Mustafa – South Korea

How are y’all! My name is Mustafa, I am currently a Junior Electrical Engineering major at ECU with a minor in Business Administration.

This Semester I am headed to the far away land of Seoul, South Korea to study an exchange semester at Yonsei University. I wanted to experience and explore not only a new country but also how their universities teach engineering. I thought it was super important for me to gain this experience and how it would help me in my future understand the differences between our curriculum and the south Korean curriculum which is widely regarded as one of the strongest engineering curriculums in the world

Super excited to go out there and explore the city of Seoul, initially I’m super worried about what I would be able to do as I heard that a lot of the entertainment and things to do around the universities were not things up my alley but I went online and looked at many different blogs and social media posts and I really became interested in the café culture that south Korea offers and me being a huge fan of not only baked goods but sweets in general it really made me even more excited to be there.

I have also prepared a bit by learning a few basic phrases to be able to communicate with the people and have planned to take a language course at the university while I’m there to build on my language skills, thankfully I heard that much of the signage and even many of the people speak English there.

Landing in Korea, I had many feelings going through me ranging from excitement to nervousness to even a bit of relief. It was a long trip, and I was already very tired and ready to touch ground after being in the air for over 20 some hours total. It was a huge rush of new things hitting me all at once as soon as I got beyond the baggage claim gates and thankfully I was able to find the subway ticketing machine and buy a ticket to the train station that was closest to my housing which was an hour away from the airport.

The subway itself was packed as many people have just landed and are heading towards Seoul but thankfully the trip went on without any trouble and once I got to my housing I unpacked my clothes and got to meet my very cool roommate!

The first thing after unpacking all of my clothes and things was arguably the most important thing for anyone to do in a new place, find where the best place to eat some good lunch. Looking at Naver, which is the Korean equivalent for google maps, I found that surprisingly the local department stores had food courts which looked interesting which led me to go and try them. It surprisingly had a huge selection of vendors and restaurants as well as a whole grocery store in the basement. I ended up eating out with my roommate at this place that serves Dak galbi which is like a large chicken and noodle dish with a lot of tasty vegetables and cheese and it was absolutely a great way to start off my time in Korea!

The YonKo games:

Yonsei University, like all universities around the world that participate in school-sanctioned sports, has a long-running rivalry with another university, Korea University. During these YonKo games, many different sports clubs compete against the respective sports clubs from the rival university in an event spanning multiple days, placing each of the school’s pride on the line. As part of my time at Yonsei University, I decided to join a sport club to not only keep up with my health but to also meet and befriend people at the school and as a result of me joining and practicing consistently i had the pleasure of competing alongside other Yonsei students in a team judo dual which cool enough was hosted outside in front of the Student Union building.

And as if just being in that event was not cool enough, when my match came around, and it was time for me to compete, I got the win that ended up securing the team score in the opening games for our team, and to say that we were stoked is not doing the moment any service. Team morale was high, and the cheers were loud both from our team members and the alumni who came to support us.

So overall, that was arguably one of my most memorable days in South Korea and truly a highlight of this entire study abroad experience for me!