Intense sunlight dazzles from the sky and pervades through the streets, creating a neighborly environment. Sprinklers spray water all over the road where car tires seem to be hauled by the heated asphalt. Downtown streets embody vestiges of the Japanese colonial period with its stone buildings, and yearly countless visitors explore the area with their sunscreen on. Daegu, the hottest major city in South Korea, is also known as the second biggest city of education, as if the heat is coming from the city’s education fever.
The academies and high schools boast their college entrance examination results, posting a placard up as high as if they are announcing to the world. However, occasionally, young students with fatigue all over on their faces break the tranquility and pride of my hometown. These students, who are living proofs of the remnants of the cramming education system, inspired me to expand my horizons and pursue studies elsewhere even though I love Daegu. My hometown is a wonderful place to study, but there belie some austere truths about the educational system.
To avoid becoming a “question-solving machine” (Not to disparage all the students, but they really look like a machine), I had to take a leap of faith. The school I applied to, is located in the middle of a mountain valley in Gangwon-do, and has the most unique educational system in South Korea. It was a new dawn for me, a challenge.
Compared to the local education system, the new school system required us with a mix of grit. We rarely were guided manually, nor did we were confident about anything regarding the admission process. We had to search through the darkness to reach our exit. I thus began to learn as much as I could get my hands on, as much as I liked. To keep up the pace with the cataclysmic international situation, I started to subscribe to English newspapers, to not lose myself in the midst of hectic daily-life, I started to write daily planners, and to cope with any potential job I get, I started to learn computer programming. Among all the activities, however, I was deeply mesmerized by the computational abilities and the potential applications of computer programming, and especially, deep learning and artificial intelligence.
Since then, computer programming for me was an apparatus to reassemble the real world. From astrophysical simulations to statistical inference on cancer rates, there seemed to be no limit to whatsoever computer programming could do. To be specific, my concerns about CS drove me to take every course available in my high school, even designating my position as a school programming club leader.
I believe that CS in the near future will be residing among every other field, affecting the prosperity of the businesses and the diversity of the economy. Years ago, people did not anticipate how Amazon would revolutionize how we purchase products, or how smartphones would be a ubiquitous and useful presence in our daily lives. Just as we couldn’t predict these shifts, being a leading role in the “information revolution”, CS will bring major changes to our lives.
These developments, however, are unlikely to be distributed to cities and countries with less regard for the field. I don’t see any compelling reasons why these innovations cannot be embraced in my community if talented leaders choose to care. I want to be a part not just of cutting-edge innovations but finding ways to distribute access to innovation opportunities more evenly. I consider placards in my hometown, and I think about how they can relate not just to college examination results.
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