My Summer Attending the Harvard Summer School-Seoul Program & Interning for 2 Weeks- Summer 2010

This summer I chose to participate in the Harvard Summer School Program in Seoul with the intention of learning Intermediate Korean in the country where the language was born. In the end, however, I did much more than just that: I also had the opportunity to learn about Korean culture and Anthropology through Prof. Michael Herzfeld’s and Prof. Elise Prébin’s “Experiencing Korea, Experiencing Comparison” and then see first-hand what I was learning in the classroom by simply going out into the streets of Seoul. Fortunately, both courses that I took during summer school will count towards a Secondary Field in East Asian studies, which I have decided to pursue and I was also able to get one General Education requirement out of the way. The largest rewards from participating in this program, though, were not academic, but personal – in the short two months I had in Korea, I made several valuable friendships, I gained my first official work experience through an internship at KISTEP and I even got glimpses of Korea that foreigners do not typically get thanks to what I learned during my stay. 

Upon arrival in Korea, I spent my first six weeks taking Anth S-1726 and Korean S-120a at Ewha Womans University. During this time, I took my first Anthropology course ever and grew as a writer after learning new ways in which to think critically about the world around me. Likewise in Korean class, I got to learn new vocabulary, grammatical structures and Hanja Chinese characters. Both courses pushed me as a student and as an individual – I was encouraged to take risks, make mistakes and find comfort in the unfamiliar. Although I had taken a whole year of Elementary Korean prior to this summer, I soon realized that I still had a lot more Korean to learn when I found myself struggling in my immersive Korean course. The class was taught entirely in Korean and my classmates were two Korean-Americans who knew the language fairly well. Although I constantly worked hard to do well and I always did my best, there were times in which I felt discouraged and there were also times in which I doubted in my abilities. These times of hardship in Korean class, however, eventually turned out to be my greatest educational experience of the summer – later on, during my internship at KISTEP, I found myself in a Korean-only environment in which my ability to survive without English allowed me to build stronger bonds with my co-workers. Outside the workplace, my abilities in Korean also allowed me to do independent travel both inside of and outside of Seoul. I attended a Korean Catholic service in Myeong-dong every week, I rode the subways without a map and without worries, and right after my two-week internship with KISTEP ended, I briefly got a glimpse of Jeju Island.

Granted, although this was my second visit to Korea, the very experience of being there had still been a bit of a novelty for me. I would still look around all over the place while riding subway cars and I would laugh at funny-looking advertisements that to the ordinary Korean citizen were uninteresting and banal. Unlike my first visit, however, I truly feel that I got a more authentic view of Korea’s history and culture. During my time as a student at Ewha, I was able to get past the barriers of cultural intimacy and through conversation with students, I learned about topics such as gender inequality, the age of Park Chung-Hee, ongoing poverty in Korea, North Korea and the current craze for plastic surgery. Then, during my two-week internship at KISTEP my experiences with being in a Korean-only language environment from Korean S-120a allowed me to be at comfort with my coworkers, where I got a glimpse of Korea’s ambitions to be a leader in science and technology and participate in the after-work drinking culture. Most importantly, though the whole time I was there, I able to make my own experiences about Korea without having to relying on others for help and while I have yet to learn even more Korean, I was able to pick up concepts such as “Jung” and “Ha” which are always lost in translation.

-Daniel Martinez, '13