Korean Education

     In the Takaki reading for Tuesday it was interesting to find how the very educated South koreans that immigrated into America were not able to use their degrees to its fullest extent. "Korean doctors often found themselves confined to inner city hospitals and shunned by white doctors, and they tended to be in specializations such as anesthesiology and radiology rather than the more prestigious areas like surgeries and internal medicine"(Takaki 439)
     Koreans are extremely well educated today as they were in the past. While I was in high school señor year, one of our foreign exchange students, Sien, gave a speech on her thesis paper comparing American education and that of Korea's education. It was fascinating to find out that koreans in high school would start school at 8 am and finish at 5 and then afterwards they will go to a night school from 7 to 11 at night and start it all back over again. They would work at school on weekends and summer and spring vacations were not heard of. Also if they even considered going to college they have to take a College Scholastic Ability test which pretty much determines your future on what job you will get and what kind of education you will receive. Sien put it as an extremely hard SAT test but even more than that. Where the SAT sets standards in America for college acceptance the College Scholastic Ability test will follow you through the rest of your careers.
     Sien said that her studies seem easy in America but the thing she said she struggled most with was English the learning and speaking of the language. Which seems like it is a struggle for koreans today as well as the ones Takaki wrote about in his book, "language barrier."