I dropped by my alma mater, Seoul National University of Science and Technology, for the first time in a long while. It was late at night and too dark to see properly, but quite a few buildings I had never seen before had gone up. Some were still under construction, and a lone excavator sat in the middle of one site. Where there had been a lawn a decade ago, a gleaming building now stood in imposing silence. The old Da Vinci Hall, rumored to be haunted, was gone, and something new had taken its place. The campus keeps getting better, and yet I could not help feeling a little sad that it was drifting, bit by bit, from the picture in my memory. So before it is too late, I want to set down what the school looked like in 2006.
To be precise, it was still Seoul National University of Industry. It had not yet been reorganized into a general university. That meant, when you applied in the regular admissions round, we were lumped into the bottom “ra” tier. Many people used up their ga, na, and da picks on other schools and parked us as a safe backup, as I remember. Among friends we usually shortened the name to “Industry U.” I still remember oversleeping once in my rented room, jumping in a taxi, mumbling “to Industry U, please,” dozing off, and waking up near Sahmyook University instead. Ridiculous.
The name carried a poor image among adults. My father was no exception. When I said I wanted to go there, he asked why I had studied so hard only to end up at “an industrial college.” The name itself smelled of vocational school. But oddly enough, among high school seniors the recognition was actually not bad at all.
Come to think of it, some of my classmates came from vocational high schools. At the time, Seoul National University of Industry was one of the few universities in Seoul that had a special admissions track for vocational-school students, and the bar was anything but low, so many of them aimed for us. If I may exaggerate a little, we were the “Seoul National University” of that lane. You practically needed to win a major national contest even to be competitive. Perhaps that is why the friends who entered through that route were talented in all sorts of ways. One classmate who had prepared for a web-design-style contest even picked up side jobs redesigning the department homepage to help pay living expenses.
The image that sticks most vividly in my mind from my first year is Euiui Hall. I have no idea whether it is still called that. Seniors one year ahead of me used to call Euiui Hall the “liberal arts building,” and Dasang Hall “Engineering Building 1,” or something along those lines. Since every general-education class was held in Euiui Hall, all students, regardless of major, knew it well. A lobby sat in the middle, with corridors extending to either side. During breaks, students would crowd into that lobby with cigarettes hanging from their lips, and they smoked right there. Today smoking culture has at least been dragged in a more reasonable direction, and smokers have far less room to maneuver. But even by the standards of that time, it was shocking. People lit up in the middle of the building. The smoking corner sat right next to the vending machine, so non-smokers who just wanted a drink had to thread their way through a cloud of smoke. The idea that there were ashtrays set there is almost unimaginable now. Later on, some people would even step out of class, light up immediately in the corridor, then walk back in.
Behind the first floor of Euiui Hall there was another drinks machine and smoking area, and beyond that stood Buram Dormitory. Back then, Buram was the only dorm on campus. Its capacity was laughably small, so most of us never even dreamed of getting in. If memory serves, grades were one of the main filters, and most of the students I knew who lived there were comfortably above a 4.0 GPA. I never seriously considered applying during my years at school.
Behind the dorm was what we called the Cooperation Gate, the rear entrance to campus. It is probably still there. Calling it a “gate” was generous. It was more like a gap in the fence. If you went through it, you could walk toward Hagye Station, and people said it was faster than coming from Gongneung Station. Friends on the liberal arts side, who took a lot of classes in Euiui Hall, often used the Hagye–Cooperation Gate route. I rarely had reason to.
Next to Euiui Hall stood the old Da Vinci Hall. It had a colonial-era look and looked like a three-story building from the front, but inside it only had two floors, which fed all sorts of bizarre rumors. On the second floor, the stairs simply ended, and along the hallway were narrow windows placed just beyond the reach of an average adult man. I once heard that some brave fool had tried to climb through one of those windows to enter the mythical third floor. I cannot remember how that story ended. It probably was not worth remembering.
Past Da Vinci Hall lay the first student union building. The cafeteria and lounge were on the first floor, while club rooms lined the upper floors. If I recall correctly, the central clubs occupied the second floor and the student council the third. Whenever clubs or the student council needed to paint large protest banners, they usually worked on the roof. The stationery shop called Exciting Stationery on the second floor sold the supplies. Even now, I suspect the roof of that old union building still bears layers of old paint. I have no idea whether students still make banners like that.
By the time I enrolled in 2006, central clubs were already in decline. As the job market grew harsher, students turned away from clubs and toward departmental activities that might offer even the slightest edge on a résumé. Seniors in central clubs lamented that freshmen no longer signed up like they used to. Still, the students who stayed in clubs threw themselves into them completely.
There were two band clubs, Semachi and Gray Mood. There was also Baeksong, but it felt less like a straight rock band and more like folk protest songs played with band arrangements, so the atmosphere was a little different. Semachi and Gray Mood had their rooms tucked into a corner of the central athletic field. It was not the neatly turfed field you see now, but a dusty dirt lot, and those two clubs split a tiny building in one corner. I heard Semachi had originally been the only club, and that Gray Mood had broken away after a split over musical direction. The fact that the two clubs still shared one roof was its own joke. As the rumors went, Semachi’s performances were brutal and hard, while Gray Mood leaned softer and sweeter. I remember one Semachi show where well over eighty percent of the set was growled vocals. Semachi was also famous for severe discipline. Sometimes, passing by, you would see a few people lying face down outside the room while someone who looked like a senior swung what might have been a bat. Hazing scandals occasionally make the news now and then, but back then that sort of thing was nearly unheard of at Industry U, which made it all the more memorable. I also heard that when a show was near and the set was not ready, they would not even let you go to class. I suspect Gray Mood did not split from Semachi only over music, but also over that heavy-handed atmosphere.
About a month after the semester started, something odd happened in front of the first student union. Sorrisarang, the campus acoustic-guitar club, held what they called an “in-school training session,” basically an unplugged performance in the plaza outside the union. Calling it a performance was generous. It looked more like a courage test. They had to train clueless freshmen to perform somehow, but the freshmen hated singing in front of people, so I suppose this was the seniors’ desperate way of pushing them through it.