If you are a university student, are you planning to go abroad to study your major further or improve your foreign language proficiency? Or if you already graduated from university, have you ever dreamt of studying abroad?

In fact, University of Seoul (UOS) provides many chances to be exchange students or study dual degree courses, in partnership with foreign universities. Therefore, through Global UOS, I would like to introduce some exchange students or dual degree programs exclusively designed for several majors.

Since I major in Urban Sociology, I decided to find information about overseas study courses for Urban Sociology at UOS. Urban Sociology, like other majors at UOS, runs exchange students programs with over 30 universities abroad. Some overseas partner universities have exchange student programs especially for Urban Sciences, such as Rikktyo university, Fudan university, University of Cologne, and so on.

Department of Urban Sociology at UOS also has dual degree partnerships with foreign universities. SUNY Stony Brook, San Francisco State University (SFSU), University of Texas at Dallas and Miami University are the ones that offer dual degree courses for UOS students. However, since these universities do not have Urban Science majors, UOS students who major in Urban Sociology have to study Sociology instead.
Park Seul-ki (Urban Sociology, ‘05) is one of the students who pioneered dual degree courses for Urban Sociology at UOS. She studied in Meiji University (Japan) for one year as an exchange student and then moved to SFSU as a dual degree program participant.

She said that she got interested in studying abroad, since she wanted to “have a new challenge and study in a new environments.” She chose Japan as the first place to study abroad, since she grew up in Japan and can speak Japanese fluently. She attended lectures named ‘Seminars on Sociology,’ that were originally intended for senior students. Thanks to these lectures, she decided to move to another country to focus more on studying Sociology.

SFSU was the next place where she continued her overseas campus life. She recalled that studying in SFSU was “really hard to follow.” However, she said “My time in SFSU was also a beneficial experience.” It is because she could accumulate more professional knowledge regarding Sociology. Moreover, since there were many female professors in her major at SFSU, she could also begin to change her mind that “Sociology is not reserved for only men, and can be also conquered by women.” In addition, she added “Any student willing to study overseas should not hesitate to go out, but has to make a specific blueprint for overseas campus life.”

Like the case of Park Seul-ki, many Urban Sociology students at UOS have experienced overseas study courses. It is not confirmed, at the moment, whether or not all of them have gained crucial success from studying abroad. Nonetheless, overseas education courses for Urban Sociology at UOS show that it can be worth challenging yourself to study in an unfamiliar and new environment.