|
Korean Job Discussion Forums
"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
BananaBan
Joined: 16 Nov 2011
|
 Posted: Sat Dec 17, 2011 9:43 pm Post subject: Are Korean universities less difficult to get into? |
 |
|
This is for the graduate programs.
I have seen alot of posts where people talk about doing university here, which has me wondering...
I have a B.A. All years have recieved about an average grade, with the exception of my last year, where i managed to have an average that was a bit higher than 80% just for the final year marks.
The university i went to is usually regarded as the top university in Canada. (does school reputation matter for grad school?).
Or are korean univ grad programs so competitive that you need a 90% and up! |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
UseAsDirected
Joined: 12 Dec 2009
|
| Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 12:34 am Post subject: Re: Are Korean universities less difficult to get into? |
|
|
Before I haemorrhage information at you, please mention 1) what it is you want to study, 2) your goal(s), 3) how hard you are willing to study at a non-Anglo-American university, and 4) yes or no, child of Korean parents.
I know two 'white-American' and some gyopo graduates of a 'SKY' school, and two Indian-American graduates of KAIST. I will forward your above message to some of them.
(Perhaps better than reading a response from a cynic ESL teacher who likely would only mouth off bad things about Asian universities! haha! J/k).
-E |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Hugo85
Joined: 27 Aug 2010
|
| Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 2:11 am Post subject: Re: Are Korean universities less difficult to get into? |
|
|
| BananaBan wrote: |
| The university i went to is usually regarded as the top university in Canada. (does school reputation matter for grad school?). |
Yes. To a certain extent.
| Quote: |
| Or are korean univ grad programs so competitive that you need a 90% and up! |
No, they aren't. But getting free tuition or a stipend is the harder part. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
BananaBan
Joined: 16 Nov 2011
|
| Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 12:57 pm Post subject: |
|
|
1) Urban planning or a field that would open better opportunities for me teaching English (i.e. MA in English, Tesol, Teaching etc).
3) How hard you are willing to study at a non-Anglo-American university: I dedicate a lot of time to studying/researching, so I would answer with a "very hard".
4) Child of Korean parents? No.
~ also, SKY are the "elite" universities in Korea. Does the status of the university you graduated from have an impact on the type of jobs you can get in Korea? I am not too concerned with university status so long as instructors are qualified and if it doesnt effect job prospects.
In Canada (and i assume for most of the western world), univ rep doesnt matter (unless went to Harvard, Yale, MIT etc), what does matter is what the applicant knows and his/her work experience.
| Hugo85 wrote: |
No, they aren't. But getting free tuition or a stipend is the harder part. |
I have no concerns with getting funding for education, so long as i will get a return to the investment  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Hugo85
Joined: 27 Aug 2010
|
| Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 3:29 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| BananaBan wrote: |
1) Urban planning or a field that would open better opportunities for me teaching English (i.e. MA in English, Tesol, Teaching etc).
3) How hard you are willing to study at a non-Anglo-American university: I dedicate a lot of time to studying/researching, so I would answer with a "very hard". |
In my lab people usually work 12 hours per day with a 20 minute break.
| Quote: |
4) Child of Korean parents? No.
~ also, SKY are the "elite" universities in Korea. Does the status of the university you graduated from have an impact on the type of jobs you can get in Korea? I am not too concerned with university status so long as instructors are qualified and if it doesnt effect job prospects.
In Canada (and i assume for most of the western world), univ rep doesnt matter (unless went to Harvard, Yale, MIT etc), what does matter is what the applicant knows and his/her work experience. |
Indeed, in Canada no one gives a shit that McGill is ranked so much higher than UQAM. Here it is very different, at least for Koreans. I am not sure how different it is for foreigners, but I would stack the odds in your favor.
| Quote: |
| Hugo85 wrote: |
No, they aren't. But getting free tuition or a stipend is the harder part. |
I have no concerns with getting funding for education, so long as i will get a return to the investment |
A masters will take 2 years, with 2x 8000$ in tuition and a potential 2x 10000$ in stipend it is worth looking into scholarships. 36000$ is a lot of money regardless of if you have that or more in the bank. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
BananaBan
Joined: 16 Nov 2011
|
| Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 5:24 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Hugo85 wrote: |
Indeed, in Canada no one gives a shit that McGill is ranked so much higher than UQAM. Here it is very different, at least for Koreans. I am not sure how different it is for foreigners, but I would stack the odds in your favor.
|
dont forget that rank is usually associated with a university's research, as opposed to the quality of its teaching, especially at the undergrad level.
and i have heard that degrees from western universities are more "prestigious" than Korean ones.
| Hugo85 wrote: |
In my lab people usually work 12 hours per day with a 20 minute break.
|
dam! 12 hours in class? unless you dont have to do devote outside time to research papers and reports, that is alot!
what is your program? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
UseAsDirected
Joined: 12 Dec 2009
|
| Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 8:27 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| BananaBan wrote: |
1) Urban planning or a field that would open better opportunities for me teaching English (i.e. MA in English, Tesol, Teaching etc).
3) How hard you are willing to study at a non-Anglo-American university: I dedicate a lot of time to studying/researching, so I would answer with a "very hard".
4) Child of Korean parents? No.
~ also, SKY are the "elite" universities in Korea. Does the status of the university you graduated from have an impact on the type of jobs you can get in Korea? I am not too concerned with university status so long as instructors are qualified and if it doesnt effect job prospects.
In Canada (and i assume for most of the western world), univ rep doesnt matter (unless went to Harvard, Yale, MIT etc), what does matter is what the applicant knows and his/her work experience.
| Hugo85 wrote: |
No, they aren't. But getting free tuition or a stipend is the harder part. |
I have no concerns with getting funding for education, so long as i will get a return to the investment |
I divide my response below into two parts: first the answer to the original questions and you can stop reading after that; second, a longer background section in case you have other questions .
from 1) Right then, you intend to study urban planning or English education. I do not immediately see the relationship, nevertheless urban planning at Seoul National is under the purview of civil and environmental engineering and at KAIST under civil and architectural engineering. Neither my friends nor I know about Korea or Yonsei universities. As for English education, I suppose it is handled through those very departments (KAIST is a polytechnic and does not offer pedagogy programs).
from 3) Good, you are willing to study very hard, because at SNU and KAIST, no matter what their world rankings are, due to realities of Korean study habits, nationalist competition, and the devolving world economy, people study very, very hard. The past ten years harder than ever, as evidenced by the number of library seats always full, the number of books taken out, and the number of remedial courses removed, which SNU tracks for financial purposes. They, as in Europe, "do more with less." I make no claim whether they actually do.
from 4) Excellent, you are a white non-Korean -- the admission quota at SNU for Korean heritage is 20%-35% depending on department (1%-6% for professional schools like medicine, law, vet infirmary), but for a white non-Korean, it is 50/50 (excepting the professional schools). You read correctly --you have a 50/50 chance of receiving admission simply because you are white.
As a footnote to the concern about elite schools, Korea is a small, pact, highly competitive place. It already has its league table in place. Due to other social realities, moniker does matter, as it does in almost all urban centers about the world.
Education promoters at top Korean universities think that Westerners have received a good education and hold Western schools as a benchmark, conflating the Western school and us (e.g., "All Edinburgh or Northwestern graduates must be immensely bright"). I make no personal value statement.
Your chance at SNU is high because the school has dramatically expanded its effort to attract degree-seeking international BSc, MPhil, PhD, students. However, engineering is competitive, and I do not know the numbers or what KAIST does.
Part two � background
I think it is a good thing for you to study abroad and seek a degree and Korea is a good choice. Quite a few academicians have written editorials and books pointing to a noticeable prestige shift eastward and little hubs are forming over in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea (but, as a Briton, that is not necessarily good). Asians work very hard, concentrate long, and are very productive. Once they evolve their educational systems for innovation and soft skills, East Asia could run that shift to completion. This is public opinion among intellectuals, not mine. Look up the recent Times Higher Education piece on YouTube; they claim Asian schools are steadfastly supplanting Western counterparts in the world league tables and closing other gaps due to an assortment of reasons. Asian schools no longer "suck."
