The Office of Admissions and Career Paths in CALS of SNU, located on the second-floor lobby of Building 200, operates programs to develop student skills—both for undergraduate and graduate students—and conducts surveys and analyses to ensure satisfactory campus life and to aid in skill development. In addition, it also runs field trips and camps for prospective CALS students. The student press met with Lim Jung-hoon, an administrator at the Office of Admissions and Career Paths, to ask him about the problems that students are facing due to the changes in the job market amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although the reduction of offline classes due to COVID-19 made it difficult for Lim to meet with students in-person to hear their stories, he expects the uncertainty of the future to be one of their main concerns. Recent trends in the job market involve the smaller size of corporate recruitment as one of the biggest changes, and there is also uncertainty over the method and timing of recruitment, which is a cause for concern for many undergraduates going into the job market.

Some CALS programs also had to changes due to COVID-19, and a major example of such a change is the cancellation of study abroad programs—including CALS Global Challenger Program, CALS foreign internship program, and program for the support of graduate students in foreign academic conference presentations—for two consecutive years of 2020 and 2021. Although students now have limited opportunities to study in a new environment of foreign countries, Lim believes that they still have ample opportunities for developing their skills through newly-introduced or expanded programs for domestic or on-campus activities.

Aside from programs for current undergraduate students, all field trip events for prospective students in middle and high schools were suspended due to COVID-19. There have been some intermittent inquiries about possible invitations from many middle and high schools, but they could not be accommodated because of the pandemic—instead, the CALS student PR group CALSIAN is running online publicity events.

Written by Kim Se-yeong and Lee Gyeong-mi 
Student Press of College of Agriculture and Life Sciences