Wait, I’m supposed to study…

Have you noticed that, so far, I only shared positive experiences (with whoever is still reading this)? It’s time to change that.

tl;dr: my courses suck, especially because I find the pedagogical choices of the professors questionable. Maybe my expectations are too high, but I think they’re justified, being a student at Korea’s flagship university.

Although I already knew that Seoul National University is the best university in South Korea, I was still astonished by the admiration I often met when telling Koreans where I did my studies. Ironically, the official reason to why I’m here (as an exchange student) turns out to be the most annoying and the most disappointing aspect of my stay. Don’t get me wrong – the University itself boasts with a beautiful campus, modern facilities and everything a student might need for his life on campus. Ranging from a two-digit number of cafeterias over different convenience stores to an own post office, a flower shop and even a hairdresser, you are indeed given the best conditions to study, so that the only critical topic remaining is the studying itself.

To give you an outline of my current semester: I initially planned to take four courses with a total amount of 12 credits (They are weighted differently here, so that local Computer Science students recommended me to not exceed three courses). Because the course registration was organized in a First-Come-First-Served-manner (and outcompeting Koreans online from Germany is very hard), I couldn’t register for all four courses and ended up with three of them: Cryptography, Artificial Neural Networks (both graduate level) and Computer Convergence Application (4th year undergrad level). What all my courses have in common:

• They are on tuesdays and thursdays, one block of 75 minutes per lecture each (So I got 5 free days per week!!).
• They have a high concentration of foreign students (40 to 50 percent), because there aren’t many Computer Science courses offered in English here and the other internationals are funneling into those as a result.
• Lecture attendance is required, as it contributes to your final grade (although it’s only 10%).
• Grades are most likely to be given based on your percentile performance instead of your absolute number of points scored in exams/assignments.
• Lectures are held by a professor and are accompanied by several PhD/Master students who help the professor organize the lecture and the corresponding assignments. Those students are called Technical Assistants (TAs).
• The professors’ English is worse than expected. You need to be highly concentrated to understand everything they say. In some cases, it is only possible to derive what is meant by including the context.

Now let me describe what each lecture has to offer:

• Artificial Neural Networks: This class is very popular (also with locals) and I got lucky here with the course registration. Problem is that so far I cannot really link the information the professor is bombarding us with the actual course syllabus given before the lecture started. In contrast to the official course title, the key word for this lecture was switched to Self-Learning Neural Algorithms, however without making clear what is changing in terms of course topics and how those two phrases are related to each other. While I can classify them because of my prior knowledge in these topics, others are visibly just getting started with that whole AI/Cognitive Computing Domain, so that I think it is mandatory for the professor to clearly show his students how to categorize the input they get over the next weeks. This leads me to the next problem: While asking the main TA after a lecture, he told me that the professor aims to raise an awareness for the different approaches one should consider when developing artificial neural networks and the corresponding algorithms. However, what the professor is presenting is nothing more than math formulas. While he explains the formulas in detail (and his explanations for those formulas are good), he is not telling the students about the situations in which these formulas are to be applied (aka the actual algorithms used and their categroization in the domain of machine learning), leaving them with the impression that they have to learn those cryptic lines of math by heart to understand what is going on (the TA told me that you don’t have to know them!).
• Computer Convergence Application: While the professor seems to be a cool guy with a very good sense of humor, he is actually very hard to listen to. His Korean accent combined with vocabulary deficits and his occasional switches to Korean to explain something again for the local students (as if this is not an English lecture for them)  actually make it difficult sometimes to even tell whether he is talking in English or in Korean right now. Furthermore, this course originally wanted to show possible applications of IT when combined with other domains such as telecommunication or finance. What it actually does is machine learning (again) , pattern matching algorithmis and statistics. I don’t know though if I’m the only one who is really pissed off by not being taught what is promised by the course title and the syllabus to be taught in the lectures…
• Cryptography: In contrast to the other professors I have, this class’ professor is not entirely Korean but what I believe to be of Indian descent. His english is actually the best out of the three professors I have, with a manageable Indian accent. However, he doesn’t seem motivated to hold the lecture, and he doesn’t seem to be too proficient in the domain of cryptographical basics either (that’s what I assume if he can’t answer basic student questions). At least he’s sticking to the intended course content.

As a conclusion, I’m not fully convinced that absolving these courses will benefit me in a meaningful way. If I heard comparable lectures in Karlsruhe, I think I would have been better off. Nevertheless, I’ll try to get good grades in these courses, as long as it is possible for me to transfer the credits earned in them. I still didn’t get any assignments or exercises from the three courses, so that I still have the hope of them being more helpful than the lectures themselves. Finally, good thing that studying is not the main attraction of my Korea experience anyways!