SNU College of Engineering Spearheading Internationalization

SNU’s Agenda for 2007, Internationalization!
2007 has been the year of internationalization for SNU. This year it signed new academic exchange agreements with over a hundred overseas universities, and also invited foreign scholars to open the Summer Institute. To keep up with the university’s efforts, colleges are also putting emphasis on the internationalization of their educational programs, research, and administration system. Among them, the College of Engineering’s efforts are certainly outstanding. More than 10% of the 1100 foreign students at SNU are engineering students. Also, in most of the laboratories, foreign researchers and Korean researchers are working together. The College of Engineering, which was ranked 7th in this year’s research results evaluation, now represents a globalizing SNU.

- Internationalization of Research: Improving Facilities
Seoul National University was ranked 32nd in the number of citations per researcher according to The Science Citation Index; however, regarding Engineering Department research results, SNU was ranked 7th in the world according to the Chinese Institute of Industrial Technology Evaluation. This outstanding achievement is a result of a huge investment and continuous efforts. The research budget of the College of Engineering exceeds a small university’s annual budget. Professor Hyeon Taeghwan of the Department of Chemistry whose nanotechnology-related journal was designated a Hot Paper, said “The days of blaming bad facilities are now gone; labs have improved a lot. Sometimes even international scholars are amazed to see the laboratory facilities”, confirming that research facilities have improved remarkably.

- More Incoming Students
SNU’s goal is to increase its percentage of foreign students to 10% by 2010; and the College of Engineering is taking the lead with various programs to attract more students from overseas.

- International IT Policy Scholarship Program for Human Networking
The Master’s and Doctoral programs in Technology Management, established to train IT leaders, have launched a new course, ‘International IT Policy Scholarship Program’. Its aim is to educate the developing world’s IT-related entrepreneurs and high-level government officials. By educating IT policy specialists, it aims to construct a human network based on industrial, academic and governmental sectors of each country and to spread Korean IT standards through policy consulting. Now there are about 40 students from 25 countries taking this course at SNU.

- Samsung Electronics Global Scholarship
The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science annually accepts 10 students from overseas through Samsung Electronics’ scholarship program. This program, which has been running for 5 years, only targets students from China, Russia and India. The Malaysian government currectly sends its students on governmental scholarship to SNU, while Saudi Arabia is making great efforts to introduce the ARMCO program to SNU. The College of Engineering says that it will admit all foreign governmental scholarship students to maximize ‘Incoming Internationalization’.

- More Courses Conducted in English
The College of Engineering offers various courses in English as it has many foreign students. During spring semester of 2007, 131 of 611 classes were taught in English, which was over 21% of all classes. In addition, even if a class is originally planned to be conducted in Korean, if more than one foreign student registers for it, it will be taught in English-- making more and more classes accessible to students from abroad. After the Graduate School of International Studies, the number of English courses offered by the College of Engineering was the highest at SNU.

- Internationalization of the Administration
Having a large number of foreign students and the first foreign associate professor, internationalization of the administration was inevitable. Professor McKay, who came here in 2005, said “When I first got here I couldn’t do anything without an assistant; but now the Dean conducts meetings in English and most of the documents are written in both Korean and English. I was really amazed to see these instant changes.”

- Global Leadership Program: ‘Outgoing Internationalization’
Regarding ‘Outgoing Internationalization’, the College of Engineering has been outstanding. However, to give the chance to study abroad to even more students, it launched the Global Leadership Program (GLP). GLP offers an intensive English practice course for freshmen including a one week course at SNU Language Education Institute at one-third of the original charge. To its undergraduate students, it offers internships with multi-national corporations. Also, graduate students can obtain a degree at foreign schools as scholarship recipients. For instance, just as the Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) sends its students on scholarship to SNU, Beijing University and TsingHua University, SNU students can also study at Tokyo University. The Bourses Pascal Scholarship to France is also conducted in a similar way.

In addition to all these programs, GLP launched Etiquette Enhancement Class. Through this class, students can learn about international etiquette directly from foreign ambassadors from diverse countries.

Thus far 34 out of 231 academic exchange agreements have been signed directly by the College of Engineering, It is making continuous internationalization efforts through these exchange agreements. For example, it conducted a co-lecture via satellite during fall semester and co-guidance program for a doctoral degree with Tokyo University. SNU has concluded the Dual Degree Agreement with France Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne as well, so that students can graduate with two masters degrees if they take master’s level courses at SNU College of Engineering and Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne separately.

SNU PR Office