KU students participated in a meaningful contest and made special donation

(From the left) Kim Do Hyun (Business ’19), Kang Eun Kyo (Political Science and International Relations ’19), Head of Seongbuk-gu Lee Seung Ro, Lim Hyun Woo (Media & Communication ’19)

The donation of three KU undergraduates warmed the hearts of many people. Kim Do Hyun (Business ’19), Kang Eun Kyo (Political Science and International Relations ’19), and Lim Hyun Woo (Media & Communication ’19) participated in the ‘2020 Symposium contest for the rehabilitation of Japanese military sexual slavery victims.’ They won the honor award for their paper titled ‘The desirable approach for movie contents to improve the awareness of Comfort women.’

The students must have wanted to spend the prize money for themselves, as it is the well-deserved reward for their efforts and hard work. Yet, since the money was rewarded from a meaningful contest, the students wanted to use the prize money in a meaningful way. They added their own money and donated it to the Anam Community Service Center to be used to aid local low-income youths.

Head of Seongbuk-gu, Lee Seung Ro, met and encouraged the students and gave them a letter of appreciation to show his thanks.

KUBS met Kim Do Hyun, a business school undergraduate and one of the three students, to hear his story.

Kim Do Hyun (Business ’19)

Q. You participated in a meaningful contest and made a very special donation. How did you meet your friends from other majors and get together as a team?

We met as fellow students in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Class of 2019. We became close friends before being assigned to our majors, and this is how we decided to make a team.

Q. Please tell us about how your team decided to donate the prize money to local low-income youths.

We did not expect to win a prize at the time of submitting the paper, and were simply content to participate in a contest with a meaningful topic. We were lucky to be selected for the honor award, and received a huge amount of prize money. We contemplated on how we should use the money, and concluded that we should give it back to society because most of the funding were from civic group donations. One of our teammates had participated in educational service activities suggested to donate the prize money for those who lack access to education. So, we donated our money to Anam Community Service Center to aid students of low-income, single parent families.

Q. Briefly tell us about your paper that won the honor award in the ‘2020 Symposium contest for the rehabilitation of Japanese military sexual slavery victims’

We felt that solutions for Comfort women are mainly focused on formal aspects. We contemplated to find a novel approach that can reach out globally and chose movie contents as our main topic.

Compared to Holocaust movies, contents about Comfort women were extremely uniform. Holocaust films such as ‘Life is Beautiful’, ‘Schindler’s List’ and many other masterpieces have various themes, characters, backgrounds etc. On the contrary, movies on Comfort women are mostly documentary films that focus solely on reenacting what happened. We thought this was a huge problem since it limits attracting a wide pool of audience.

If films about Comfort women become movies that people ‘want to watch,’ more people will remember Comfort women, and furthermore this will contribute in preventing this tragedy being repeated. Therefore, we wrote a paper titled