Beyond Academia

I am also an active trumpet player, and music has been a long-standing part of my life alongside my academic work. 

As an undergraduate, I founded the Korea United College Orchestra (KUCO), a student-led orchestra that set out to challenge the usual separation between stage and audience in classical music. Rather than treating students as passive listeners, the project brought together players from more than sixty different majors who already loved music but were pursuing other fields. What began as an idea few people took seriously eventually drew close to 300 applicants; after auditions, about 100 musicians were selected, and we were able to perform at the Seoul Arts Center with Maestro Nanse Gum, one of Korea’s leading conductors. Building and running the orchestra from scratch made me think carefully about what it means to hold an organisation together: how roles are defined, how people commit, and how a shared project is kept on track.

I later had opportunities to perform beyond the non-professional sphere, including joining a festival orchestra composed of conservatory students for a collaboration with Mischa Maisky under the baton of Maestra Hanna Chang, and taking part in a performance with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra under Maestro Myung-whun Chung. Entering these environments as a non-major was exceptionally rare in that world, and the musicians I encountered had little experience with someone from outside their usual professional pathway. This unfamiliarity shaped how I was perceived, but it also gave me a distinct vantage point: as someone who did not fully belong to that community, I could observe how interaction patterns, informal hierarchies, and the broader structure of the classical music world were organised and maintained—features that insiders often take for granted.

These moments remain meaningful to me—not as musical achievements, but as occasions that shaped how I observe and think about people, the structures they form, and the ways in which communities organise themselves. They offered an early glimpse into how interaction, hierarchy, and shared practices operate within a world very different from my own, and that perspective has stayed with me.