In this blog post, we’ll show you how to incorporate your interest in digital technology into your motivation for applying to Media Science. Turn your interest into a compelling strength.
Write about your academic experiences and impressions
Internet High School, Commerce Major
I majored in internet commerce while attending an internet high school in Chungnam, South Korea. At first, my grades were not good enough, so I went to an internet high school with relatively lower entrance examination scores than liberal arts high schools. However, when I started studying commerce, I realized that it suited my aptitude well and that I should be a person who pioneers for my future without being concerned about grades. Therefore, I studied to become a person who can skillfully do internet commerce by acquiring the theory and practice of e-commerce through the curriculum of the department, and I always actively participated in classes.
The specific course contents included computerized accounting, network construction, e-commerce, internet shop management, and marketing and advertising. Among them, I often used computers and spent a lot of time in the PC workshop to acquire basic information technology for network construction. Although I was able to handle computers at a similar level to my peers, I had to learn a lot of new skills related to actual utilization. In particular, I developed my skills in creating and managing homepages, creating Excel and presentations, etc. through multiple practices. Although marketing and advertising subjects were not specifically related to the utilization of the Internet, I studied them carefully because they were related to the keywords of medium and media.
In the second year of high school, I deepened my understanding of the major courses and challenged myself with related certifications that reflected these skills. First, I obtained the Internet commerce operator certification individually and studied in a team to obtain the e-commerce manager and information equipment operator certifications. At that time, my friends who were going to go into the field of network engineering got together to prepare for the certifications. In addition, I obtained the information searcher and information processing technician certifications through the school’s preparation course and received an exemplary award as the student who obtained the most certifications in my grade.
Write about your key extracurricular activities and impressions
Three levels of learning in information technology clubs
As part of the curriculum, I was required to spend two hours of my last class on Friday in a club as part of the curriculum, so participating in a club was mandatory. I joined the Information Technology Club out of five different clubs. Our club had an organized three-step learning process that took us from learning networking skills to actually creating content, so I took advantage of this process to become a growing network professional.
First of all, when I joined the club in my freshman year, I learned basic information technology. The teacher in charge of the club, an information computer teacher, taught the class himself, and when necessary, seniors would join the class for guidance and demonstration of practical tasks. The classmates who joined the club worked as a group, and the specific contents of the class were document processing, databases, spreadsheets, and presentations as working skills. Since we were in a single group, it was helpful to have a lot of people to ask if I was lacking or didn’t know something, and there were also competitive assignments for each group, so we collaborated with each other to create the assignments, and we had a synergistic effect by discussing the finalization.
Over the course of the year, I improved my basic network management skills, database-related programming skills, and programming language skills. In the second year, I completed the “Information Culture and Ethics School Program” as the second stage of my studies. This course was a moral learning process necessary for the information age, and I listened carefully because I knew that I would be creating content with the content I learned. The topics of study included encounters in cyberspace, virtual self and real self, ethical issues in a ubiquitous society, the introduction of the game shutdown system, personal information protection and human rights issues online, the effect of cultural diffusion in cyberspace, the need to use e-commerce correctly, and the need to prevent cybercrimes such as hacking.
In the second semester of our second year, we took what we had learned and developed our own educational content on information ethics by referring to the materials provided by the Smart Information Culture Portal in the third semester. We took it seriously because the creation of educational flashes was conducted in the form of a contest, and the best ones were adopted by the Smart Information Culture Portal and awarded cash prizes. We covered the cyber human rights violations and privacy issues that impressed us the most from the content we learned, and utilized JavaScript and Flash to create a UCC in the form of a short advertisement. Although our work was not adopted, we developed a lot in terms of teamwork, and we could feel the reward of creating new cultural content with the skills we learned and acquired.
Examples of Caring, Sharing, and Cooperation and what we learned
Resolving conflict within the team
When I was in high school, there were about eight classes in the school, of which there were six male classes. The six male classes were very competitive in sports. We usually tried to settle the ball games in PE class, and there was a lot of inter-class rivalry during the athletic competitions. We competed in three sports: soccer, baseball, and basketball. As the competition progressed, points were awarded for each sport, and our goal was to add them up and ultimately become the number one class.
But along the way, conflicts arose. Our class was strong in soccer and basketball and weak in baseball. We had a few guys in the lineup who were taller, had good shots, and had good strength or endurance, but relatively few of us had good hitting or running skills, which are necessary for baseball. I was the captain of the basketball team and the goalie of the soccer team because I was in good physical condition and tall, so I encouraged my teammates to do their best in soccer and basketball, but in baseball, I was eliminated from the preliminary rounds. As a result, fewer friends wanted to join the baseball team and there were conflicts within the team.
In addition, the team members were criticized by their classmates when they failed to qualify, so they blamed each other and fights escalated. When it became clear that it was because someone wasn’t good enough, I tried to calm them down by saying that it’s important to do your best, not to be too competitive in athletics, and convinced them to try other sports instead of baseball. By telling them that we can’t win everything, and that we should play baseball lightly as a compromise, I soothed their hurt feelings and allowed them to focus on their other sports. My efforts as captain paid off because my friends focused on their other sports, and I was in a position to manage the conflict to achieve good results.
