Just a small question. How difficult is this university to get into as an international student? My mother is originally from Korea, but is no longer a citizen. I have a highly STEM focused high school career with numerous activities/summer classes revolving around STEM. Is the admissions rate for this school for international students very small? Thanks !
A quick Google search says about 20%, so probably easier than most STEM-y colleges in the US (MIT, CalTech, Berkeley, GTech, etc). Apparently there’s crazy good scholarships for internationals too, maybe I should apply too lol.
If it’s not too personal, any particular reason for wanting to go to KAIST for undergrad? Besides your mom, that is. I’ve heard that KAIST is considered the “MIT of South Korea”, but my (limited) perception is that it’s a lot more popular to study abroad and do research there than to actually attend.
@udonlord Thanks for the response. I’m mostly interested just because the scholarship opportunity seems very helpful, and I feel like I’d still get a top-teir education for engineering. I also loved Korea when I stayed there for the summer, and I have a feeling it might just be better to get out of the US right now. Everything is so uncertain, but in Korea, it seems like they have it together. My plan is to attend KAISt if I get in and don’t get in to my top 6 schools in the US. I am worried about the way this may look when applying for jobs, just because I don’t think that the university’s name holds any weight when applying for jobs in the US.
I see. My take on STEM careers is that it matters a lot less than humanities careers where your shiny new degree came from.
STEM tends to be more defined by tangible skills (i.e. SQL, Immunoprecipitation, Gas Chromatography etc.). So long as you’ve got a combination of relevant skills going into the job market, it doesn’t really matter so much where you got them as long as you have them.
On the other hand, humanities ppl like Art History and Medieval Literature majors don’t really have as many tangible skills, besides being good at reading literature and analyzing history, but that’s hard to quantify. In that case, they tend to rely on the Harvard or Princeton degree that they have to springboard and do other things. See what I mean? If you learned how to generate and analyze data tables, work a spectrophotometer, or know how to do a basic brain section, it matters a lot more that you’re amazing at it than if you learned from Berkeley, Penn State, or Stanford.
@udonlord Thanks so much. I never thought about it that way before, but it makes sense.