When families compare research programs, one question comes up again and again: "It's a research paper. Won't a longer program produce a better one?" Ten weeks sounds more serious than ten days. Yet the idea behind a hackathon points the other way: a few days of complete focus can accomplish more than months of stop-and-start effort. The Seoul Research Program (SRP) is built on that idea.
Ten weeks online vs. ten days in Seoul
A common online format pairs a student with a mentor for about an hour a week over ten weeks. Across the whole program, that typically comes to about 10 to 15 hours of guidance, spread over two and a half months.
SRP compresses the work instead of stretching it. For ten days in Seoul, students set their other commitments aside and concentrate on a single paper: 30 hours of instruction with their professor and 20 hours with TAs from master's and doctoral programs at leading universities. That is 50 hours in all, three to four times the total mentoring in a typical ten-week online program, and all of it in person.
A college credit hour is a useful yardstick. One credit represents about 15 to 16 hours of class time, so a three-credit course comes to roughly 45 to 48 hours. Students routinely ask the professor of a single three-credit course for a graduate school recommendation, even when they shared that class with as many as 100 classmates. SRP's 50 hours go to a class that averages five or six students.
| Typical 10-week online program | Seoul Research Program | |
|---|---|---|
| Length | 10 weeks | 10 days |
| Format | Video calls, about 1 hour a week | In person in Seoul |
| Total mentoring time | About 10–15 hours | 50 hours: 30 with the professor, 20 with TAs |
| When a student gets stuck | The question waits for next week's call | Worked through with the professor on the spot |
| Basis for a recommendation letter |
