WINDSOR –– St. Joseph’s Catholic High School is hosting a group of 10 international exchange students from Suwon, South Korea for four weeks. Jane Lee (Korean: Lee Subin) and Dongyoon Kim represented the group for an interview with Laser News.
(From left to right; Jane Lee, and Dongyoon Kim. Photo by Mia Portelance)
They attend Suwon Information Science High School in Suwon, the capital city of Gyeonggi Province in Northwestern South Korea, and are in their final year of high school.
Their school offers an exchange program with a different Canadian city each year, and this year, it happened to be Windsor. In 2017, students from their high school attended schools in Toronto.
Jane, Dongyoon, and the rest of their friends who are in the exchange program will be in Canada for a total of 3 months. They will be experiencing the daily routine of a typical senior high school student in Windsor for a month, then they will be out of school for the next month, and will end their stay with a co-op program with Computer for Kids until the end of their program.
Upon the first two weeks of their stay at St. Joe’s, they already notice the conspicuous difference between their high school, and ours.
In Suwon Information Science High School, Jane and Dongyoon have 7 classes for the whole school year, with each class being 50 minutes each. Their day starts at 9 o’clock in the morning, and ends at 5 o’clock at night. Additionally, both of them attend after-school classes for further studying and tend to their homework and/or test preparations.
At St. Joe’s, their group will only be taking on a 7 hour school day and 4 classes with no after-school activities. Jane and Dongyoon have most of their classes together, which were precisely chosen to be aligned with the careers they would like to pursue. Jane anticipates a career in computer engineering, and Dongyoon would like to work in the networking field.