1. Study
Studying in South Korea is a pretty good opportunity to learn information technology and experience it. Many of the Engineering departments of Universities are offering scholarships for research students here. Also, there are many outstanding institutions around world like SNU (Seoul National University), KAIST, POSTECH, Yonsei University, Korea University, Hanyang University etc.. If you are considering doing your research degree in Korea, it would be a good place for you.
Living in Seoul, information technologies are immersed into everywhere and facilitating daily lives. Also, there are many international academic and industrial conferences taking place, which provides a good chance to participate in.
2. Transportation
One of the most impressive parts of daily lives in South Korea is definitely transportation. Usually, you could reach everywhere by subway and public bus. In addition, there are always three friendly instruction languages including Korean, English and Chinese which could provide convenience instructions for traveling as well.
Even the transportation is quite convenient, there are too many people and so overcrowded. There are over 10 million people living in Seoul, which almost is 20% of the whole Country. Because of that, the subway is extremely packed with people and overcrowded during rush hour.
3. Work
As you can see from the picture below, South Korea is the country with 400 more working hours than the average of OECD.
Additionally, since all men have to go military service over 2 years, they have rigid structures and hierarchy within the working places as well. The hierarchy is very critical if you are working in Korea. A byproduct of such rigid corporate structures is constant and unnecessary reporting to senior directors, as soldiers to a superior officer.
Too much focus on report making... It's sometimes need many days to finish up a report with fancy-look images, forms and words in a formal meeting or for directors. The approval from middle level approvals will also take time before the report would be delivered to the final decision maker. It enforces employees spend a ridiculous amount of time to move on to the next tasks.
They like drinking and they believe in that this is also an important part of work, which means, they will come to work on time (around 7:00AM) even they had a crazy drinking night yesterday over 12:00PM...
It's tough working in Korea, but maybe this is one of the most important reasons with different culture that the small country could have big multinational companies like SAMSUNG, Hyundai Motor Group and so on...
4. Service
I think if you've visited Korea before, you would certainly be impressed by the kind service attitude here. One typical example is the Incheon Airport which has been ranked top 1 over 9 consecutive years in the Airport Service Quality conducted by ACI:Airports Council International. Furthermore, the delivery service is so quick and convenient that you could almost order anything through online shopping. They will deliver the stuff you've ordered within a few days.
There are majority of stores and shops open at midnight. You could enjoy night life over even 12:00PM and you will easily find out that it's still very crowded out there.
5. Korea, The impossible country
There's a book written by Daniel Tudor, who is a journalist born in Manchester and live in Korea for decades. Korea, The impossible country has two meanings with the word "impossible", one is representing that Korea made a great success over their history within a short time, the other meaning is that even they overcame and achieved a lot until now, but they still cannot enjoy themselves and because of a lot of stress over never ending competitions and workloads. He thought it's time to stop competition and enjoy life by having work and life balance and proud of the outstanding country they made.
I've been almost in Korea over 5 years and found that they are absolutely making a lot of money through manufacturing, K-Pop, game industries and IT industries. Even sometimes it looks like they are workaholics and formed bad effect during the rapid developing process, there's no doubt about the success and progress they've made are so impressive compare to any other countries. The only thing to do is maybe find out how to develop and lead the country in a healthier and lasting way to make people more comfortable and make the country become more salubrious spot around the world with high productivity as well.
