How did you end up in this field? That was the kind of question students brought to the professors at the 2025 Seoul Research Program (SRP) dinner. Some were seated beside faculty who didn't teach their class, and what they wanted to hear about was less the subject than the path each professor had taken to it.
Why a dinner?
Few high school students have their major fully figured out, and that is normal. Plenty of adults are still working out what they love to do, and teenagers have seen far less of the world. So the SRP team asked itself how the program could give students a wider range of experiences.
Students were already working hard in class and digging deep into topics of their own. The dinner was a way to take that one step further. What if they could talk with a professor from a field outside their own course? What if they could hear what a peer in another class was wrestling with? For a student still undecided about a major, a conversation like that might offer a hint. For one who already has a direction, it might stretch their thinking.
That was the idea behind the SRP dinner party. It was never meant to be just a meal. CRI saw it as a small, low-key way to let students connect naturally with people they had been hoping to talk to.
A slightly awkward start
Students from different SRP classes shared the room with faculty including Brian Stoltz (Caltech), Kit Hickey (MIT), Max Krasnow (Harvard), Nabil Alshurafa (Northwestern), William Burke-White (University of Pennsylvania), and Ryan Fang (University of Chicago).
At first, nobody quite knew how to begin. Between filling plates at the buffet and finding a seat, students traded glances, waiting to see who would speak first. Those sitting next to a professor from another course looked especially unsure of what to say.
Then, somewhere around the time plates were half empty, conversations started on their own. The questions went something like this:
- "How did you get started in this field?"
- "Where do your research ideas usually come from?"
- "Could your work connect to the topic of the class I'm taking?"
