Prof. Gwan-Heng Lee, the Dean of GIST College did an interview with the host of the City of Light at GFN, the Gwangju FM radio station (98.7 MHz), on March 14, 2011. The main purpose of his interview was to give a brief introduction of GIST and to emphasize why GIST is a very powerful institute in Korea. He also discussed GIST’s competitive position in terms of its world rankings, and how it was possible that we could develop this fast, as GIST only has a brief 17-year history.

Prof. Lee mentioned that the most notable results we might see is that GIST will be ranked the 10^th in the world in terms of citations per faculty in 2010. This result indicates that the research and academic capabilities of GIST have achieved the level of a world-class university. As such, some prestigious universities such as Caltech and UC Berkeley in the USA have now started to do more active collaborations with GIST. 

In the radio interview yesterday evening, he also said that, “GIST college admits only 100 students per year. It is a school for a select few students who are talented in science and technology. GIST College does not have barriers between departments as most schools do; instead, students can choose their concentration areas.”

“Our system provides for a great deal of flexibility in terms of curriculum. We decided to use Caltech as our benchmarking university, and I first visited them 2 years ago. I presented our proposal to their Vice Provost regarding possible educational collaborations between the two institutes. Since then, Caltech professors have visited us three times and GIST professors visited them six times. And finally, they liked the idea of helping us to establish a new college since they can make such a meaningful contribution.”

“At this time, we have an MOU with Caltech for exchanging summer internship students. But the overall MOU between the two institutes has yet to be finalized. We plan to have it by the end of this year.

The best effect is that our curriculum will be well developed by benchmarking Caltech teaching methods and laboratory courses. It will also greatly help us to recruit the best students in the nation.”

“Last year, we sent all our freshmen students to UC Berkeley to take summer session courses. Each student took two regular summer courses and they all managed very well.”

“Also our graduate program has been using English for all classes since we were founded in 1995—there is 100% English instruction on campus. For this reason, it is not such a big deal for us to have our undergraduate students to have their classes in English, as well.”

For further detail, please see the attached file.