Colleges Adopt New Style of Welcoming Freshmen
By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
Movie stars and singers have been the main guests for universities' events to welcome freshmen. This year, Yonsei, Soongsil and Sookmyung invited popular entertainers to their events.
The "luxurious" admission ceremonies, however, have drawn criticism from parents and students who have complained about tuition hikes.
In response, some universities have introduced a variety of events that can help students adapt to new campus life.
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has canceled its admission ceremony scheduled for March 2, saving about 20 million won. Instead, the university plans to hold a "self-discovery" camp over three days to help students find their future jobs.
Duksung Women's University hosted an "eco-campus" campaign, at which students signed up to participate in a campaign that requires them to refrain from drinking and smoking, and to save energy.
Some other universities invited special lecturers to promote a better university life. Dankuk University this year organized programs with company CEOs in order to help students develop a more creative leadership.
Kyung Hee University also offered its 4,000 freshmen a special lecture by Paul Kennedy, an eminent scholar from Yale University, last Friday.
The university officials said they organized the lecture to remind their freshmen on the meaning of being university students and help them design their future.
Under the theme, "Education and the Future of Humankind," Kennedy said "Students like yourselves come to university excited, curious, and quite frightened. It is the task of the university - chiefly, of its professors - to respond to their feelings, to train them how to think better, how to ask the right questions, how to gather and analyze data, how to put an argument together, how to distinguish proper knowledge from fake knowledge. When universities do that well, they have fulfilled the expectations which a society ought to ask of them."
He added, "The future of humankind does rest upon education, more than upon anything else." In the second part of the welcoming ceremony, performances by the university student clubs and a gala musical concert were staged.