Hugh and Jongdae talk about why Korean students can be under so much stress. They were both lucky to not feel too much pressure from their parents, but many other students are not as fortunate as can be seen by the high suicide rate. This type of pressure is a big problem in Korea. Not only because of the pressure but the narrow life that parents push their children into doesn’t guarantee happiness.

A difference between the Korean system and the Australian system that I have seen has been that the Korean system puts the most stress on high school students with their one exam for getting into a good university, once in uni they can relax a bit. In Australia, while highschool can be stressful, it’s not the only way to get into university and there is not as much stress to get into a certain uni, instead the stress comes once in university where you can be marked harshly and so much is expected of you. I know many Korean students (who go to Australia for uni) have been shocked at how harshly they were marked in Australia because they thought the hard thing was getting into uni, not completing it.

In Korea there is a lot of talk about which university someone went to, rather than what they actually studied… it’s something that contributes to highschool student’s stress about their exam because all the pressure is about getting into the few ‘top’ universities.

While in Seoul we’ve been working as normal so we don’t actually get to go out that often. If I vlogged everyday it would be just boring footage of us working on laptops haha. On this day we went and filmed in the Eat Your Kimchi studio as Simon and Martina very nicely let us use it and we got to do some stuff in Hongedae.