When students attend universities, most of them are looking forward to hanging out with new friends, making a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and participating in other social activities. It is true that I expected these too, but what I expected the most was taking great classes as I decided to attend one of the most prestigious public universities in the U.S.

For me, taking a great class means that I am taking a lecture which helps me improve my critical thinking skills, and knowledge in a given subject. And guess what? Dr. Rose was the professor who fully satisfied my expectations.

Interestingly, I did not like his class during my first semester. Dr. Rose gave us a bunch of readings and also assigned other things to do but I was too busy to do the assignments during my first semester because I spent my time mostly with new friends. So I did not try to find the meaning of completing these assignments at that time and this attitude did not lead me to earn good grades.

But in the following semester, I was getting tired of just playing around because I found out that it was not really a meaningful way to spend my whole college years. Suddenly, my very first expectation when I came to UAC popped up in my head. I was expecting great classes which help me improve my thoughts, knowledge, and skills, but I totally forgot about this because I was just busy with other less important things.

This thought affected my attitude toward classes a lot. I started to concentrate more on what Dr. Rose said in his class and I did my best in completing assignments. This new attitude helped me discover many great aspects of his class.

First of all, his course was so constructive. He never taught us random things in the lecture, but taught us in a ‘stage by stage’ way. For instance, in his video production class, I did not have any skills and/or knowledge about editing and making videos.

For students like me, Dr. Rose focused on teaching basic concepts at first. After the few weeks, he started to teach more practical elements of video production such as taking a short video with cameras. After we got used to do these practical stuff, finally, he instructed us to make a 10~20 minutes movie, and the result was amazing.

Most of the groups in class came up with really fine movies as final outcomes. I am pretty sure that most of the students did not expect this at the beginning of class, because there was no one who could make a video professionally. However, through Dr. Rose’s ‘stage by stage’ method, students got more confidence as the semester progresses, because they knew that their knowledge and skills in video production have been upgraded.

Video Link ->https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy-Z-Acxbq4&feature=youtu.be

This is our group’s movie for the video production’s final project. Check this out!

Another aspect of Dr. Rose’s class is that he does not teach us every single detail. It is common that professors and teachers try to teach students every single thing about a specific subject, but he sometimes utilizes an alternative teaching method. Since he knew that letting students learn by themselves through a trial and error process would improve their ability of learning, he just let us explore to learn. For instance, students had a chance to study in a studio in Video Production class. Our job was finding out the functions of studio machines such as prompters, various types of cameras, CG operators, and other equipment in the studio. In this situation, normally, students expect that the professor shows them how to work these machines from the beginning to the end.

However, all Dr. Rose did was just making us work in groups and telling us to find out how to operate these machines. Every group had their own machine to work with and we were able to find out how to operate each in time. In this way, we were able to master the system more effectively than just listening to what he said, because we were actually finding out how to work this out by ourselves. We gained more confidence as well. Even though, at first, we were afraid of operating machines when we first saw them, but at last, we realized that Dr. Rose did not give us an impossible mission. For the next step, he made all groups rotate one another so that each group can teach their own machine’s instruction to the other group. This rotating learning system continued for about an hour. His teaching method/approach made students go over their designated machine’s instruction twice, because we had to teach it to others. In the end, most of students were able to operate all machines in the studio. Last summer, I was volunteering for the U-20 World Cup in the Incheon World Cup Stadium. During this time period, I had a chance to see a studio in the stadium. In the studio, I whispered to myself. “Man! I know how to work all these things!” Yes, Dr. Rose has done his job.

Critical thinking is another keyword for his class. Yujin Kim who is a junior at UAC said that “his lectures naturally make me keep thinking ‘why’ by myself, so I could build the strength of critical thinking. Before I took his class, I was lack of building a critical thinking skill, however, I was able to improve it while I studied with him.” As she said, Dr. Rose always makes us think ‘Why?’ during every lecture he gives. As the semester progresses, I was able to think more deeply. For the last assignment in his Visual Communication class, he gave us an essay assignment as a final project. Student had to write 700 words about a picture.

And I wrote 754 words about this picture. It seemed impossible to write huge amount of words by just looking at one picture but I was able to do it because my critical thinking skill has been improved.

I am not the only the one who praises Dr. Rose’s class. Most of the students who experienced his class love his teaching style like I do. Sang yeop An, who is a junior at UAC also said “when I was in high school, I always dreamed about a class like Dr. Rose’s. He always tries to communicate with students.” Other than teaching, he offered UAC students opportunities to work in OBS during the 2018 Winter Olympic season. He has done many great jobs for UAC. People at UAC should feel huge gratitude toward him, because we are so lucky to have Dr. Rose on our campus!

Written by Sang-Ha Baek