With the program now at its conclusion and all of us happily situated at home, it’s finally time to write the final blog highlighting our last week in Seoul. I will say, even though it’s been less than a week I find myself missing the research project and all our cohort members. I’m happy I’ve had enough time before my new school semester starts to reflect on everything that happened this summer. At some point in my life, I definitely want to return to Korea, hopefully after having learned more conversational Korean language skills to get by!

Research Progress

Lili and I finished our Urban Design Lab project with the finish line as close as possible. It went down to the wire, but we introduced virtual reality and keyboard movement to the project. Essentially, you can navigate yourself or an avatar through the street of the project like a video game! I’m glad we finished with such success at incorporating this project as a digital twin. 

Figure 1: Lili controlling VR of our project as seen in screenshot of our video.

We had a lot of help from Sihyeon from our lab, who had previous experience on a similar project. She helped us navigate Unreal Engine and especially the VR aspects of it. During the last few days, Lili and I had to learn some basic video editing to stitch together the videos of our project as well as videos of ourselves controlling the VR or the keyboard movement. Hopefully, Dr. Kwon will feature our project on his youtube channel or blog!

Aside from the end of our project, we said our goodbyes to all the grad students of the lab, and I was happy to hand-write letters to each of them with small gifts to our 3 mentors; Oh Kyeongmin, Park Sihyeong, and Kang Mingu. Lili also brought in a cake as a farewell gift and we had a small ‘party’ with our lab members and other interns and even invited over Mahe and Nicole’s transportation lab to finish the rest of our cake! We had a bit of time to start our research paper and now Lili and I met through Zoom to discuss and start it!

Excursions

At the end of the program, I definitely started to feel the exhaustion of Jeju the week before, and from being on ‘GO’ mode for the past 8 weeks. Despite that, I did my best to see more of Korea.

I chased my newfound passion for bike riding by taking a trip to Yangpyeong in Gyeongi-do and Gyeongju. In addition, I did a lot of last-second souvenir shopping for myself and my friends/family back home. I will very much miss the convenience of public transportation everywhere in Seoul… 

This trip definitely inspired me to work in transportation engineering or urban design and of course live in a city with ample public transport options.

Figure 2: Remnants of a palace and a fully intact garden as seen on my Gyeongju bike trip.

My favorite city in all of Korea is certainly Gyeongju! I really liked the unique food options from that city, the close proximity of all the historic monuments, and all the temples in that city. I spent 6 hours bike riding all over and enjoyed every moment of it. I was surprised at how empty it was when I visited. I wonder if monsoon season scares people away, but I was lucky to have plenty of sun!

Figure 3: Bike riding near YangPyeong