gmtPLUS09 | live from Seoul

My gf works at one of those boutique financial services consulting firms. The top 1% of this year’s freshmen recruiting class consists of only females. “What happened to all the guys,” I asked?

Instead of studying and working toward college graduation, they are doing one or both of the following:

• Playing MMORPG games¹ in dimly lit, smoky PC rooms
• Dating

I wondered to myself how dating can have adverse effects on the GPA. That was later answered. Dating and the opportunities for sex can be all to distracting when all they’ve done thus far in life has been dedicated to getting into college and appeasing their parents.

Thus, slacking in college is not a big deal in Korea. Most of all academic study has been completed by the time they graduate high school. Getting into college is the true battle, and everything including college graduation is pretty much down hill after that. You will find high schoolers cramming and studying like clockwork vying for admission into one of the SKY² schools. Their entire lives will be defined by the results of the dreaded college entrance exam.

Ladies, if you want to torpedo the guy sitting at top of the class, date him.

1. Starcraft, Warcraft, Lineage↩
2. Seoul National U., Korea U., Yonsei U.↩

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 3:13 am and is filed under Seoul Searching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.