Life as a KDI School student is vibrant and also challenging. The school provides a happy mix of both pedagogic and extra-curricular endeavors, making student life here anything but dull. 

In the spirit of “outside-the-box thinking”, KDIS also offers students an outlet for other well-rounded pursuits through the KDIS student forums and clubs. The KDIS student forums are organized by the students who form groups by region or policy area of interest. The forums organize various activities such as interviews, seminars, and conferences. Meanwhile, the KDI Schoolstudent clubs aim to provide students with ample opportunities to come together and share valuable experiences through various social, cultural, scholastic, athletic, and religious programs. They are a venue for students to mingle and get to know others, while pursuing common interests beyond academics. It helps students foster friendships among members through voluntary participation in areas of common interest. 

KDIS highly encourages students to get involved in the student forums and clubs and provides support for their activities. This year, we have seen many interesting groups initiated by students and professors. In particular, 6 student forums and 17 student clubs were officially registered during the Fall 2022 semester. 

Let’s take a look at some of the best organizations and find out what they are up to!

KDIS Photography Club

The main purpose of the club is to provide KDI students with an interest in photography the opportunity to get together, share ideas and experience, be creative, and at the same time, explore places and capture the culture of Korea through the camera lens. Open to all kinds of photographer, it also aims to engage the KDIS community in the art of photography through knowledge-sharing and capacity-building on technical skills.

From the past semesters, the club organized various activities such as themed shoots for creative, portrait, day and night, lifestyle, urban photography, cherry blossoms, black and white, color, selfie, and monochromatic challenges, as well as photowalks in Sejong City. They started the Fall 2022 semester with an orientation and a basic photography workshop. Among its upcoming activities are more photography challenges, photowalks, an advanced photography workshop, and club socials. Ms. Antonie Lyka Manaloto from the Philippines is the current club Representative.

KDIS Women’s Leadership Forum

The KDIS Women’s Leadership Forum aims to be an inclusive platform where female KDI students from different countries, religions, cultures, and backgrounds can connect, converge, share, and address various topics related to gender equality and women’s empowerment.  It hopes to create a safe, respectful space where students can share real-life stories and experiences from women across multiple contexts by addressing race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and nationality, among others, to bring awareness- through practical activities developed by students themselves- about gender and its intersectionalities. For this, the forum organized regular “Safe Talks” on relevant issues such as gender-based violence at work, women in public spaces, and LGBTQIA+ rights. They also had activities commemorating Women’s Month and an art program to celebrate women, entitled ‘WomArt’. It also featured 31 remarkable women leaders for their ‘31 Days, 31 Woken, 31 Profiles’ editorial. 

This semester, the group is continuing its various programs with the purpose of deconstructing, unlearning, and re-learning about feminism, women’s rights, and inequality by developing a strong community of students, alumni, and mentors. Ms. Stefany Michelle Campins, from Mexico, is the current Forum Representative. 

KDIS MDP Reading Group

Organized by Professor Changkeun Lee, the MDP Reading Club aims to offer members insights into what makes a “good” empirical paper and ultimately give them a motivation for their own research topic.  The group, made up of five MDP students and one faculty member, will meet to discuss and deep dive into a single academic paper, learn its strength and discuss how it could be improved. Members will look into what others have done in the frontier, and ideally find a gap they would like to fill in. For this semester, Professor David Sungho Park is leading the group, and the focus will be on papers in micro-development economics. Those interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in the near future would benefit the most by participating in this group.