Korean Students vs International Students

Let me count. Since February this year, I've knocked out three courses in my UIUC iMBA

• MBA 597 – Program Foundations

• FIN 574 – Microeconomics for Business

• FIN 571 – Money and Banking

And here I am.

My first reaction was, honestly, just: this is impressive. It's a school built around systems, so getting started was easier than I expected—and for someone like me, who spent years at big corporations and portals staring at exactly this kind of infrastructure, it's genuinely something to admire. (The sheer number of separate sites they've wired together, from SSO to student account syncing... wow.)

The learning itself is way more self-directed than I thought. You check the syllabus through Canvas (basically an LMS), then work through a new module that opens every week.

Week to week, none of it looks like much. But here's the thing—it shows up like rent or a paycheck. Every single week. No skipping. So when you're doing this on top of a full-time job, there's a very specific moment that hits: ughhhh, when am I ever going to finish all this.

The actual studying happens on Coursera first, then a second pass on Canvas. Confused me a little at the start. Now I just breeze through it.

Assignments live on both Canvas and Coursera. Including group projects, of course. (Group. Projects.)

How do you even do group projects online? Well—we survived an entire COVID era. We came out stronger. We have video calls now.

Every group is different, but let me just tell you what I've felt so far.

I was born and raised in Korea, which means I'm a little obsessed with maximum efficiency per unit of time. Even if we only meet for a bit, it had better be the best possible use of that bit. And group work being group work, if everyone gathers with no clear agenda, the time just... evaporates. Because you need time to sync up, talk, listen, then think again.

Maybe that's why (pure headcanon here) most of the East Asian students leaned toward doing things document-first instead of over video. And I'm with them. Everyone solves their assigned piece, summarizes the key points, shares it, "ping me if you've got thoughts." Fast. Efficient.

But the Western approach seems to run on a different setting. (To be clear—I'm not saying their way is worse.)

On a genuinely multinational team, the Western folks tend to prefer just hopping on a call and figuring it out face-to-face, rather than pinning down a topic first and then meeting.

My first instinct was: if we meet without even deciding what we're going to talk about, isn't that kind of a waste? Why do it that way? Then I read a couple of papers recently, and it started to click.

How the East and the West see things differently

Turns out this is a pretty well-studied thing.

The anthropologist Edward Hall split cultures into "high-context" and "low-context." East Asia—Korea, Japan, China—is the textbook high-context culture: a lot gets understood through context and relationships without everything being spelled out. Low-context cultures like the US and Western Europe prefer it all explicit, direct, said out loud.

And here's the fun twist. You'd assume the more relationship-oriented East would be the one insisting on face time—but in actual collaboration, it flips. High-context cultures run on an unspoken "you already get it, right?", so people are fine going off, doing their part, and just sharing the result. Low-context cultures have to make everything explicit through words, which naturally becomes "let's just get on a call and hash it out."

Richard Nisbett's The Geography of Thought points at something adjacent. East Asians tend toward holistic thinking—taking in the whole field and the relationships inside it—while Westerners lean analytic, isolating a single object and breaking it down. (That one's more about perception than meeting etiquette, but you can see the shape of it.)

So these tiny differences in how we're wired end up shaping how we communicate. For someone who's only ever lived in Korea, that was a genuinely fascinating little anomaly to bump into. Not a question of who's right—just the quiet realization that we've been configured a bit differently.

Anyway. Three courses down. Back to the module that's already sitting there waiting for me.