On Sunday, July 17, the University of Utah’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering welcomed 12 freshman and sophomore students from the University of Utah Asia Campus in South Korea who are visiting our campus in Salt Lake City.
This annual trip is organized to give U Asia Campus students the opportunity to learn about the scope of undergraduate research opportunities in the ECE department by meeting faculty on our campus and touring research labs. The program also helps students to develop their interests and initiate meaningful interactions with professors they may have classes with in the future.
The visiting students included Inhyup Lee, Da Kyung Kang, Subin Kim, Gyungho Min, Donggeon Kim, Seungju Kim, Taehoon Kim, Seungwon Kim, Hayoung Im, Claire Park, Jeeeun Ahn, and Jinseo Park.
The two-week visit was sponsored in collaboration with the U Asia Campus undergraduate research program and required that each student submit an essay detailing their experience in addition to developing an undergraduate research plan. Last year, only five students from the U Asia campus made the long flight to Salt Lake City. The ECE department was thrilled to host more than double the number of students this year and hopes to see the program continue to grow in the years to come.
During their time here, the students met with 16 faculty members, toured 15 laboratories, one local company, the Utah Nanofabrication Facility, and the University of Utah Hospital. This year’s program chair was ECE professor Hanseup Kim, who hosted a workshop on nanotechnology and microdevices.
For several of the students, the experience reinforced their current interests and passions.
“It was great to meet professors here – I never thought there were so many professors in our department. The field I’m interested in is actually both computer engineering and neuro and brain science, and I hadn’t thought there were actually professors that were researching and studying this field I’m interested in,” said sophomore Inhyup Lee. “It was really helpful to learn what kind of projects are going on and what kind of research there is here at the U of U.”
Other students who came to the program unsure of their exact paths were excited to have more clarity and direction going forward. “Before coming to this summer program, I had difficulty choosing my major,” says freshman Hayoung Im. “This program helped me in many ways. I was able to hear the explanation [of each major] directly from the professors on the main campus and know what kind of research they did and how the content I would learn was used. Through these many explanations and visits to labs, I found out that I am interested in semiconductors and robotics.”
In addition to meeting with faculty and visiting labs, students toured the Salt Lake campus and had the opportunity to explore some of northern Utah’s most iconic attractions. The group spent a weekend visiting places such as Thanksgiving Point, American Fork Canyon, the Bonneville Salt Flats, Dinosaur Island, and the “world’s first KFC”.
U Asia Campus students have access to baccalaureate programs in electrical engineering and computer engineering. These four-year undergraduate programs have the same comprehensive and rigorous courses as their Utah counterparts, including classes in Electromagnetics & Transmission Lines, Embedded Systems, Engineering Probability & Statistics, and Digital System Design. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department chair Florian Solzbacher says this is the start of a growing curricular offering in ECE at the U’s Asia Campus.
U Asia Campus students study at the Incheon Global Campus for three years before spending their final year at the Salt Lake City campus. This program provides those students early access and insight into their education. Any U Asia Campus student enrolled in the ECE department can apply to participate in this summer program. Similarly, Salt Lake City students can also apply to spend a semester abroad at the U Asia Campus.
To see a video about their tours and trips around Northern Utah, see below.