Once again I’ve had another busy week here in Seoul since my last update both at work and on my own.

I spent the time in my office mainly this week. I was tasked with writing a few articles for our company website. One was to promote our outdoor education programs. I mainly wrote it with teachers and educators in mind. The goal is that hopefully they will see the article when they search something like “Outdoor Education South Korea” on Google, then from the article they may visit our website and learn more about what type of programs we provide.

This week for food I had a lot of classic dishes that I have already had. There’s a nice katsu place near my office, which is really good. The breading on the pork is super light and their sauce is super good. You get a nice miso soup and some side dishes to go alone with it, which are all tasty as well. I also had a clam stew called jogaetang (조개탕) which is made with venus clams and we heat it up in the center of the table with all the vegetables and clams. After a bit you add noodles into the broth. Another really good dish I had this past week was gukbap (국밥), specifically sogogi gukbap (소고기국밥). Gukbap is a dish where rice is put into hot soup. Usually with soups, you get rice on the side and it’s up to you whether you want to put it in or eat it separately. Usually I eat most of the meat and vegetables then throw the rice in to finish off the broth with. With gukbap I think it’s kind of expected that you eat the rice with everything else. The kind I had was sogogi. Gogi (고기) means meat in Korean and So (소) is the name for cow, so it’s combined to mean beef. It was really a good dish. You can get it spicy or regular, and I think it may be usually served spicy, but I got normal. It was very flavorful but still light. Actually, mine had noodles too, but I think it depends where you get the dish as it’s not universal.

I had a bit of a fun activity on Wednesday this week. Our company is holding a team-building event for another company later next week and it’s going to be based on Squid Game games. So we practiced playing the games together for preparation. I haven’t seen any of the show, but it was still a lot of fun to play the games. A lot of them are traditional Korean games that kids have played for generations, so it was nice to learn a bit more about Korean culture through playing them. I also got to play games during my workday which was a nice break from the rest of the day’s work.

In terms of leadership, I have had chances for leadership since I have been in middle school. Through my Boy Scout troop, I learned a lot of leadership characteristics and had chances to use them as I held various positions through the troop. As a leader there, I learned what type of things worked well and what didn’t work – both through my own doing and also as an onlooker viewing the other boys leading the troop.

I would call my leadership style “lead by doing” type. I very much like to set a good example for the team that I lead. I also think that I am very good at delegating tasks and separating out the workload so that it doesn’t all have to be done by one person or that one person has all the work on their plate.

I think that after coming to South Korea, my leadership style has largely remained the same. I haven’t had many chances to be a leader, as I have a boss and supervisor who lead me instead. I’m just an intern, not a section manager, so it’s hard to be a leader. It’s not like I can tell my coworkers what they should be doing. I do think that by viewing my bosses, I have learned new ways to improve my leadership skills. I can take back lessons on explaining projects, giving directions, ways to keep people on task, and more. In this sense, by watching and learning from other leaders, I am also becoming a better leader, or have the potential to be a better leader in the future.