Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology - KAIST (reviews)

I did my undergrad in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science here, graduated in 2022.

Pros: good research, great facilities, good programmes, completely free tuition, inexpensive accommodation + allowance, flexibility in course choice, wide material coverage, all pros of Korea (e.g. safety, convenient travelling)

Cons: strict attendance, some lectures of poor quality, competition and relative grading, hard to make local friends/connections, all cons of Korea (e.g. no English whatsoever outside campus)

The school is very much research-oriented, with lots and lots of great resources and facilities to do research. So if you want to do a research graduate or post-graduate course here and you like a particular programme, this is definitely a good place for you.

That said, most profs are good researches, not necessarily good educators. University-wide policy is that every course essential for degree completion is taught in English. Thus, with a few exceptions in Humanities, and some very obscure courses, you won’t have to learn Korean. The professors had to learn English though. And despite that most of them have lived for a certain period of time in the US, some really struggle to teach in English. In worst cases it will come down to the professor simply reading the slides in the lecture. Couple that with a strict attendance policy, you get a pure torture. On a positive note, most of the newly coming young profs are not like that.

Lab/research experience is also very different across different professors. Some are complete grind where you only do what professor tells you to do, and end up working 55+ hours a week. Some are nice and cheerful productive environments where you can even have your name on the authors list of couple papers being an undergrad, and enjoy the research process throughout.

The courses choice is wide and the programme is really flexible about what you do. This is especially true for larger departments like the School of Electrical Engineering – which is in fact, called “School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering” in Korean, and I don’t even know why the word Electrical is even there – you won’t get to learn anything like High Power Electrics. Depending on a course, the amount of theory and hands-on differs significantly from completely theoretical courses to labs with almost zero theory taught. Overall, I would like to get slightly more hands-on experience, but it was alright. The material coverage is on a very good balance in between breadth and depth. Perhaps, it’s trying to get both breadth and depth, which results in a relatively high workload.

And this high workload is something that is partly fuelled by all grading being done relatively. For example, to get an A, you don’t have to score 90% – you have to be roughly above avg + 1 stddev of the normalised score distribution in your group. This encourages some instructors and assistants to either make the workload extremely high, or make the exams extremely difficult just for the sake of difficulty, or both. Yet, if you don’t care too much about your grades, but still keep studying, it’s hard to fail a particular course.

Social life is something that is difficult to have in KAIST if you are an international student. 90% of the students are Korean, and most of them feel shy to/don’t really want to reach out to international students. Reaching out to those people yourself will rarely help. Out of the remaining students most are not too much into socialising. What are the chances that you’ll like the remaining few? Most clubs are also primarily Korean with all their activities conducted in Korean. Should be somewhat easier if you speak Korean, but not necessarily as easy as it would be elsewhere in the world.

Personally, the first reason why I chose to study in Korea was kaist. I liked all benefits it offered – full tuition, monthly scholarships, other facilities. There are many different student clubs, some activities and festivals. However, if you should not expect too much if you are a foreigner who doesn’t speak Korean. You will luck social experience, since in most cases all those activities are conducted in national language.
So if your first priority is uni ranking and studies and you don’t mind spending most of your time in library, then kaist is a great choice.

In general, the program is good, but it is research-oriented. This means that the main focus will be on your research and your life will depend on the lab you will be assigned to. There are various courses, but usually, professors don’t pressure graduate students as they say that the main goal of a graduate student is doing research. And as it is an Asian country, in some labs workload and expected working hours can be crazy. So I would recommend choosing your lab wisely and asking people around about the professor and lab atmosphere, because you will spend most of your time here (you have working hours like from 9 am till 6 pm). The international community might not be as big as in the US, but it’s becoming better. I enjoy my social life here a lot. And if you like living in busy cities, Daejeon might not be your option, it’s mostly very chill.

The best thing about KAIST is academic freedom: you make your own schedule and you are free to change departments and double major. I am double majoring with CS and it is a great choice to have opportunities both in academia and industry. Research is also strong. Competition is too tough and you usually can forget about your life for the 4 months during the semester. But I did learn a lot, and given generous financial aid (0 tuition and about 300 USD monthly allowance plus part time job opportunities), it’s more than I could realistically ask for or expect. You won’t regret it, but my advice is to play it safe and do something in CS related anyway, since it’s hard to find a job in other fields right after graduation