Now that midterms are over, I’m going to take some time to reflect on academics in my post. Besides my Korean class, most of my classmates are Korean students and the classes aren’t designed specifically for exchange students (though they are taught in English). This, combined with cultural differences, has challenged me this semester. My environmental impact assessment class consists of lectures and two main group projects. The professor is very nice and has a lot of expertise in his field, but his slides are hard to understand at times because his English grammar isn’t great. The group project is to pick a site somewhere around Seoul and analyze its environmental impact assessment based on criteria that we chose, as well as issues in the assessment. All of the documents for this are in Korean, and my Korean is not nearly good enough to read them, so I was told to pick a similar site in the U.S. that I could compare it with in the presentations. I did, but I still felt like my groupmates did the vast majority of the work, since I’m unable to contribute much to the main topic. Sometimes we have to use translators to communicate, which is annoying. I wish my Korean was better.

Another problem I have is my environmental chemistry class. The midterm was extremely difficult. According to the distribution, at least 75% of the class failed (including myself). Everyone in the class is required to have taken college chemistry before, and I would’ve expected the average to be better since I’d assume there are chemistry majors taking it. The most confusing part was that there was no curve. If that happened at an American university, students would be outraged, but here no one seems to think it’s a big deal (or if it is, they don’t show it). I think the reason why is the cultural differences between Korea and the U.S. Korea has a stronger social hierarchy since it was heavily influenced by Confucianism, where one of the principal relationships is “master over student”. Therefore, when many students fail a class, it’s seen as their fault rather than the professors, since the professor has a higher “status” in this case. The students wouldn’t bring up the issue with the administration because they would be dismissed for “not studying enough” or doing something else wrong that led to their failure. However, I did some research and a lot of professors assign grades based on a student’s performance relative to the rest of the class. If that’s the case, I think I’ll pass. It’s just a difficult thing to get used to. Overall, I’m grateful for the opportunity to study here, and I’m learning a lot. The end is approaching fast, and it’s a little sad.

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Learn more about this blogger’s study abroad program: Korea University: Exchange