Opportunities to Study or Teach in Korea

Options for undergraduates:

Korea America Student Conference (so awesome it is hard to explain in a single phrase, but essentially a month-long intensive cultural boot-camp ^^)

NSEP Boren Undergraduate Scholarship (for a summer or full-year of study abroad)

Freeman-Asia (for a summer or full-year of study abroad)

TALK and EPIC Programs (teaching English in Korea for one year, fully funded by South Korea; TALK is for currently enrolled undergraduates and EPIK is for graduates who already have a BA)

Options for graduates and undergraduates entering their senior year:

Flagship Language Program (fully funded, two years of intensive language study, spread between the University of Hawaii and Korea University)

Fulbright Full Grant or English Teaching Assistantships (ETA) (fully funded; graduating seniors and graduate students can apply to spend a year abroad in Korea either doing independent research or teaching English)

Graduate Study in Korea (numerous fully and partially funded opportunities for studying an MA in International Studies or many other fields at a university in South Korea ~ this can be a good step towards jobs in the foreign service, K-Studies PhD back in the states, doing business in Korea, etc.)

Refer to my earlier blog entry about scholarships and programs for Graduate Schools of International Studies in Korea.

Korea Studies @ Stanford

This fall I graduated from the University of Washington with an MA in sociology and am beginning a PhD in sociology at Stanford.  This week marks my third week in Palo Alto.

Stanford has a fantastic and rapidly growing Korea Studies program at the faculty level.  We have professors who study Korea in history (Yumi Moon), sociology (Gi-wook Shin), public policy through APARC (David Straub & Joyce Lee), and literature (Dafna Zur).  We also have Korean language lecturer (Hee-Sun Kim) and a Korea studies librarian (Kyungmi Chun).  Korea Studies has two more faculty lines in the social sciences and is currently conducting a search for professors, most likely in political science and anthropology.  Once these positions are filled, I believe we will have the most comprehensive group of K-Studies scholars in the social sciences than any university outside of Korea.

At the graduate level, this year a number of students entered graduate programs in sociology, history, anthropology, and a number of MA students in East Asia Studies, effectively doubling the number of graduate students studying Korea at Stanford.

What I am less certain of is what we have going for undergrads.  A couple of weeks ago I attended a Korea Studies event at Berkeley and met a number of undergraduates over there interested in Korea.  This year and in the years to come, I am planning to help organize and grow our undergrad K-Studies program and do joint activities with students at Berkeley.  I would like to help organize student groups such as Students for Korea Studies at the University of Washington and the North Korea Study Group, two groups that some friends and I started just two years ago at the University of Washington.  Many students have graduated and gone on to do various things related to Korea.  One friend got a job with the Korean consulate in Seattle.  Another is working covertly in Southeast Asia with LiNK, a North Korea human rights NGO, assisting defectors as they try to get from North Korea to South Korea.  A number of us have gone on to pursue K-Studies in graduate school.  Many of us have also done research or taught English in Korea and have established some deep connections there both in terms of friendships and cultural understanding.  It's a very exciting world and this is precisely what I hope we can get up and running at Stanford: a community of students, faculty, and local residents interested in building cultural ties, language proficiency, friendships, and possibly careers in or related to Korea(s).