President Lee Kwang-hyung of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology said “KAIST has spearheaded the development of Korea’s science and education, and in 2013, we’ll redouble efforts to come closer to the goal of being a global top 10 university.”
“Last year, our university did not stop spearheading creating global values and innovation for human beings’ happiness and prosperity amid a situation of many activities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” President Lee said.
He said KAIST implemented the “QAIST” in 2022, a new student culture competition initiative, in a full-fledged fashion and came a step closer to a dream of being a global top 10 university. Here is a look at the implementation of QAIST and its outcomes.
President Lee said, “The first comes ‘Education and Question’, designed to nurture gifted manpower who has questions.”
The university held ‘Color Your Project’, ‘KAIST Crazy Day Idea Contest’, and ‘KAIST Q-Day’ to spur its students’ curiosity and help them grow with big dreams in a creative culture and environment.
Prizes were awarded for creative ideas and expressions through the Color Your Project while an environment for spreading innovation, creative spirit and making questions was built through the Crazy Day and Q-Day, he said.
“The second comes “Advanced Research,” designed to define new issues and solve them,” President Lee said. “We’ve encouraged first research, not following others, and research to define new issues and solve them,” he said.
“The third thing is internationalization, designed to nurture global manpower and internationalization capabilities,” he said. “KAIST opened ‘NYU-KAIST Joint Campus’, designed to expand its excellent science and technology capabilities to the global stage and help its students and faculty members’ startups to enter the United States,” Lee said.
“We’ve made a first step to enter the United States to solve human beings’ common issues by combining New York University’s outstanding basic science and convergence research capabilities and KAIST’s science technology capabilities,” he said.
“The fourth thing is startup designed to create global values,” he said. “Innovation of startup support systems has made startup procedure simplified and convenient,” President Lee said.
In particular, he said continued institutional reform and introduction of support programs and the establishment of a one-stop service process have raised the number of faculty members’ startups from four in 2020 to nine in 2021 and 17 in 2022. KAIST inaugurated KAIST Holdings designed to create profit through technologies owned by KAIST, he said.
Lastly, President Lee spoke of the establishment of trust.
“We’ve made efforts to expand mutual understanding through serving and caring, and began to offer prizes for volunteer activities and emphasized volunteer activities to state and society,” he said.
“KAIST alumni working at Lotte Group, Enzynomics and Crafton as well as WooriByul’s research team have seen donation activities go well,” Lee said.
In order to create innovation momentum, President Lee suggested five things: spreading culture of keeping on questions, first research with no fear of failure, actualizing of NYU-KAIST Joint Campus, invigorating of startups, and making KAIST trusted by people.
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