Korean Culture is one of the two concentrations of Korean Studies that Ewha GSIS offers. In this post, you will learn more about this concentration through our interview with a current master’s student in Korean Culture.
Following, we have an interview with Alice Salvetti, a Master’s Student at Ewha GSIS!
Could you tell us about yourself?
Hello, everyone! I’m Alice Salvetti, and I’m currently in the 4th semester of my Master’s degree here at Ewha. My Major is Korean Studies with a focus on Korean Culture. I come from a small town in northern Italy and in undergrad I moved to Venice where I majored in Korean Language at Ca’Foscari University. I guess you could say I have been studying Korean for a long time haha! Aside from studying, I love going cafè-hopping with my friends and I also have an interest in quirky street fashion. Unfortunately nowadays, with the pandemic going on, I have been wearing mostly pajamas… 😅
How did you come to know about this program at ewha gsis?
When I was in undergrad i had the chance to come to Ewha as an exchange student for one semester and I fell in love with the campus and the atmosphere of the area in general. After graduating, I started working for a local startup but i couldn’t help but think that I would have loved to continue my studies instead. I knew that I wanted to keep studying and researching about Korea, so i looked for info on various Korean Studies departments. In the end, I chose Ewha GSIS because, differently from most other universities, its Korean Studies department offers classes mostly in Korean and i thought it would be a great opportunity to improve my language proficiency.
Could you explain to us about your program?
The Korean Studies department offers two major tracks: Korean Culture and Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language. In both cases, you have to take at least half of your classes from your selected major in order to graduate, but for the rest of the classes you are free to choose from the other major or even other GSIS departments. I personally took the majority of my classes within my chosen major, but I shared Culture classes with many students from Education major who liked to mix and match. Our department also offers the possibility to gain a Korean Language Teaching Certificate if you complete a certain amount of specific classes.
What are the advantages of this program?
I personally think one of the most valuable points of the program is the variety of topics and fields covered by the Korean Culture classes. When we think about culture, generally we imagine traditional art, literature, history and ancient topics like that, am I right? However in the past semester, alongside classes on traditional culture, I had the chance to attend classes about sociology, cultural anthropology, modern literature, theory and even movies! I think that this variety of fields contributed to teach me a more open and multifaceded approach to academic studies.
What do you personally enjoy about this program?
I think most GSIS students will feel the same, but I personally enjoy the multicultural environment very much. In every class there are students from different countries who get to share their unique perspectives and knowledge with everyone else. In one of my classes last semester the professor said that he was feeling like a guest on Unconventional Summit (the name of a TV show)! Every student there was from a different country and we naturally started talking about our experiences and comparing them with the Korean situation… It was very fun and interesting!
Last Comments
I came to Ewha in 2019, when the pandemic was nowhere in sight, and I was lucky to experience the full campus life for at least one semster. My heart goes to all the new students who are stuck with online classes and can’t enjoy their university life to the fullest. However, I want to say that you will definitely not regret choosing Ewha, and that if we all work together there will definitely come better days, days where we can finally come together and greet each other (hopefully) without a mask. Until then, let’s do our best and try to stay healthy and safe!
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