A photo of me walking through the snowy lawn of Gyeongbokgung Palace.

Author: Hyunseo Seok | Major: Biomedical Engineering | Semester: Winter 2023-2024

Academics

In 2002, I was born in South Korea. However, due to my father’s employment, our family immigrated to the United States when I was about two years old. Ever since, I visited South Korea maybe once every few years and only for a few weeks. Although I was physically separated from my heritage, I still kept up with the culture and the language. This study abroad experience was an opportunity for me to further my cultural identity.

While growing up, my father sometimes discussed his South Korean education and how it differs with the American education system. His main points of contrast were the studying methods and work ethic. In the program, I only took one 3-hour credit, but it was enough to keep me studying every day. Even though the program was relatively short, I found myself adapting to new studying habits like reviewing notes right after class, skimming textbooks efficiently, and the Pomodoro technique. These are definitely habits I will incorporate into this upcoming semester.

Before I went abroad, I was given a list of classes to choose from. I wanted to pick fun classes like Korean History or Korean Entertainment, but I decided to take a class that is most applicable to the healthcare field, which is my passion. The class that I took was Social Psychology, and it was one of the most engaging/interesting class that I have ever taken. The professor for that course was Dr. Hajin Lee from the University of Montreal, and she made sure to incorporate famous psychology studies during her lectures. As a class, we analyzed the Stanford Prison experiment, Milgram Dot test, and Bystander experiment. She also liked to incorporate different real-life situations that we would go through and analyze them bit by bit. I came out of this class looking at human behavior differently.

Compared to my courses at UARK, my Social Psychology class had a small number of students (~25 students). Therefore, we had much smaller discussions and interaction with the professor.

Culture

I don’t think I scratched the surface with the culture in Seoul. First of all, we ate lots and lots of food. From street food like hotdeok and tteokbokki, to traditional rice and stew like soft tofu soup and potato stew, we ate many different genres of food. Also, the food was extremely cheap. For about 4-5 dollars you can fill yourself up with a delicious meal. However, not all of the foods that we ate was from restaurants, some of them were from convenience stores. It was a common occurrence to take a late-night trip to a convenience store to indulge in some ramen and banana milk for such a cheap price.

Since there are many restaurants, we wanted to go to in Seoul, we had to utilize the public transport options. The subway is extremely efficient and clean, and the city buses were equally organized and on-time.

Advice

I would definitely recommend this program to anyone who has a slight bit of interest in South Korea. It was a wonderful experience, and I would go again in a heartbeat. However, there are certain things to take note of before going. First, the course was a little demanding, so students shouldn’t expect lenient coursework throughout the experience. Second, the people in Seoul can be callous and indifferent, but do not mistake it for rudeness as they are all just trying to get to their next point of destination. Third, make sure to study a little bit of Korean before going. The younger generation is quite adequate in English, but the older generations may struggle a little bit (and they usually run the restaurants).