Potato in Seoul - Studying in Korea

CAU Library

My entire reason for going to Korea was to study. Technically speaking. It took up 4 of the 6 of the months I was there. I studied at a university in the southern region of Seoul called Chung-Ang University, or CAU (중앙대학교). Located in the Heukseok area (off of the Heukseok station/흑석역), it's essentially the Korean version of a college town. Despite being part of Seoul itself, Heukseok is pretty self-contained. All the popular makeup chains have stores located there, there's some local shops, and there's an abundance of restaurants. There are several convenient stores, and a Daiso, which is a discount retailer similar to a dollar store here in the US.

Yook-sam Naengmyeon: a lunch-time hot spot as shown by the line

The CAU campus is pretty average looking, to be honest. It's definitely prettier than my home university, but seeing that CAU is built entirely up hill, the administration is pretty limited in terms of what it can do for beautification. The school is made up of three sections: front, center, and back gate. The dorm was at the back gate, literally all the way in the back. It was at the top of the giant hill. Just guess where all my classes were. Front gate. Of course, right? It took me about 15 minutes to walk to the giant 102 building for classes from the dormitory. I could make it in ten if I was rushing, aka I slept in a little too long, but honestly, running to class wasn't necessarily an option unless you wanted to risk breaking a bone by rolling your way down to class instead of walking.

308 is the dorm. 102 is where most of my classes were

The stairs of death at front gate

Studying in Korea was a different experience from studying here at home in the US. The usual school-related stress even felt different, at least for me. (And trust me, I'm someone who stresses about school.) One of the biggest differences for me was living on campus versus commuting like I usually do at home. At home, I make the 35 minute drive downtown to school Monday through Friday. At CAU, I was pretty much always on campus.

I actually really enjoyed my time as a dormer. I liked being on campus and having my friends so close by. Especially since I couldn't drive anyways. I could walk 10 feet down the hall and knock on my friend's door and ask if she wanted to eat lunch together. Or I could walk down one flight of stairs and ask a different friend. I would say over 90% of the international students at CAU live in the dorms thanks to guaranteed dorm rooms because of our status as international students. Interestingly, it's highly competitive for Korean national students to get into the dorms, which made me appreciate the guaranteed room that much more.

Another big difference was that I had zero homework assignments in all of my classes at CAU except for one. Generally, I had one group project/presentation and two exams. That was it. Which does also mean that my entire grade rested on only those three things. Through the power of 1AM runs to the McDonald's at the front of the campus with my roommate and study buddies, I did manage to do well.

Group project planning

Sleeping through class is a common past time

It can be said that Korean students have amazing (cram) studying abilities. It's almost a super power. A week and a half before midterm exams, all the study rooms, the library, and all the couches in the lounge were filled with students starting to study for the upcoming exams. When final exams came, it was exactly the same. This actually really surprised me at first. I shocked a few people when I said that I had free time the week before midterms. Usually I'd get a response like, "But don't you have midterms coming? You should study more!" Korean students studied for an entire week before midterms, right up until the professor handed them their exam paper. I have never seen anyone so thoroughly dedicated to exams, but it's no surprise considering South Korea's societal outlook on grades and school achievement.

It can also be said that a lot of Korean students sleep, talk, or play on their phones through class. This kind of also surprised me. I mean, for sure in the US there are thousands of students who do the same, but there were times when over 50% of an 85-person class was dead asleep, drooling onto their desks. And I'm not lying about the drool. There were a lot of desks I wiped clean of someone else's drool before being able to set my books down.

My desk set up BEFORE classes started.

I took 5 courses while I was there:
-American Foreign Policy (the only class I had homework for, and a lot of it too)
-Korean Contemporary Issues
-Elementary Korean
-Freight Transport Operations
-International Logistics

American Foreign Policy and Elementary Korean were the only two classes that had Korean professors. The rest were taught by visiting professors from the US, England, and Taiwan. Pretty much all of my professors called me Rihanna because of the way my name is written with the Korean alphabet. Rihanna and Leanna would be spelled the same way phonetically. It really didn't take long for that to became my nickname. My friends later even started to introduce me to people as Rihanna. There was even a time when someone was told my name and thought I was actually Rihanna the singer before they had met me in person. Sorry to disappoint.

Freight Transport Operations classmates from Vietnam and Indonesia

The only thing I didn't particularly care for at CAU was the dining hall. Actually, there are two dining halls in the dorms. One is the general one in the "old" dorm building that I was in (308), and the other dining hall is in the "new" building which had just opened maybe one year before I was there (309). The new dining hall is about 100x better than the older one.  Let me rephrase. The potato pizza in the new dining hall is 100x better than anything served in the old dining hall. But the old dining hall has cheap prices, so it's an economical meal choice. A ticket for the dining halls cost no more than 2,500 won ($2.18) per meal. The pizza was technically 11,900, or 3 meal tickets ($10.38). The old dining hall cost about 1,300-2,000 for a meal, which equates to roughly $1.15-$1.75. Not bad at all, if you don't mind cafeteria food.

Korean college student's dream: freshly stocked convenient store food

CAU has a lot of amenities, which were all greatly appreciated by us international students, including a health clinic ($60 for student insurance + $5 for one-time health check up before the semester started, both mandatory), several convenient stores, a McDonalds (just can't escape them though that bulgogi burger was great), a post office, a stationary store, and a gym attached to the dorm. There are also a couple cafe chains located right at the front entrance of the university including Starbucks, which was put in right after I left. There is also a pretty large library, which I somehow never ended up stepping foot into, despite being at CAU for an entire semester.

The hardest part about the whole semester, I would say, was registering for classes. Since none of the classes I took were going to count towards my degree, I had free reign in terms of what I wanted to take. Unlike some US universities, CAU makes each international student register on their own for classes. This seems simple enough except the entire registration site is in Korean and most of the class descriptions are as well. Some of the classes I took I picked based entirely on the name alone. The CAU International Office did e-mail the international students a PowerPoint about how to register, aka what buttons to push and how to search, etc, but it still took quite a bit of time to get registered. Some classes only allowed a specific number of international students as well, so I tried to avoid classes I figured would have a high number of them to give myself a better chance of getting into the classes I picked, and I ended up getting into all of my first choices.

The area surrounding MBC World

My hand is apparently the same size as K-pop idol Changmin from TVXQ

CAU provided some cultural activities and outings throughout the semester, but I honestly didn't participate in most of them. I was more keen on daily life in Seoul, rather than going out touring, though I did enough of that later on. The school provided a temple stay (a two-day, one-night stay at a temple and demonstration of daily temple life) and a trip to a strawberry field (which honestly doesn't strike me as very Korean). There was also a "modern culture" trip to MBC Studios, an entertainment company's "museum" of sorts, and a B-Boy musical show.

Fun fact: This hallway is featured in the Korean drama Mischievous Kiss, which was based off the Japanese drama of the same name. CAU is the university that the lead characters end up attending though under a different name in the drama

This isn't to say that every second of the time in Seoul was fine and dandy, but if I had to summarize the trip as a whole, I had a great experience studying at CAU. The classes were (mostly) interesting and I met a ton of really cool people there from all over the world. If you ever get to go to Korea hopefully you won't be studying or at least only studying, but it's definitely an experience worth having for people currently in school. It's a great way to get out and see the world and immerse yourself in another culture before work life limits your traveling.

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