My name is Jeff Luong, and I’m a third-year Computer Science student studying in Seoul, South Korea for one semester. Ever since I enrolled to university, I’ve had a lot of friends and family telling me that I should look into studying abroad as it allows me to explore the world while being in school and to me, that was a good enough reason to try and jump onto the study abroad train. At first, I was every nervous and confused about this whole process, but CGE was there to help guide me through every single step of the way and made it completely easy for me. For me, I didn’t have any class or time restraints as I took most of my required classes for my major beforehand and needed block classes and electives to fill, so my options were very broad.
I ultimately wanted to travel and study in somewhere in Asia and a couple of my friends went to South Korea for summer school and for a fall semester and they couldn’t recommend it enough to me. I decided, why not, and looked for a university that I can apply through CGE and landed on Hanyang University. I could not have been happier with my decision to apply to Hanyang University. They had a lot of classes that I could take as a block class and elective that I was very interested in such as Neurocomputing and Machine Learning. They also had classes that helps students with stress and classes that teaches student about photography too!
As for the student life here in Seoul, all the professors here are required to take attendance unlike TU, but
the difficulty of the homework is about on par. The best part about Seoul is that there are tons of cafes that allow you to study and some of them are open 24 hours for people to study there. I’ve never been the type to study as I’m always getting distracted by my environment but these cafes and study zones that the university provides really immersed and pushed me to study because everyone else around you are studying intensely.
In short, life in Seoul has been amazing. There are tons to do and explore and everyone here is respectful. I know friends who left their phones, wallets, and other personal items unattended in public and not a single person would touch it. The safety that I feel when in Seoul is unbeatable and the locals really appreciate when a foreigner tries to speak in their native language. I could not recommend Seoul enough. The food is great, studying is very enjoyable here, the professors and schoolwork is harsh but will click together once you put some time into it. I’m honestly very sad that I have to leave soon and this experience is making me look into the future to find another opportunity to live here again.