In this blog post, we’ll show you how to make your creative ideas more than just claims in your R&D personal statement, and how to present them convincingly with concrete experiences and logic.
Passion and relevant experience
“How I traveled to a foreign country for free”
I’ve loved ‘challenges’ since I was a kid, because I like the achievements that come to me after a challenge. In my opinion, challenges are for good, not bad. Because I think that if you take on a challenge and succeed, the rewards come with the success, and if you take on a challenge and fail, the reward is bigger than the challenge, it’s an experience that makes you rethink your life and realize what you’re lacking. So I like challenges, and since middle school, I’ve been participating in various debate and writing competitions, winning awards and doing well.
The good thing about coming to college is that the rewards are big. The area I challenged myself the hardest was in the area of ‘traveling abroad’. The idea is that if you show your passion, in return, they will send you on an all-expenses-paid trip abroad to nurture your passion. This seemed like a challenge worthy of my life, and as a result, I was able to travel to Turkey and Istanbul, as well as get the opportunity to go to Japan for an industrial placement. I write down these two trips as passion experiences not just because they were free, but because I learned so much from them. First of all, I realized how small a world I was living in. I could have experienced so many things, so many books, so many objects, but I felt things that I wouldn’t have known without traveling abroad. I also realized what I needed to do. I felt that I needed to develop something new, not just follow the domestic market, so I thought about joining LG Electronics’ R&D field from then on. I would like to show you the strength to come up with new ideas and pursue them through the constant challenges I have faced and the experiences I have gained. I wish you well.
Achievements
“Free tutoring started with 2 people, grew to 30 people”
I always wanted to do volunteer work when I entered college because something I learned from a TED talk stuck in my head. It was about the number of people in the world who go to college. In that talk, I learned a shocking fact: only 1% of the world’s population is able to go to college. I realized then that I wanted to serve as someone who had the good fortune of being able to go to college and have what the 99% who couldn’t go to college wanted to have, no matter how much they wanted to, because of family circumstances or social prejudice. So the first thing I did a year after I started college was go to a church plant and sign up to tutor for free. At first, only two people came because I said it was free, so I started teaching them my own study know-how and background that they wouldn’t have taught me at the academy. I taught them how to study, not how to study, not how to write, but how to really think. And then it started to go viral and people started coming. As the number of people grew, so did the number of people who came to volunteer, and eventually it became a nice, supportive group of people. Now I’ve passed it on to my college friends, and I occasionally go to check up on them or bring them bread or sweets for encouragement, but every time I see them, I feel a pang of pride, and most of all, I’m overwhelmed with joy that the little activity I started has continued to this day.
Failure Experience
“Take care of the most important things first”
I had one experience where I failed in a really ridiculous way. It was when I was president of my department and we were organizing a college bar. We had a great team, the juniors were all on board, and the seniors always had my back. We organized some groundbreaking events, and we even planned a special event to celebrate the return of our seniors, which is like homecoming day in Korea. We also organized a ceremony to deliver flowers to our teachers, and we took on the challenge of presenting and competing to pass these plans to the school and get the budget. But in our excitement, we forgot the most important thing, and that was the venue. We should have been the first to grab a venue on campus, but we didn’t, and other departments and clubs snatched up all the good spots first, so we had to settle for a small venue, alternating between classrooms and playgrounds. Luckily, the seniors and teachers saw it as a fun hiccup and it ended happily, but if this was my job and it was an event that I was planning, it would be horrible to think about. So I learned from this experience how to plan and execute, how to plan ahead and do things one step at a time without missing anything.
Personality strengths and weaknesses
“Study for sure, work for sure, have fun for sure”
The strength of my personality is that it is labeled as ‘sure’. When it comes to studying, I make sure to study. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the amount of studying and let it pile up and don’t do it or run away from it. I have friends who don’t study well for exams and would rather play than study, and I have friends who use the dreaded “fake it till you make it” approach to studying. But I’m a very disciplined student. Ever since I learned how to make a plan, I study by making a plan and strictly sticking to it, one by one. That’s how I was able to master English and Japanese in two months. Also, I’m very sure of my work. I worked a lot of part-time jobs early on, and when I started a job, I always did it as if it was something I had to do. Even when I was a cram school instructor, I took care of the children one by one, and I didn’t just teach them to study, but I also took responsibility for cleaning the cram school and managing the students, so the director of the place where I worked always believed in me because I was good at doing things without being told, and later he even entrusted me with managing money and things. Also, I’m definitely fun when I’m having fun. I don’t think you shouldn’t have fun in life, because I think if life is going to be hard anyway, you should go through it having fun, so I’m definitely a fun person when I’m playing and definitely a social person when I’m socializing.
The downside of my personality is that I’m definitely good at making connections and breaking them, and that can be a good way to handle things, but sometimes I can be judged as cold. As I learn to work and learn company life, I will become a person who handles things well.
Future plans
“Innovation LG, and me at the center of it!”
I always draw the future in my head. In my head, I’m in the middle of an innovative LG. I’m still new, but I’m confident that I can bring the technology and research and development that will revolutionize LG once again. I’m looking forward to showcasing my capabilities at LG, the place that holds the world, the place that grows the world. I wish you all the best.
