“It is a shape of a skull,” said a volunteer.

The other students are laughing and trying to find eyes and a nose from a lump of a cheese; but it soon becomes clear that finding a piece reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s Scream from the lump of a cheese is going to challenge even the most proficient young scientists, and very soon they’ll all be crushing the cheese to eat it.

These city-based students are not used to this sort of experience; although they might be skilful at calculating the earning rate of the chemical reaction from milk to cheese, they are not used to seeing and touching green cheese just before its chemical reaction.

For the sixth Residential College (RC) Day, on October 2, more than eighty RC students went to a cattle ranch in Dangjin-Gun, Chungnam Province. The RC, founded in 2008 in order to offer an array of academic and social programs that enhance the undergraduate experience, has held several culture events. For this time, students who’d been cooped up in the library for weeks were enjoying farm life and experiencing several hands-on events, including milking a cow, processing cheese, feeding a heifer, making ice cream, and so on.

It was rainy when the tour buses reached Agroland Taeshin Farm. However, the rainy weather could not allay their excitement. Agroland Taeshin Farm (http://www.taeshinfarm.com) was established in 1968 and has grown over the years taking a hands-on approach to introducing farm life and its beautiful nature. On that day, there were only few family-sized groups of  tourists. On a green field the size of one hundred football-stadiums, there was nothing but a group of RC students with over two thousand head of grazing cows and sheep.

At Agroland Taeshin Farm, students were separated into four groups and they experienced farm life, albeit its digest version. RC residents, who had never before talked with each other, were racking their brains together to win a prize, the privilege to choose a dinner menu of up to eight thousand won. Putting their hands in a hot tub together to soften a cuddle of cheese, they discussed which piece had the weirdest shape and was worth eating.

Although they could not ride on a horse due to the bad weather, they got several memorable, unforgettable experiences. When students were queuing for squirting milk, a cow suddenly raised its tail, and soon all students had to shunt from the excrement. “Holy cow! It was the most dung that I ever seen,” a student said. “The smells diffused just like I’ve learned in class.”

“Visiting a farm is a very interesting experience,” said Jingeol Lee. He added, “Even the cows were bigger than I expected. I made several friends while I was out in the field. I wish the RC had more tangible programs like this.”