On My Way To Korea

Well, like the title says classes started on Tuesday.  I’ve been to everything except for North Korean Politics (which I’m really excited about).  I signed up for 6 classes with the intent to drop 2 and I think I will go ahead and do that.   3 were in English and 3 in Korean, the English ones being related to my major and the other three being GE classes.  I know I want to drop the Cyber Society class, which I’m really sad about.  It looks like a really interesting subject, but the teacher is incredibly hard to understand.  Maybe its just that my Korean isn’t good enough yet, but I attended the Women’s History class today and I understood that teacher a LOT better.  Now, since I know I probably want to take the North Korean class no matter what I have to decide to either drop the Women’s History class or Artificial Intelligence.  The AI class isn’t exactly what I was expecting, it doesn’t involve programming at all.  The closest we come to programming is using tools already built for creating neural networks or machine learning.  Decisions, decisions …

Oh yeah, while I’m talking about the start of school I might as well mention a small annoyance.  For some reason, registration and dropping of classes can only take place between 9 and 4 for some reason.  I was talking with  Curtis Muller, a fellow SNU student, who also felt the same way.  Isn’t the internet there so that things can be available all day every day?  I can understand a starting and end date … but does it really have to have office hours?  I’ve never seen that at any university I’ve been to.  It can be slightly annoying since people usually have class during those hours and what not.

On a brighter side, everything’s gone pretty smoothly.  I don’t really have that many complaints.  I got my registration card, bank account, phone, and know the area fairly well.  Also knowing Korean is a HUGE help.  Most of the school websites (including the class registration website and the student portal) are all in Korean so those who don’t know Korean have to memorize where everything’s at or in some places hover the mouse over a phrase to get the English.  The teachers I have speak really good English and the classes seem like they’ll be pretty interesting.  It looks like this is going to be quite a semester!

Independence Movement Day (or 3.1) is a Korean holiday which celebrates the Korean independence movement against Japan during the Japanese colonization.  A friend told me to visit the Independence Hall at some point so I decided that I might as well make it my last trip before school starts.  The only thing that sucked (big time) was that it was raining and cold.  By the time I left I couldn’t really feel my fingers.  The second to last pic is a group, YGK (Youth of Great Korea), which did a quick interview with me and took a pic.

Source

Seriously, Kim Ung-yong has had quite an amazing life: Talked at 6 months, conversed normally at 1, solved differential equations at 4, attended physics classes at university as a guest student from age 3 to 6, was invited by NASA to come to the USA at age 7, finished his PhD by 16, and currently holds the Guinness Book of World Records award for Highest IQ.  Oh yeah, and he decided to live a normal life (getting a Civil Engineering degree.  Yeah, I know, ridiculous) and was called a loser for doing what he wanted.

Read the full story here. (Source)

Best comment (and follow-up): “I thought this was going to be a biography of Kim Jong-il. I heard he did stuff like this when still in the womb!” “Didn’t you hear? He saved his mother’s life by doing an appendectomy on her while still in the womb using his own fingernails.”

Asian Girls Creepy Synchronized Disobedience