Being a fulltime ethnically whiteforeign undergraduate student at Ewha is as rare as it gets. There’s very few like me, with most being within the master’s program, transfer program or exchange program at Ewha, not staying more than a year to two years at most. But here I am, studying under Ewha as my home university for my full four years of my bachelor degree. I feel it is within my power, after almost a year at Ewha and in Korea, to give the readers an insight as to what life is like at Ewha for a student like me, including both the up’s and downs of this school from my perspective.
Life at Ewha is not as easy as it seems. I’ve found many foreigner’s travel here without the proper understanding of how hard studying at a Korean university is, or how hard learning the Korean language actually is. Studying at Ewha is both fun and stressful for me. I am currently in my second semester of my freshman year, having started in the fall of 2017 when I was sixteen years old. I originate from Scotland, the second biggest country in the united nations of Britain. After coming to Korea, I settled relatively quickly and began to understand the ins and outs of Ewha. Something that’s very important to comment upon is the huge dissatisfactions all, if not most, full-time foreigners have with the OIA. It is very hard to find accurate new information from them, and not only myself but another girl had the same issue in which tuition transfer was a problem and registration can be lost in translation. I think within the future, it may be a good idea to gather other’s like myself to make an easier website or brochure for the OIA, as I have suggested before. As for other negatives before the positives, it is very hard for us to mingle within our other department members as we aren’t invited to things such as MT’s without asking about them first. I think these sort of things should be better taken into consideration.
The positives about Ewha, however, are still plentiful. Ewha is a beautiful university, being one of the most of the most amazing universities I’ve ever seen. This is partly one of the reasons I decided to attend Ewha. It’s a mixture of both old, from things such as the Chapel, to the new and modern such as the architectural wonder that is the ECC, a signature of our campus. There’s also the amazing sense of community within our campus. I feel as though I have made sisters for my life at this university, people from all over the nation and the world, coming from all different backgrounds, teaching me new things, traditions and languages along the way. Feminism is very prominent in our society, we can all feel safe as one, with the recent MeToo march we had on campus showing a great example of this for future generation of Ewha girls to come. I have found the education at Ewha is top notch, with amazing professors from all over the world, coming to teach at our prestigious university in Korea. This is something myself, and many other students are very proud for flaunt to our families, friends and loved ones. Student life is for the most part very open to foreigner’s who attend here, as I can admit as a member of the International Studies Department’s EDiS debate club, which I highly recommend others to join. And finally, there is a high level of pride that comes with being a full time student at Ewha as an ethnicallywhite foreigner. As I am rare, I am viewed as a strong and intelligent woman to have attended such a good school with such amazing students that went through a trouble in high school to get to where they are, and I am immensely thankful for this.