KAIST President Celebrating POSTECH’s 30th Anniversary
KAIST President Celebrating POSTECH’s 30th Anniversary
  • Reporter Jeong Yoon-han
  • 승인 2016.09.28 22:36
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On Sep. 8, Kang Sung-mo, the school president of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) visited POSTECH to deliver a lecture in celebration of our school’s 30th anniversary. He delivered a lecture about the importance of having a happy life. The lecture was mostly about the president’s life, how he went to college, how he earned his Ph. D., how he became a researcher at Bell Lab, and how he went on to become the president of KAIST. However, he did not forget about his lecture’s topic, having a happy life, in between. He illustrated his point through the movie, “Chariots of Fire (1981)” by comparing two gold medalists of the 1924 Paris Olympics, Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams.
The president also talked about three characteristics of a happy person by quoting from Ed Diener’s Subjective Well-Being. The characteristics are being highly satisfied with current life, experiencing positive feelings such as pleasure or pride often, and experiencing rather negative thoughts, displeasure, or sadness.
His lecture also talked about why people in their 20’s nowadays feel they are unhappy and misfortunate. Four out of ten people in their 20's feel anxious about their lives. Also, their feelings are hurt really easily, which comes from lack of confidence. There are several reasons that lead to this phenomenon. The first is because people in 20’s think of other people around them as competitors, which leads to more losers than winners. The second is due to materialism in which profit related activities are rated higher than other values. The third is due to the lack of balance between positive and negative feelings.
The lecture by President Kang is just a beginning of POSTECH’s 30th anniversary. On Sep. 21, Peter Fulde, who was the head of Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics located in Mu eun-jae building, had lecture about the relationship between science and the Korean economy. There are more lectures prepared by people coming to celebrate our school’s 30th anniversary.