Week 2 in Korea - Classes Start
South Korea ·Hello I am back with another blog. This one is written one week late because I was a bit busy, but now I am sitting in my room with nothing to do, so it is a good time to write this one.
I wanted to take a moment and compare classes between Yonsei University and Berkeley, since there are some differences that I wasn’t used to or didn’t expect. I guess the first major difference is that they take attendance very seriously here. Before you enter a lecture room, you have to use your student ID card to scan in on a scanner next to the door, and when you leave, you have to scan out as well. For some classes, if you come in 5-10 minutes late, it just counts as an absence, and if you have 30 percent absences, you fail the course no matter what. So this was a bit of a stressful change for me since I usually don’t attend lectures when I am at Berkeley, and when I do, I’m also usually late. I keep reminding myself that I am required to go to class, but I still somehow managed to skip two classes during the first two weeks. Hopefully this won’t happen again :( Other than lectures, which similarly to Berkeley are 3 hours a week, there are no discussion sections, at least for the classes that I am enrolled in. I think this is actually a hidden perk because if I had to go to mandatory discussion for all my classes, I would be really sad. One small difference is that classes are the “opposite” of Berkeley time, where they start on the hour and end ten minutes before. I think I still heavily prefer Berkeley time though.
I am enrolled in 3 classes this semester. Korean, Korean Food and Culture, and Early Modern Korea and its Historical Sites in Seoul. These classes are mostly for exchange students, so there aren’t actually local Korean students in these classes, but they were a really good way to meet and talk to other international students. I was also not expecting how easy my classes were. So far, in the first two weeks, the only homework I had was a two page paper on some random history for the Early Modern Korea class. I think around this time in Berkeley, I would be stressed with multiple CS homeworks and projects already, so this change of pace for school is really nice. I’m not 100 percent sure, but for my Korean Food and Culture class, I think there is just a midterm and final and no other homework other than in class quizzes :D. One sad thing that happened was that I failed my placement test for Korean, so I am stuck learning the same things I did last semester, but I’m not too upset since it means that the class would be very easy and I don’t have to study as much.
Here are some things that I did and saw during these two weeks.
