This September, a special event to introduce Peking University will take place at Ewha. The presidents of both universities have agreed to hold the event to reciprocate for the Ewha University Day held at Peking University in 2007.
Zhou Qifeng, the current president of Peking University, made his first official trip to Ewha on May 8 to plan the event. During the talk, Zhou emphasized the importance of exchanges between Ewha and Peking as one of the top universities in Asia .
The two universities’ special relation has existed since 1993; just a year after establishing diplomatic relations with People’s Republic of on August 24, 1992.
Besides being top-level schools, Ewha and Peking share a tradition of putting emphasis on female education. Peking University was the first university in to admit female students in 1920. It also established a Women’s Studies Center in October 1990. Ewha was the first modern institution in for female students and opened the first graduate program for women’s studies in Asia, in 1982.
The relationship between Ewha and Peking was tightened through yearly academic conferences on women’s studies. The first academic exchange was in December 1993, during the first North East Asia Women’s Conference, where the former president of Ewha, Chung Il-sook, made a speech. Then, in 1996, an academic interchange agreement was made between the schools. Ewha also held “Ewha Womans University Day” at Peking in 2007 for the first time as a South Korean university. Peking has held these events to introduce world class universities to its students since 2001.
“This time, when Peking is introduced at Ewha, I hope the event will connect not only the students of Peking and Ewha, but also the students of China and South Korea as a whole,” said Huiting Chen (Korean, 3), an exchange student from Peking to Ewha.
To aid students in further developing their education in Peking, the Ewha-Peking Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (EPTeCSOL) program and a satellite campus in Peking were made last year. The EPTeCSOL program allows Ewha graduate students to get joint master’s degrees from both universities.
Through the satellite campus project, Min Dong-eun (Chinese, 4) began studying at Peking last year. “Right now I am the only exchange student from Ewha at Peking. I hope more Ewha students will be able to study at Peking ,” said Min.
Professor Zi Hong-min (Business), the dean of the Office of Global Affairs at Ewha said that Ewha is to increase its numbers of exchange students to Peking.
Ko Eun-mee & Hur Eun-bi
eunmeeko@ewhain.net & evehur@ewhain.net