Tuesday, 6 January 2009

University Demystified

When everyone ask about my university, I am totally clueless, but when I ask some of my peers, they are as blank as I am. Some of us did attempt to decode what does our university slogan Top Ten & To The World is trying to convey. Perhaps it is one of the issue related to branding, which reminds me of some article published by the Korea Times a couple months ago, Korean Slogans Comical to Foreigners. Do read the whole series they covered, very interesting indeed.

Now, back to my university, there are way too many divisions, departments and other confusing and inconsistent terminology used here, making you really wonder how would you answer question posted by someone back home. Question like "What is your major?", "Which faculty are you from?" can be a multiple answer question. For us (to me at least), terms like department or division should be used in context referring to administrative department or division and not as a equivalent of faculty and major.

So, generally the mapping of term according to what I'm familiar with, would be division = faculty, department = major. Then another most common question is, what are the faculties available in my university. I did some checking, and found some fairly interesting information, and not to mention scattered and not organised, even for the Korean version. Why can't they just put such basic information into one?

Let me start off with graduation school (대학원 大學院), which has less "options"

With numerous other courses available for undergraduate and some with graduate courses, I just list down the name of faculty and college.

Except probably for the Korean name, the English name is inconsistently used. The main university website give one version, while the faculty website shows another. Terminology is also not standardised, they just jumble between faculty, department, division, school, college.... Is it that hard just to standardise it across?

No comments: