2011 EISC Session II Participant: Daniel Gunderson
University of Oslo, Norway

" This summer I participated in Session II of the Ewha International Summer School, and it was the best summer vacation I have ever had. The program offered an intensive Korean language course taught by great teachers, and even though it was only for two weeks I feel I got to improve my Korean quite much. The second part of the program consisted of a variety of cultural courses taught by great professors from Korea and abroad. Almost every day after completing the cultural course we went on a field trip which was relevant to the course we had that day. For instance, one day we had a course about the history of the Kyongbok palace followed by a fieldtrip to the palace. Although I had been to the palace a few times before, it felt like I visited a totally new place because of the background information we were given in the class. Another day we learned about Korean popular culture followed by a visit to the Miso performance which was one of the best theatre experiences I ever had. We also learned about Korean movies followed by a visit to a film studio, as well as learning to play Korean traditional music, making ceramics, making kimchi and so on. Everything was extremely well planned by the summer school staff and the choices of where to visit and what to learn could hardly been done any better.

The campus is clean and nice with great facilities and many on-campus cafés, as well as a lot of places to have delicious meals outside of campus. Among the 90 members of Session II there were only five male students, so each guy was like a “group leader” with 17 girls in each group. Maybe some guys think that the summer school is just for female students because of the name “Ewha Womans University”, but the content of the program is just as interesting for guys as for girls and I would strongly recommend the summer school to any guys interested. I would also definitely recommend this summer program to anyone who wants to learn more about Korea and its language and culture. "