I welcome all of our freshmen, who came to POSTECH with dreams and passion for science and technology. I also congratulate and gratefully acknowledge the parents of the incoming students for sending them to POSTECH after having raised them with unbounded parental care and love.

POSTECH is Korea’s first research-oriented university, founded by POSCO, the national pride and global powerhouse in the steel industry, for the advancement of science and engineering education and the development of the nation’s scientific and technological capacity. This year marks the quarter-century anniversary of our university. While growing into a high-spirited young and dynamic institute, POSTECH has driven the development of Korea’s higher education and contributed to the advancement of the nation’s science and technology, through pursuit of excellence in education and research. As a result, we are recognized as one of the top science and engineering universities of the world and placed best in Korea, third in Asia, and 28th in the world by The Times of London in its World University Rankings 2010. Now you become a member of the university that is Korea’s pride and hope as well as the world’s focus of attention. Therefore, take pride and do your utmost to cultivate professional knowledge, creativity, and character worthy of POSTECH.

Our Proud and Dearest Freshmen of POSTECH!

POSTECH’s educational goal is to train you to become world-class scientists who are capable of challenging the Nobel Prize and the Fields Medal, or to foster creative and innovative global entrepreneurs like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, or Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.

To this end, POSTECH has, from its beginning, provided customized education for a small elite group selected carefully with thorough academic supervision. Starting this year, our curriculum will be fully reformed with an educational focus on our advanced Ph.D. program. Through integrated undergraduate and graduate training, firstly you will lay a firm foundation in basic education on fundamentals and core disciplines and then immerse yourselves in the systematized and intensified major studies of your choice based on the foundation. You will be able to cut short the long road to a Ph.D. degree by two to three years, as well as to begin the scientist’s journey earlier by participating in advanced research even as an undergraduate. We also plan to reinforce our courses in humanities, arts and social sciences to better support you to cultivate creativity and human nature, essential for your growth into global leaders.

Along with these efforts of the university, also highly critical to become creative and influential leaders of the nation and the world is how you live your college life. First of all, study diligently the fundamental subjects such as math, physics, chemistry and life science, and exert yourselves mightily to become the winning professional players on the international arena in your special areas. Next, in order to cultivate open-minded thinking and creativity as future global leaders, you must busy yourselves building broad interest and gaining experience in the humanities, the arts and social sciences. Remember, creativity is not to seek, but to seed and feed.

POSTECH is unique in Korea in that all members of the university, including faculty, students and researchers, live together in the same campus, which enables them to interact efficiently. The future sciences are developing through convergence and integration, bringing forth multilateral synergies. Similar to the Tae-Neung National Village, where national athletes stay and train together, POSTECH provides an ideal environment for the nation’s foremost scientists and engineers to focus on their research with ready access to vibrant interdisciplinary exchanges and collaboration. I suggest that, to become world-class professionals, you take full advantage of this privilege of unique opportunities, and try extra hard to frequently communicate and closely collaborate with your professors and peers. Please be aware that the threats to the humanity, which you must manage, include energy shortage, environmental degradation, climate change, limited resources, food crises, diseases, and terrorism; these problems cannot be solved by one person and require extensive cooperation across the disciplinary as well as regional boundaries.

As such, I would like to emphasize that, to become leaders of this society, you should foster Zeitgeist as well as a sense of responsibility; furthermore, to become de facto global leaders, you should also speak fluent English, as if speaking a native tongue, and freely communicate with other global leaders at professional levels. I sincerely hope that, you grow to become proud Postechians, who serve others above and beyond self-centered interest and with dignity and self-respect worthy of the world’s future leaders.

I would like to close by extending my sincere appreciation to Dr. Wook Hyun Kwon for his precious time to deliver words of encouragement to POSTECH’s freshmen.

I wish all freshmen every glory and blessing.

 

 

 

 

 

Mar.  2,  2011
President  Sunggi Baik