According to the official Vision 2020 key index, most important indices should be improved by 2010, so I am very curious how reality corresponds to the plan. Among five key areas to achieve the goal of being in the world’s top 20 universities are the globalization, education, research, faculty and financial spheres. I cannot speak about the latter ones, because have no access to statistics on them, but can tell you what I feel about the popularization of POSTECH work going on out there.

In my opinion, there should be extensive work done to make POSTECH visible in global arena. The information is slowly penetrating into the world, but it is not enough. For instance, try to Google “Dormitory for International Cultural Exchange POSTECH.” One of the top results is a website of the University of Waterloo, where one can find a brief introduction to our university, and there is mention about the international dormitory (DICE) as well. Is it good? Definitely, but suppose I would like to go deeper and find more information about POSTECH. And this is where I get problems. POSTECH is trying to be as famous as, say, Caltech, but let us compare a simple thing: the Wikipedia articles about these two universities. The article about POSTECH is very small, highlighting only very scarce and basic information whereas the one about the California Institute of Technology is huge, giving extensive highlights into the university’s history, academics and student life. Then let’s see in how many languages these articles are available: 3 languages for POSTECH and 35 for Caltech. When a person makes a decision about their destination, he or she wants to know everything about it. Wikipedia is maybe not the most reliable source of information, but it is always in the top five search results and could be a good place to start with.

I remember during the opening ceremony of the POSTECH-KAIST Science War that KAIST students were making many jokes about the POSTECH campus being “non-English friendly.” In some sense this is true, but there is vast improvement over the past years. Now we finally have one global ATM on campus, all signs are finally replaced with English and every official information poster now has an English version along with the Korean one. But these are only baby-steps on the way to true diffusion of English here. Simply compare the English and Korean versions of the POSTECH web pages. The main page, HEMOS, POVIS and library web sites are only partially translated. The union web page does not have an English version at all, which means that any sort of online interaction is unavailable. I suggest taking a closer look at these systems to improve the experience of all foreign students and a future with a 20% international faculty.