Week 2: awesome people

My experience is that change is good.

This text will be about some of the things I've learned during my stay here. I believe it's more important than writing about the places I've been to or how I've felt because when it comes to learning there's always a need for reflection, as the things that I've done and how I felt are merely the environment in which my learning takes place.



1. Learn
s) school

Even if it's interesting as a subject, I'm going to drop clinical psychology due to the excessive use of Korean in the class. Management science will have to go because it's high school math.

This leaves me with five courses (30 ECTS) that have 12,5 hours lectures a week. Which is good. It has been pretty intense here so far, and I'm not sure if it's going to slow down that much... especially since I haven't used that much time for school outside classes.

The lectures are mandatory to attend, with the possibility of being absent four times. Strict. A word of warning about them, too. The main learning method is memorizing details as opposed to learning how things work. The big picture, so to speak. As I said last time though I'll be focusing on the school part more as my four months here go on.

There's one thing I should mention right here though. A good thing with studying psychology is that it comes with complimentary learning methods and the like. It is about the way we think, right?

l) language

Tutoring for the win! Now I'm a regular normal guy in the sense that I'm, well, lazy. One hour a week with a personal Korean tutor for visualizing new words and expressions helps me develop my Korean quite significantly. I just need to rehearse afterwards, which takes a lot less energy than creating the images in your head.

Some people are taking an intensive (20h/week) or an evening (6h/week) course in Korean but as I'm here for four months I believe I've done the right choice not taking either of them.

When I have the time to learn to read hangeul (하얼 or so) faster I believe I'll watch some music videos with subtitles. Pretty efficient I take it. Besides, a lot of songs are in Konglish (Korean & English) so you can guess the context at times. I also heard that Korean is one of the easiest languages in the world. Let's see.

As for intercultural communication, at times I'm facing dilemmas that are better just to wait out than to ask for any help...

p) people

I've met some pretty awesome people during my time here. Thanks for that guys and girls. Sorry though, I'm not going to focus on praising you but on... learning. Yeaaaah. After two weeks here I see that groups of friends have pretty much formed. I wonder if a group development theory could be applied here. In any case, people have gained quite a lot of trust to each other as the descriptive data they have of the others is now at a sufficient level to estimate how people are. In just two weeks, not bad.

I'm also amazed by how many people you can gather at a certain point at a certain time as long as there's time for e.g. a party. The grapevine is all you need for that. I can relate this to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and The Tipping Point. They're two book about psychology, especially about groups and intuition. Very empirical too, i.e. not boring.

Everytime you try to change something or adapt anything new you will need to put energy into it, but more often than not it's totally worth it. Now I don't know if this appears to you as obvious, but what I've discovered is that to most people just don't think about it in their everyday life. Let's say that you're interested in reading someone's blog but "there's no time" or "I'll do it tomorrow" or "it's too long". Yeah, it takes energy. Here's something that could help you relate to how complicated (or simple or whatever you want to call it) psychology (the way we think) is.

Keeping an open mind has been the most important thing here so far. I'm happy to say that I'm a much better people person than e.g. at the same time last year thanks to having gained experience of working with various types of personalities. What is the person passionate about? That's the first thing I try to keep in mind when getting to know someone.

I have wondered if I should create explicit knowledge of some structured way of getting to know people. It could help me out at times when my less social personality takes charge. At the moment I'm just trying to find out what's the driving factor for any person. People are just people, driven by something that has played a key role in their development. Quite basic, but sometimes... not that easy, huh? I believe you'd understand my way of thinking better if you knew my background better.

Talking about explicit knowledge, there's something very basic we tend to forget when communicating to others. Instead of focusing on the viewpoint of the receiving person of communication we often try to talk as if both the people knew the same things. Now if that there the case there wouldn't be any need for communication! Rather than doing that we should keep in mind that the meaning of any given word varies depending on a person's background. If someone hasn't seen a cat in their life it's very unlikely that they're interested in a lonely cat lady's pets' names. Note to self: this could be worked into a communication workshop.

It's good to have some safe net however. You never know how you react to a culture. For example I couldn't take army spirit during my whole stay here. Thus it's good to be an AIESECer. :) It is very easy to network with colleagues pretty much everywhere. A single small specific common factor, being an AIESECer, makes such a huge difference. The culture connects similar-minded people and it does it well. Let's see if I'll my future will have anything to do with AIESEC in Korea.

c) cultures

As a westerner, as a Finnish male, I figure I'm in a good spot when it comes to the hierachy here. Now I've been thinking about the difference between Korean culture and e.g. the US. My conclusion is that wherever you should go there always is a hierarchy. In the latter country the hierarchy is informal, though. People are not equal because little-regulated capitalism leads to very unlevel starting points for the citizens.

Both the formal and informal ones have their pros and cons as I said last time. Politeness is the number one thing to remember when dealing with any stranger. I like that. It gives me a warm feeling of existing. The downside is that you can't really criticize professors or sleep during a class. This disables open discussion and possibilities for change.

If I were a girl I guess it wouldn't be as easy to climb a corporate ladder here, but in my opinion that applies pretty much everywhere. Cultures set expectations. For example, see a link about learned helplessness.

People here tend to live at their parents well after starting to study at a university. Probably a result of very expensive housing costs and traditions. I think this in turn has caused some lack of self-leadership, because I still feel that a lot of things could be done a lot better if people just gave more thought to them. In the everyday life, at work, with others. People don't seem to be very apt to make any decisions because of the hierarchy.

I guess it's also a social norm not to stay out a whole night. There are love hotels for this specific purpose. I brought up norms because every culture has them, written or unspoken. But they exist everywhere. I believe I have at least some tacit knowledge of how to break them in a way that actually isn't perceived badly by others. You can't avoid trial and error of course, but that's life. This is achieved by humor, and in my opinion there's real potential in using norms as a way of gaining the others' attention because they're something we all have knowledge of and something we don't necessarily like.

Not everything here is about making big profits. That's just the multinational companies. I like the way many companies actually serve the needs of a customer and thus gain profit rather than the mentality of making profit by satisfying the needs of customers. There's a big difference in which way the company approaches its operations. I wonder if I was able to communicate it properly.

A few words about 2. Feel and 3. Do

I'll be writing more about these two in my next text. I hope that I'll also learn to be a bit more efficient with writing this stuff as I rehearse. It's taking quite a lot of free time at the moment, just like the exchange student activities (a lot to do!). I also need some time just for myself just to clear my head. Maybe buying a laptop will fix the situation. I have a lot of pictures from here, the most official of which will probably start popping up here at some point too.

Loppu/fin

In the p) section of this text I gave you a link to a video which, if you spent 15 minutes watching it, could have profound effects on the way you think. But I'm interested in knowing how you felt when reading that there's a video about psychology. Did you watch the video? Chances are it was something new to you and I want to know how people feel when learning something new.

If you're interested, here's half an hour of more good stuff I went through today.

Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers
Ask the Coach
Attitude Reflects Leadership

Later