Thursday, December 17, 2009

University 101: Seoul National University

Well, who would not know "the" Seoul National University (Seoul-dae-SNU)? Founded on August 22, 1946, the school is considered as the primary academic institution in Korea. SNU is admired by Koreans as it screens the "best" of the best students in Korea. If you tell a Korean that you are studying in SNU, they would definitely praise you. This is in connection to the prestige of the school's image.
Comprising 16 colleges and 6 professional schools the student population is around 30,000. There are 2 campuses, Gwanak (main) and Yeongeon (medicine). Since I am not taking medicine, I'm in the main campus ^^ haha.
Originally, the only campus was in Yeongeon but according to my Korean language teacher, during the time of Pres. Park Chung Hee there were many demonstrations conducted by Seoul-dae (서울대) students. Even during a 10 minute break, students would run to the Blue House 청와대 (Korea's White Palace) and rally in front of the building. So the government decided to transfer the campus to Gwanak, which is an hour subway ride from the Yeongeon campus ^^v The Gwanak campus, according to my friends and some sources, was used to be a golf course owned by a Korean multinational company 재벌, not sure what it was. The campus is literally in the middle of the mountain. We ride a shuttle bus to go to different buildings or else you would have to do mountain climbing together with the ajumas and ajoshis ^^ lol
The school is very proud of its achievments such as ranking 5th in the world in terms of the number of alumni currently holding CEO positions in Fortune 500 enterprises, 47th in the world and 7th in Asia by The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2009, of course no. 1 in Korea and ranked 24th in the world in publications in an analysis of data from the Science Citation Index. It's also housing world-class professors such as nobel prize awardees and Korea's own top experts.

Important links:http://www.useoul.edu/ (English portal)
http://oia.snu.ac.kr/ (Office of International Affairs)
http://gsis.snu.ac.kr (Graduate School of International Studies)
http://lei.snu.ac.kr/english (Language Education Institute)

4 comments:

  1. I wanna study Korean in SNU, is it good?

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  2. Yeah, I think your story about campus is pretty much true. SNU students used to fight for democracy, but not many are interested in Politics or history these days, even including me. How sad.

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  3. Anonymous 1: For me LEI in SNU is good. The teachers are trained and class actvities are well-designed to cope with the needs of the students ^^ for more info http://lei.snu.ac.kr/english

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  4. Sue: in my whole stay in SNU I only saw a rally once. It was attended by around 20 students and the rally was very scripted ^^ lol it was cool though

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