Pre-Departure Post

My name is Christal and this summer, I am attending KASC which stands for Korea-America Student Conference. The program is due largely in part by the ISC International Student Conference who raises most of the funds. Every year, students from all over American Universities and Korean Universities whether they are pursuing their bachelors, masters or doctorates participate in this program to help building up relations between the nations and the leaders of the world. Whats very unique, at least to me is that the program is entirely student run, so the students who participated last year, elected an executive board of students who helped create the program we are now following for this year. What is also wonderful about this program is that every year the program location differs in location from America and South Korea.

So this year is the programs second year running, but first time in South Korea. The program model is on based on JASC, Japanese American Student Conference, and people like former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and a former prime minister of Japan have participated in it. An Emissary from the American Embassy in SK remarked at our conference kick-off, that when you look at the list of people who have participated in JASC that it represents the who's who of US- Japanese relations, and that he is sure the same will happen with the tradition we are setting up at KASC.

Every year the program is split up into roundtables that revolve around our theme. This years theme is Advancing US-Korea Cooperation on International Affairs. From that theme pools together roundtable discussion on Shared Defence and National Security, Creating Global Citizens, Science and Technology and Creating Innovative Solutions, Media and Culture and is dynamic influence on the two nations as well as Going Green and Environmental Policy. I am on the roundtable for Going Green, and a requirement for this program before joining our friends in South Korea was to compile a 10-15 page paper on the topic of our choice concerning our roundtable. The topics that were introduced from our individual RT were astounding. People wrote about Cars and CO2, The Swamps of South Korea, Environmental Security and how countries who have a huge on standby military might be hurting the enviornment, and mine which mainly focused on how socioeconomics, politics, the economy, the business/market, technology, and the environment were are interrelated and we could not move forward collectively without the other and nor could we solve anything by creating policy like the Kyoto Protocol because I thought it would be better if we as people did the little things like turning off our light switch, and having a country take example and lead everyone else into the Green Age as opposed to forcing countries to follow a specific policy.