The Application I Almost Didn’t Send
When I was sitting in my BCORE class listening to a peer talk about his study abroad experience, I remember thinking how cool it sounded, and also that it just wasn’t something I could do. Even when I sent in my application a year later, I felt like I was just taking a shot in the dark.
I’m so glad I sent it anyway. A few months later, I was spending a month across the ocean in South Korea, starting in Seoul, then heading to Daejeon, and ending on Jeju Island. Along the way, I worked on two very different engineering projects, one for watermelon farmers and one with EV charging data, and both pushed me way out of my comfort zone and taught me something new.
Daejeon!
In Daejeon, we teamed up with Hannam University students for a two-week design challenge: create something to help older Korean watermelon farmers. I was a little nervous about working with students from another country, but the ice broke fast. One of the very first questions we were asked was about our MBTI. I didn’t realize it at the time, but everyone’s MBTI told the whole team a lot about each other! Between that and a lot of team lunches and dinners, we warmed up to each other pretty quickly.
Before we even started brainstorming, we spent days visiting greenhouses and interviewing farmers, which was a completely new part of the design process for me. Then came two days of my ideas getting shot down one after another during the long ideation phase, but I kept showing up with the next one anyway.
Our final idea, an AI-driven pest control robot, went on to win first prize at a regional hackathon when one of our peers presented it after the program. Our study abroad group even made it into a local Hannam news article!
Jeju-do!
Then we traveled to Jeju Island, the same island I used to see in K-dramas! :O Here, we did a two-week AI “learncation” at Jeju National University. As an electrical engineering major, I’d never worked hands-on with deep learning, and before this I didn’t even know how many types of AI models there were. Suddenly, I was the technical lead on a project using real EV charging station data to predict energy demand, and we managed to shrink our models to 312× smaller while still making reliable predictions. Since I want to go into renewable energy after I graduate, getting to see how AI actually fits into the field was super exciting.
My biggest lesson came from presenting it. I got so deep into the technical stuff that I forgot not everyone in the audience would know what “knowledge distillation” meant. So instead of reading off the slides or spitting out random numbers, I learned the material well enough to teach it and mold it to my audience.
What I’m Taking Home
I came home more confident in sharing my ideas, more willing to speak up, and pretty sure renewable energy is where I want to be. But the biggest thing I took away was how much I learned from the people around me, especially the Korean students who showed me a whole new way of working in a team. It got me out of my own little thought bubble.
It’s crazy to think that not too long ago, I was the one sitting in my BCORE class, hearing someone else’s study abroad story and thinking it wasn’t possible for me. Now I get to be the one sharing my story with others!