Good Aspects of studying here
In 2011, Seoul University incorporated. Before that the place was a bureaucratic-civil-servant-shit-hole. Ten years from now it will be equivalent to University of London or America's University of California Berkeley. The difference between being un-incorporation and incorporation is massive. Better quality assurance, higher accountability effort, more money, better facilities, more international university contact including student exchange programs with good schools, less red tape, less civil servant and administration garbage. As more foreign professors are added and more money is given for scholarships, more progress will follow. (Last week a Korean woman donated �1 million to SNU, which was impossible to do before that). But, only one, perhaps two public unis are incorporated in all of South Korea.
The past ten years Korea has really cleaned up its universities. Once nothing more than establishment cradles, today they are credible research institutions. Research quality is quite high. SCI shows one place is ranked 20th in international publications (I ignore domestic publications due to language barrier).
Look up the KAIST president article. A former MIT professor, he came there a few years ago and the uni has substantially improved. He dismissed a quarter of the faculty seeking tenure and now it is like a budding Imperial College London or a Caltech.
http://chronicle.com/article/No-Looking-Back-Kaists/65974/
Also look-up Emanuel Pastreich, Ph.D.; he studied Asian issues at Yale, Taiwan, Tokyo, and Harvard. He mastered technical Korean in addition to Japanese between 1995 and 2010 and also sees the shift towards the East. He is in Korea now as often gives talks at the Royal Asiatic Society RAS.
Thus, it appears the context is becoming "just right" for East Asia.
But, Korean universities are actively looking to admit Western natural sciences and engineering students. They now accept, grudgingly, the diversity and different approach to teamwork non-Koreans bring. The vast majority of white Westerners who have studied in Korea are in humanities (Korean literature, history, philosophy). Korea's Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology does not really want to give out scholarships to people who stand around Joseon monuments and penning poetry about them. They in lieu make concessions to Westerners seeking science and technology. Keep an outlook.
Korean graduate students at Seoul are very intelligent, congenial, and goal-oriented. Despite what the critics say, they are creative, but struggle to express themselves well because English is the foreign language (this is true in every culture). Though they hesitate to debate in public or around their professors, privately they are very good at commenting about other people's projects and give good criticism.
Koreans also are beginning to get a good handle on independent research; plagiarism is showing a decline. (Korean HS students only recently started to learn how to write a proper independent paper but still lack a sense of ownership).
America's Congress in 2006 passed a bill encouraging its students to study abroad and seek foreign degrees. You can look up their 10 points of "why study abroad". Their federal aid FAFSA now funds undergraduates taking foreign degrees, but no school in Korea yet has an agreement.
Bad aspects of studying here
Korea still sometimes sucks.
Though the new dorms at SNU are nice, the waiting list is too long and MPhil candidates will never really get one. So, I had to live at a 고시원, which was shaped like the top of a fuc*ing pyramid.
Korean graduate and international students do not receive funding. Apply through NIIED for a KGSP scholarship (they only offer two to Canadians...per year). Brain Korea-21 (BK 21) may offer you a scholarship upon acceptance � W900,000 a month for PhD, W500,000 a month for MPhil, but you must present at a conference or submit a paper to a reputable journal within the first twelve months each and every year or lose it, rigorous demands.
Teaching quality is still mediocre. Professors are indifferent. They focus on their research groups. There is disparity in teaching load, too � professors assign less reading in courses that are taught in English to evade complaints, yet keep the Korean versions of the courses at capacity. Thus, as a foreigner, classes taught in English are not too hard yet the Korean versions are impossible. As*holes.
There is no realistic chance for you to be a TA to gain experience and money. All attention immediately will go to your research projects. In America, I think, universities are "teaching-based" research universities i.e., graduate students take a year of classes and assume TA'ships for two terms. They are expected to get into research a year later, not the very next day.
Not all of your classes are taught in English. So, confirm to avoid problems. BK also will not provide a scholarship for you to learn Korean at the SNU LEI. You will have to do that on your own there, at Sogang or elsewhere.
You will often feel alienated. SNU students don�t want people to know that their English is imperfect, so, often no one will speak to you. Americans don't exactly provide warmth, either. Every summer Harvard brings its Harvard-Yenching students to Ewha and SNU for a month each and they are cliques of buggers, "douchebags" as the parlance goes. As*holes. So, as long as you know little Korean, you will be like a vagrant.
