Challenge Semester, Introduced for the First Time in Korea, Provides Learning-Experience Opportunities during Summer Vacation

Sungkyunkwan University has firstly introduced “Challenge Semester” to foster students’ spirit of challenge by providing various opportunities including learning and experience opportunities during summer vacation. To ensure the smooth operation of this program, the university has extended its summer vacation from 2 months to 3 months. A total of 5,500 students, including undergraduates, masters and Ph.Ds, participated in challenge semester.

This year, SKKU provides fruitful and various programs for free so that students can take as many programs as they want. The curriculum programs consist of innovative convergence classes such as AI, data analysis, and machine learning, which are of great interest to student lately. Prof. Choi Jae-Boong’s lecture, ‘Phono Sapience, new mankind born through smartphone’ is one of them. By taking these program, students can earn credits during the challenge semester.

For the extra-curriculum programs, SKKU offers lectures with various fields such as Fourth Industrial Revolution, AI, entreprenueur spirit, brand, foreign language, carrer path, and etc. Also, it actively promotes internship in which students can not only gain field experience but also recognize and solve the problem of the field by participating in the project. Moreover, it conducts research experience program in collaboration with excellent researchers to find research topics and carries it out.

Due to COVID-19, SKKU operates International Summer Semester (ISS), one of the representative international exchange programs, through online and provides various courses in the field of economics, business, AI/Data, and etc. Additionally, it will continue to offer popular lectures taught in global univerisites for free to students through an agreement with Coursera, the world’s largest open class (MOOC) platform.

*Original Article: https://www.donga.com/news/article/all/20210714/107946036/1