A recent episode of the popular Korean reality television program 1 Night 2 Days featured KAIST as part of its special on universities. To film this episode, a couple of the show’s cast members visited our campus and spent a night here, as is suggested by the program’s title, exploring the university grounds, participating in games, and attending classes with KAIST students. The KAIST Herald interviewed Dong Wan Kang, a senior from the Department of Electrical Engineering and one of the students who made an appearance on the program.

The show’s writers visited KAIST beforehand and met up with students in ELKA, the official KAIST cheer organization. They liked one of those students, Hong Seok Yang, and thought he was funny, so they asked him to pick out several close friends who would be suitable for appearing on the program with him. He asked me and two other friends to join him; the writers interviewed us. They liked what they saw, so we were able to appear on the show.

It was all real. Although the activities themselves were prepared in advance, what happened during those activities were all spontaneous. In fact, the show’s writers refused to give us scripts because they wanted us to be as natural as possible during filming. Some scenes were left out though; for example, we also played table tennis, but that was not aired because it was not very entertaining.

On the second day of filming, we were asked to invite two more students to join us for filming, but it later turned out that they were not needed. A couple of us were thus excluded from filming, but when Tae-hyun Cha (one of the show’s cast) found out about it, he got angry at the staff for not giving us students clear directions and basically wasting our time. After that incident, all of us got involved with the filming, and I was quite moved by what he did in our defense.

I did not feel any special emotions – there was no awe or intimidation in meeting the celebrities. Even during filming, I neither felt strange nor tense. Both the actors and the staff were very nice and made us feel comfortable.

Yeah, there were a few people who recognized me on the streets, such as this man who saw me and shouted out, “K4! K4!” and then came up to shake my hand. I have also received a lot of Facebook friend requests and messages. Several strangers have even asked to meet in person – it was quite frightening! But it has made no difference to my everyday life – not many people in KAIST have reacted to it.

I believe it will help with KAIST’s image – people think of KAIST as a tough place, which is true, but KAIST also has its fun side, which I think we managed to show. KAIST’s image on the show was probably a little exaggerated – many KAIST students are not as relaxed and do not enjoy as much recreation as we appeared to do on the show. At the same time, however, it was very natural – we played pool and table tennis precisely because those are two of the things we usually do in our free time.

I sometimes get hand tremors, and that happened once; but when I first met the actors to play pool, I did not get as nervous as I feared I might. Even with a dozen cameras filming me, I was quite at ease. The actors felt like friends to me.