"Appreciate everything you've done for me" Professor Choi Jong-Beom, Retirement interview
- 경영대학
- Hit380
- 2021-09-13
1. I'm curious about how you feel about your teaching career at the Business school
I started my college life as an undergraduate student in my alma mater's Department of Business Administration. I have worked in Korea, lectured universities in the U.S., New Zealand, and Singapore, and finally retired as a professor at my alma mater's business school, which makes me feel special as a Sung Kyun-in. If college life is the starting point for preparing to take the first step into society as an adult, then I can say that I'm a lucky person who ended my career by living at my alma mater both from the beginning and the end. When I graduated from my alma mater, I got a job at the Korea Development Bank for quite a long time, then decided to resign and go to the Ph.D. program at New York Stare University in the U.S at a late age of 30.
People around me said I was crazy because I gave up my stable job at the Korea Development Bank and went to study abroad. During my working life, I would sometimes ask myself what it would be like to study abroad and then go on the path of learning. Life in not possible to choose both academic and practical paths, but in the end, I chose the academic path because I thought I would not regret it later.
2. Please briefly introduce your research field and achievements.
After obtaining a doctorate in the United States, I took over to Auckland University in New Zealand, where I first did a lot of research on closed funds and became interested in research on the impact of the tax system on corporate behavior. I also studied the process of changing the capital market in the integration of the international capital market. After teaching at the National University of Singapore for about two years, when I joined my alma mater in 2002, I was expanded to research on corporate dividend policy and capital raising, and I did not feel bored because I did research in a very diverse field, such as financial institution management, derivative financial product analysis, and the behavior of individual and institutional investors. But it is regrettable that the effort to dig deep into a specific field and publish a paper in an international Top Journal was neglected.
Fortunately, since I was appointed to my alma mater, I felt very rewarding by publishing one paper each in the best academic journals, which are the world's first and second largest in the field of finance. Compared to foreign universities, Korean universities such as alma mater felt a great sense of achievement by publishing papers in the highest international journals despite difficulty of conducting the highest level of research due to the high burden of lectures and limited purchase of research funding support and statistics. After publishing such a thesis, I participated in an international conference to meet and greet eminent scholars for the first time, and they recognized me immediately by looking at my name tag. I realized the power of the Top Journal publication paper because they said they knew me well by reading my papers.
3. Are there any memorable episodes from your long teaching career?
I officiated a lot at the weddings of my disciples, and perhaps because of the occasional comment to have many children, a couple who gave birth to twins, and one disciple had a large family with one son and four daughters, and it was rewarding to be playing the role of a patriot. The disciple kept raising five siblings while working, but after reading night and night, he got his doctorate and sent me a doctoral dissertation. I don't know how proud I am.
Also, I have written many letters of recommendation for many students to study abroad, and all of them are doing great academically. In particular, I was very happy to hear that one student had recently been hired as a professor at the Zicklin School of Business the City University of New York's business school, after obtaining a doctorate from UC Irvine. I feel very rewarded to hear that my recommendation has opened the way for studying abroad in the United States.
4. Among the students you met at the business school, is there any student you remember the most? When did you feel rewarede?
The graduate school gave a lecture on a new subject, so I put up an advertisement looking for an undergraduate assistant to prepare for the lecture, and a student came and asked for an assistant job. I trained this undergraduate to boldly answer questions and prepare answers from graduate students. Since undergraduate students were required to act as tutors to help graduate students learn this student had to study difficult learning content more than three times that of graduate students in tension. I think this is a kind of quantum jump opportunity for this student. Perhaps this was an opportunity, after graduation, this student got a job at the Financial Supervisory Service and is building a very sincere career. I feel proud that he is married as a couple on the campus of his alma mater business school, working as a couple and raising two children and raising a wonderful family.
Another memorable student worked for a financial company, wrote a very good level of doctoral dissertation as a day and night reader, and is an outstanding student who published three good papers together as co-authors and me. This student is not only a Ph.D. in business administration, but also a great disciple who has made a huge career change while reading day and night, so I want to learn his driving force and sincerity.
There are many other excellent doctoral students who have published numerous papers as co-researchers with me. I'm so grateful that I really had a lot of lucky with my students.
5. What plans do you have after retirement?
Recently, I have often suffered form ill health, so I am reminded of the importance of health. After retirement, I will take a break to recover my stamina and enjoy hobbies that I have not been able to do before. I'm thinking about slowly moving away from professional academic paper work, paying more attention to the spread of knowledge for the general public, and writing a popular book if any part that can contribute to society is found.
6. Lastly, please say something to the members of Sungkyunkwan University's business school
Students at Sungkyunkwan University's business school are the best intellectuals who can achieve successful academic results at any university in the world. However, in Korea, ranking based on quantitative test results is too fixed, so it is very unfortunate that there are many young people who are deceived by this and live with a feeling of inferiority for the rest of their lives by deciding that they belong to an inferior group if they make one mistake. I hope that the members of Sungkyunkwan University will make many progressive and courageous attempts to do anything with the confidence that they are intellectuals with the highest level of knowledge in the world.
What I felt during the class was that there were so few questions from students. When conducting classes in the U.S., students often have too many questions to make progress, but in Korea, it is a pity that most students take classes passively. There are many cases where wrong questions help you learn. Believing that silly or wrong questions do not exist, the process of continuing to ask questions and trying to make sure they are learning is a very important path to increasing learning effectiveness while cultivating communication skills. If you don't understand, it's important to keep asking questions and keep digging into them until get a full understanding.
As AI has emerged as an important future-oriented field these days, undergraduate students in business schools have begun to learn coding. It's a good phenomenon, but cultivating coding skills doesn't make you a leader who leads the future. Rather, even if coding skills are lacking, those who see the big picture and constantly make bold new attempts with rich imagination and curiosity will become the protagonists of creating a better future.