I Picked It for the Name

As a teenager I chose the field mostly because “Computer Engineering” sounded cooler than its old name: Electronic Calculator Engineering.

A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.

I’d studied hard enough as an exam-taker to be in a position to choose which department to apply to, and I gravitated, naturally, toward one with “computer” in the name. A few stories from around that choice.

Computer Engineering vs. Electronic Calculator Engineering

Filling out the application, I remember thinking — without quite examining the thought — that this department’s name was cooler than the others. Had it still been the old one, Electronic Calculator Engineering, my teenage self almost certainly wouldn’t have applied.

As the department’s own history tells it, it was called Electronic Calculator Engineering back in 1978. National universities weren’t permitted to put English in a department’s name in those days; somewhere around the 1988 Seoul Olympics an ordinance changed, and English names became allowed. Once it became Computer Engineering, the story goes, both it and Industrial Design drew a kind of buff from their new names and spent a while as the flagship departments of their respective colleges.

CompEng? EE? CompSci?

By the admissions guides of the day, there were three ways in if you wanted to work with computers:

• Computer Engineering, in the College of Engineering — 75 seats
• the Electrical, Electronic, and Control Engineering group, also in Engineering — 270 seats
• the Computer Science track inside Computational Statistics, over in the College of Natural Sciences — 30 seats

I applied weighing how cool the name sounded against a class size that felt about right, and I suspect I got in on the back of a quota increase. The software-to-hardware balance, we were told, ran roughly fifty-fifty for Computer Engineering, two-to-eight for the EE group, and nine-to-one for Computer Science.

The name bred its share of misunderstanding, too. Freshmen who’d come in hoping to make games were soon disappointed, and it wasn’t long before the students who had shone at the olympiads started grumbling about professors a step behind the times.

The School of Computer Science and Engineering

None of it touched me through my master’s, which I finished in 1999, but the reshuffling of schools and departments came afterward, and the department has since been folded together with the Natural Sciences’ Computer Science into a single School of Computer Science and Engineering. My thirty Computer Science contemporaries became fellow alumni after the fact — though with no real overlap between us back then, running into one out in the working world still feels a little awkward.

Part of 90s Computer Science Stories — first-person notes on growing up with computers and studying CS in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/31