Develop Engineers’ Creative and Passionate Effort
Develop Engineers’ Creative and Passionate Effort
  • Woo Hyun Paik
  • 승인 2010.03.03 23:48
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Congatulatory Address

▲ Woo Hyun Paik,
the President of LG Electronics
Good Morning!

Congratulations to the freshmen, families, and all the people who helped you to be here today.  And, thank you so much, President Baik for inviting me to this most prestigious event at POSTECH.  So, you might ask why I am congratulating you.  Because I believe this is the best time to be an engineering professional.  As you all know, we have made tremendous advancement in engineering and science over the past several decades.  But, we still have a long way to go.  For example, computers are so advanced now but the speech recognition is no where near perfect and they don’t have their own mind yet.   We still don’t have robots anything close to human.  It still takes more than 10 hours to fly to US or Europe.  We made a huge advancement with the digital TV and now 3D TV is coming to a reality thanks to the success of mega hit movies like Avatar but we have a long way to go to implement true 3D holographic TV. The conversion efficiency of the solar panel is still less than 20% and we are still fighting cancer.   So, we have many opportunities for you and I want you to develop a successful career, and I want you to make a lot of money too.  So, you might ask how you can achieve this goal.  I think you made a good start in making that goal as you became a member of POSTECH, one of the best schools that I can think of.  Today, I would like to give you a few tips that can help you based on my life and work.

First of all, I recommend you to get a hobby to make something in the area of your interest.   It can be building a model car or an airplane.  Or you can play with generating electricity with a solar panel or a small wind turbine.  Through this experience, you can learn to develop the sense of feeling and you can learn to enjoy what you are doing.   In my case, I bought a simple radio kit and assembled it during my high school days.  I was delighted to be able to hear the radio broadcasting with the AM radio that I built.   It had only one germanium diode and I was able to enjoy the radio only through a small earphone.   Soon, I wanted to make the sound louder and I played with a vacuum tube then on to transistors.  KBS started an FM transmission at 89.1 MHz, so I assembled an FM receiver.  When they started the FM stereo broadcasting, I again attempted to build an FM stereo decoder.   I had to assemble a resonator at 19 KHz by winding coils several thousand times.   Finally, I was able to listen to stereo broadcasting and I still cannot forget the excitement I had on that day.   I then started to get interested in being able to transmit radio signals, which led me to the ham radio.  I still enjoy ham radio and where ever I go, I set up antennas and pull coaxial cables.   I did it so much that my wife once mentioned that when I die, she will bury me with antennas, cables, and ham radio gears, if I behave well!  These days, I enjoy testing and playing with the products that LG developed.   My title at LG, CTO means Chief Technology Officer, but because of this, they sometimes call me Chief Testing Officer.

Next, I would like to recommend that you read one extra technical book in the area of your major during your freshman year.  This will make you to stay ahead of your class and make you to enjoy your class work.   In my case, I read through a book called “Network Analysis” which helped me tremendously going through my classes during my sophomore years.   That book made me more knowledgeable than the TA.

The last thing I would like to recommend is to take care of your health.   Somebody said if you lose money, you lose a little.   If you lose reputation, you lose a lot.   But if you lose your health, you are losing all.   So, how do you take care of your health and stay healthy.   The most important thing I think is to have enough sleep.   There is an old saying that “early to bed and early to rise makes men healthy, wealthy, and wise.”   Is there anybody here who doesn’t want be healthy, wealthy, and wise?

So, today I mentioned a few things that can help you to become successful.   You might ask what the definition of the success is.   My definition of success is if you are happy with what you are doing and happy with what you have achieved, you are successful.   Another measure of success is whether the technology or products that you developed are used by more than 1 million people.  Every time that I watch the crystal clear pictures of the digital TV, I feel happy.  Can you imagine going back to the analog NTSC TVs?

Dear freshmen!

I think that the reason why Korean companies like LG Electronics became a global top tier company resulted from the engineers’ creative and passionate effort of day and night. There is no doubt that engineers will be the best contributors in making Korea as a global No. 1 brand.  To achieve that goal, I want each of you to become a global expert and develop innovative technologies and products.  I believe that the recently announced POSTECH Project which will invite 10 great scholars such as Nobel Prize winners and make POSTECH to be the world’s top 20 university by 2020 will help you achieving that goal.  I fully expect that you will become global top experts, and someday, your names will be on the list of Nobel Prize.