New Official Addresses for the SNU Campuses
The SNU Gwanak and Yeongeon Campuses Receive New Addresses Effective from 2012

The Gwanak campus will officially receive its new address 'Gwanak-ro' and the Yeongeon campus 'Daehak-ro' starting next year. In 2008, SNU was given the address 'Gwanak-ro 599'. The school used this address for three years, having to specify whether it was the 'Gwanak-ro' referring to the Gwanak or Yeongeon campus. This address, which caused much confusion, has finally been changed under the government's recent address reorganization plan.

Gwanak District Office's Department of Estate Documentation and the New Address Organization Team sent an official letter to SNU explaining that, although SNU's main campus address should have been 'Gwanak-ro 2' according to the building numbering principle they are following, they granted SNU the address 'Gwanak-ro 1' due to its symbolic significance in the district.

Meanwhile, the address of the Yeongeon campus returned to what it had been after a turbulent wave of changes. The SNU Yeongeon campus, which used to have the address 'Daehak-ro' traditionally significant as it literally means 'University Road', was greatly disappointed when it was changed to 'Changyeong-ro' under the 2010 address reorganization plan.

SNU filed an appeal with the Jongro District Office requesting its Yeongeon campus address be reinstated. Jongro District Office's Department of Estate Documentation accepted this appeal and made the final decision last week to assign the College of Medicine the address 'Daehak-ro 103', and the Seoul National University Hospital 'Daehak-ro 101', according to their locations measured from the back gate of the Yeongeon campus.

In accordance with the recent address reorganization plan, universities will be given one address per campus in order to eliminate the problem of different addresses within a single campus, which has caused much confusion to date. Due to SNU's immense campus, the school had borne the problem of having its front and back gates actually in two different districts. After the new addresses take effect, all the buildings on SNU's Gwanak campus will be 'Gwanak-ro 1', as all buildings on the same campus will belong to a single district.

Here are some examples of how SNU's new address will be applied.

(PR Department Address)
Seoul National University
Department of Public Relations and Communications
Building 60, 2nd Floor
1 Gwanak-ro, Bongcheon-dong, Gwanak-gu,
Seoul 151-742

(SNU Hospital Address)
Seoul National University Hospital
Building 1
101 Daehak-ro, Yeongeon-dong, Jongno-gu,
Seoul 110-799

Currently, the superintendent in charge of the new address reorganization plan in the Ministry of Public Administration and Security is reviewing whether they should translate the names of places such as 'ro' to 'road' The government did announce that the current method of Korean Romanization (the standard orthography of writing Korean names and words with the Roman alphabet) will continue to be used for now.

February 18, 2011
Written by LEE BoYoung, SNU English Editor
bylee0708@gmail.com