It is not easy to date SNU girls. In a SNU magazine I read, SNU students report their own sexual activity is low but think their peers hookups are high. They report their own high stress but think the others' is low. They also think their confidence is lowest but not their peers. And because they contend that foreigners are temporary exchange students or leave Korea after graduation or both, we are usually ignored. So, unless you carry a sign that reads "Neither am I an exchange student nor will I leave Korea", you will likely be home every night masturbating in your room, a room shaped like the top of a fuc*ing pyramid.
Research is hard, in any language, at any university.
All of the foreign graduates I know from Seoul Uni and KAIST are employed in the profession of their choice. One guy became a science teacher at a gifted school, another is at Standard Chartered; another is at the Istanbul-branch at Hyosung; another is a researcher at LG; three are at Samsung; one is trying to enter ministry of education, another to be a teacher.
HOLY SHIT 김정일 DIED, time to end this post and read the NEWS! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
kimchikowboy
Joined: 24 Jan 2003
|
| Posted: Mon Dec 19, 2011 2:35 am Post subject: |
|
|
| UseAsDirected: Thank you for taking the time to post that. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
UseAsDirected
Joined: 12 Dec 2009
|
| Posted: Mon Dec 19, 2011 3:07 am Post subject: |
|
|
| kimchikowboy wrote: |
| UseAsDirected: Thank you for taking the time to post that. |
Sir, it is my pleasure. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
BananaBan
Joined: 16 Nov 2011
|
| Posted: Mon Dec 19, 2011 12:37 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| UseAsDirected wrote: |
| kimchikowboy wrote: |
| UseAsDirected: Thank you for taking the time to post that. |
Sir, it is my pleasure. |
Yes, thank you UseAsDirected. Very useful post for me and i am sure it will be very useful for many others for the very many years in the future! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Hugo85
Joined: 27 Aug 2010
|
| Posted: Tue Dec 20, 2011 3:13 am Post subject: |
|
|
Great post (it really covers everything about studying here), but I got a few comments.
| UseAsDirected wrote: |
Part two � background
I think it is a good thing for you to study abroad and seek a degree and Korea is a good choice. Quite a few academicians have written editorials and books pointing to a noticeable prestige shift eastward and little hubs are forming over in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea (but, as a Briton, that is not necessarily good). Asians work very hard, concentrate long, and are very productive. Once they evolve their educational systems for innovation and soft skills, East Asia could run that shift to completion. This is public opinion among intellectuals, not mine. Look up the recent Times Higher Education piece on YouTube; they claim Asian schools are steadfastly supplanting Western counterparts in the world league tables and closing other gaps due to an assortment of reasons. Asian schools no longer "suck." |
Asian schools are climbing the university rankings steadily because the students are hard workers and the many professors are as good as any western professor. The international recognition is lagging a bit, but it will come in due time.
| Quote: |
Though the new dorms at SNU are nice, the waiting list is too long and MPhil candidates will never really get one. So, I had to live at a 고시원, which was shaped like the top of a fuc*ing pyramid. |
If you are a KGSP student you automatically get a dorm spot. If studying here that's definitely a good venue.
| Quote: |
| Korean graduate and international students do not receive funding. Apply through NIIED for a KGSP scholarship (they only offer two to Canadians...per year). Brain Korea-21 (BK 21) may offer you a scholarship upon acceptance � W900,000 a month for PhD, W500,000 a month for MPhil, but you must present at a conference or submit a paper to a reputable journal within the first twelve months each and every year or lose it, rigorous demands. |
An international journal a year is a rigorous demand, especially in the first year, but if you also have the option of a conference it isn't so bad... it's pretty easy to get accepted in those.
Furthermore, there were 3 Canadians admitted last year for 2 spots. In theory it should be one spot for Quebec and one spot for the rest so if you are from Quebec it should be easy to secure a spot (because you will likely be the only applicant). If you are from the rest of Canada then competition will be stiffer.
About the 12 hours a day... I do mean 12 hours a day minimum. One guy was at the lab 7 days in a row 20 hours a day last week and is glad to be able to go home at 11PM this week. It's not a required work load and as a foreigner you might be able to avoid a lot of the "non-research" work load as well as the pressure to stay later. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
