off to SNU

Today, I'll be visiting Seoul National University's Department of English Language Education. The only address I have for the department is rather vague. It's not the sort of thing that would be helpful to a taxi driver:

Department of English Language Education
Seoul National University
Seoul, 151-748, Korea

Luckily, the ad for the job in question has an office phone number, so my plan is to take the subway down to Sadang Station, which is fairly close to SNU, then grab a taxi from there to make the rest of the trip. (SNU has its own subway stop, but training all the way there, then taking a taxi, would be problematic in that I'd have no time margin to allow for taxi-related confusion. From Sadang, at least, I can head generally SNU-ward, calling the relevant campus office at my leisure to get directions.)

While I'm on SNU's campus, I'll be lunching with the world-famous Holden Beck. That ought to be fun. Holden passes himself off as a major alcoholic, but he's obviously sober enough to hold down a decent teaching job at SNU. I'll have questions for him about the book he's been working on. You can read his excellent blog here.

Shoving off in 45 minutes. It's going to be a long subway ride down south.


UPDATE: I just called the relevant SNU office and talked for a few minutes with the nice lady who answered the phone. I initially asked her for directions to the appropriate building on campus. She gave them to me, then asked why I was coming. I told her that I hadn't had any word from SNU about my application, so I was coming in person to verify. "Oh, you don't need to do that," she said, switching to bureaucrat mode in an effort to minimize actual human contact and maximize depersonalization. "Do we have your forms on file?" I told her my full name; she had trouble looking my paperwork up until I used "Kevin Kim," the name I normally go by in Korea. "Well, we've got your paperwork and everything seems fine," she said. "We haven't finished our review process yet since the application deadline was May 3. We'll inform you if we want you for an interview." Her utterance seemed rather final. I told her that, if I were to be interviewed, I would like to have the interview before I left Korea. She said that Skype interviews were also possible, so I suppose we'll see what happens. The upshot is that I'm still off to SNU, but now it's only to lunch with Holden.


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