Eric Ji

Overall Experience

This was one of the best summers I have had in a long time. I joined the K-Culture Study Abroad program as a graduate student in Hospitality Management, and we covered a lot of ground: Seoul, Gangneung, Gyeongju, and Busan. Every few days the whole texture of the trip changed. Seoul ran on density and speed, Gangneung opened up to the East Sea, Gyeongju slowed us down inside a thousand years of Silla history, and Busan pulled all of it together at the coast. What I did not expect was how much fun it would be. We ate well, walked until our feet hurt, laughed on long bus rides, and kept talking about what we had seen long after the day's schedule ended. I came in planning to study destinations as systems: who manages a site, who tells its story, who absorbs the crowds. I left with all of that, plus a group of people I genuinely enjoyed being around, and a much longer list of questions than I arrived with.

Learning experience

Busan taught me the most, and it taught me while I was having a wonderful time, which is the best way to learn anything. On paper it is a coastal city with mountains behind it. Standing there, I could see how much care goes into holding those pieces together: a market in the morning, the water in the afternoon, and in the evening the whole city spread out below a ridge. What I learned is that a destination's real product is coherence. Individual attractions can each be excellent and still add up to nothing if the connections between them are weak. Busan made me pay attention to the seams: the transit, the signage, the way one neighborhood hands you off to the next. Gangneung made the same point from the other direction, a quieter stretch of coast that knows exactly what it is offering and does not try to be more. I now look for those seams everywhere I go.

Memorable experience

Busan, without question. There was a moment when the city, the sea, and the mountains were all in front of me at once, with visitors from all over the world moving through it, and I remember simply standing there grinning. This one place was receiving the whole world without pretending to be anywhere but Korea. I have spent years around tourism destinations and very few of them manage that balance. Most either flatten themselves for foreign visitors or stay so local that outsiders bounce off. Busan did neither. It was warm, confident, and completely itself. I have thought about that moment almost every week since I came home, and it is the picture I return to when I try to explain to my own students what a great destination actually feels like.

What did you not expect?

I expected my familiarity with Korean language and culture to be an advantage, and often it was. What surprised me, and what I ended up enjoying more than I would have guessed, was how often it got in the way. Knowing a place well makes you stop looking at it. Again and again, classmates who were seeing Korea for the first time noticed things I had walked past for years: how a queue was managed, how a menu was translated, what a sign quietly assumed you already knew. That has changed how I work. I now treat my own expertise as something to check rather than something that settles a question, and when I study a destination I look for someone seeing it for the first time and ask what they notice. Being corrected by people who knew far less about Korea than I did turned out to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole trip.

What advice would you give?

Go, and go before you feel ready. There is no version of this where you have enough time, enough money, or enough language ability, and waiting for those does not make the trip better. It only makes it later. Two practical things. First, keep a short daily record, even a few lines on your phone. The details that end up mattering are never the ones you expect to remember, and they fade within a week. Second, spend your free time somewhere ordinary rather than somewhere famous. A neighborhood bakery on a Tuesday morning will teach you more about a culture than one more landmark will. And if you are older than the other students, or coming back to school after years of working, do not let that stop you. I was, and being a beginner again alongside them was the most fun I have had in years.

How has this experience impacted your life?

I teach hospitality and tourism, so going abroad as a student again was humbling in the best possible way. It reminded me what it feels like to be tired, a little lost, and trying to make sense of a place in real time, which is exactly where my own students are when I send them into the field. I will be a kinder and more useful instructor because of it. Educationally, the trip gave my doctoral work a clearer direction. Watching how a destination organizes itself around visitors handed me real cases to think with instead of abstractions. Personally, it renewed something I had let go quiet. I had forgotten how much joy there is in learning a place alongside other people instead of reading about it alone. Long term, I want to keep building bridges between Korean and Pacific tourism, in my research and in the courses I teach, and this summer turned that from an idea into a plan I am excited about.

How did you learn about this experience?

Two ways, and they arrived close together. A faculty member in my department at Iowa State mentioned the program to me, and around the same time the announcement email came through with the itinerary and the dates. The personal recommendation is what made me take it seriously, and the email is what sold me, because the schedule was built around cultural sites and field visits rather than classrooms. I am glad I said yes quickly. It turned out to be the best decision I made all year.

International Connections