Winter vacation is over, and now it is time to go back to school. Yet there will obviously be some students who blame themselves for not having spent their vacations meaningfully. If you feel this way, there’s no reason to feel regret anymore: there is a solution, and it is called Junior CoREP. I guarantee you won’t waste your next vacation.

Have you seen Junior CoREP posters around the university? Have you heard about Junior CoREP? You can see its promotion before going on vacation. Junior CoREP takes place during both summer and winter vacations, over eight weeks. It aims to turn freshmen and sophomores into job experts. Foreign students can also apply for this program if they speak Korean.

Let me ask you some questions: Do you know what you enjoy? Do you know what you are good at? Do you know what you want to do? Do you know how to present your experiences, your qualifications, or yourself? Are you confident you can establish career-related plans and goals, and then also practice them? If you cannot answer these questions correctly, you should apply to Junior CoREP. The program will help you prepare a career of your choice, understand how to get a job, create a career portfolio through both team and individual activities, and receive professional mentoring (coaching / counsel) from CoREP mentors.

Junior CoREP does not only involve team projects ― it also sees students undertake individual assignments through which they can discover their own career paths and make plans about what they want to do professionally. The goal is to provide a clear understanding of careers and how to plan them out through several detailed and precise personal analyses, making choices suitable for the individual’s and personalized career plan.
Through a written reflexive analysis, individuals find their own careers, understand their majors, document their target careers, plan how to get there, declare a vision of the future, and write both a book report and an editorial arrangement, all of which enables them to understand in detail how they can achieve their dreams. Though individual assignments can be tiresome, they are useful tools that help you determine what you need to correctly plan for your career.

Junior CoREP has a detailed schedule. The program usually meets two to three times a week and completes a single big project. Teams can meet more than three times if necessary. There are also necessary educational aspects involved in this program. For example, how to find careers and businesses, how to write reports and word program reports, how to make videos using certain programs for making promotional purposes, and how to make a PowerPoint presentation and present it. The highlight of this program is meeting with Junior CoREP seniors who already have jobs ― an event called HARMONY DAY. With the help of seniors’ advice, Junior CoREP teams learn about corporate environments and what to do to progress certain careers. You can also learn about the preparatory process that comes before acquiring a job, such as what qualifications and certifications are necessary, what extra-curricular activities are useful, and how you can prepare for a specific job or an internship. I think it is a good opportunity to understand corporate environments and acquire information related to certain careers.

It was really hard and I didn’t know what to do during all of Junior CoREP, but I definitely got something out of it. It’s short, but given the length of winter vacation, it was meaningful since I was able to make plans for my future and I decided to be active in college life being because of the program. Above all, it is a good way to spend vacation meaningfully, without wasting time, and to get career- and job-related advice ― so apply for the program.

Sae-Yoon Kim
The Kookmin Review Reporter
sayun09@naver.com