999 Forum · Industry Track · Seoul
Not a classroom in Seoul with a palace tour on Saturday. The plants. The studios. The labs. The people who run them — and a report you present at an international forum on 9 September.
The phone in your hand runs on memory made in Korea. The show you watched last night was produced here. Almost nobody outside this country has been inside the places where that happens. For ten weeks, you will be.
You pick one industry. You spend a term inside it — not reading about it, not hearing a guest lecture about it. Inside it.
Site visits run in groups of twenty, on staggered days. That number is not a slogan — it is the size at which a fab or a production line will actually let people in. A tour group of two hundred goes to the visitor centre. You are not going to the visitor centre.
And you choose where you go. Visits are posted and you apply for the ones you want. Nobody is marched through a semiconductor plant they have no interest in — which is exactly why the companies let us in, and why the people hosting you are talking to twenty students who prepared. Everyone is guaranteed a minimum number of visits, and oversubscribed sites rotate to people who have not been yet.
How the industry actually works — the companies, the money, the constraints. Korean language and safety training. Your first site visits. By the end of week two you have chosen the question you are going to chase.
The part you came for. Site visits, interviews, and hours with people doing the work. You are collecting evidence, and it is your evidence — nobody hands you a reading list.
You write. Teams of three to five, or alone if your department needs it that way. Faculty assessment, and the people who hosted you read it too.
The summer cohort presents on 9 September, in a room with executives, government, academics and investors in it. You are not in the audience.
Twelve industries in the catalogue. How many run in a term is set by how many students are in it — a site visit is twenty people, so a track needs twenty to twenty-five. A hundred students is four tracks; three hundred is twelve. Across a year, all twelve get their turn.
Solid outline — opening first. Dashed — later years. Semiconductor fab access is the hardest to arrange and we will not list it as open before it is.
Each year the Forum sets a single question. Every track answers it from where it stands. If the question is how artificial intelligence is changing the way things are made, the games track answers from inside game production, the biotech track from inside drug development, the mobility track from a vehicle line. One question, one report per industry — which is why they are worth reading next to each other, and why the archive compounds instead of scattering.
Funded place
$0
Everything above, plus your international flight — which we book, not reimburse. Funded by a company or an individual at $7,500, the same a self-funded student pays. You apply and are selected exactly the same way; sponsors fund places, they do not choose people, and they do not know whose ticket their money bought. If you are flying from somewhere expensive, that is our problem and not yours.
Self-funded
$7,500
Plus your own airfare. Covers housing and every meal, all travel inside Korea, every site visit, insurance and materials. No hidden fees. The programme costs $7,500 whoever pays for it — same housing, same meals, same visits, same insurance. A funded place is $8,500 because it also covers the flight, which is roughly what you would spend on one yourself. Whatever the fee raises above running cost becomes another student's place, and we publish how many, every year.
A semester abroad in Asia usually runs $15,000–30,000. We are not trying to undercut anyone — the fee is set close to what the term costs to run, and what it raises above that goes into the scholarship pool. The full breakdown is below.
Most programmes will not show you this. We would rather you see it, because the number looks too low otherwise and the reason it is low is not a trick.
Because this is Korea. A shared room near a subway station runs about $600 a month and three meals a day about $315. Korean students live on roughly that. It is not a discount and nothing is being cut — there is no government subsidy and no religious funding behind this price. The cost of living is simply lower than where you are reading this.
| Who can apply | Undergraduates, usually years 2–4, any major depending on track. Nationals of countries with visa-free entry to Korea, for the first cohort. |
|---|---|
| Korean needed? | None. Everything runs in English. Korean classes are offered because you will want them by week three. |
| Do I take a term off? | Ten weeks is exactly a US quarter. At semester schools it reads as one term away — and see the fact sheet on credit, which is honest about where that stands. |
| Visa | 84 days for the founding cohort, 72 thereafter — inside the 90-day visa-free entry for US, Canadian, UK, Australian and most EU passports. K-ETA is required and we walk you through it. |
| Where you live | One or two to a room, with your own bathroom, air conditioning, laundry in the building, within ten minutes' walk of a subway station. Card-key entry, CCTV, staff on site. No curfew — we do not use buildings that impose one. Photographs, room configuration and house rules are published with the application, before you pay. |
| If something happens | Group insurance including emergency medical evacuation, plus a 24-hour multilingual line and a programme duty officer. Keep your university's coverage too — we do not ask you to drop it. |
| Who you are with | Students from universities around the world, in one cohort, for ten weeks. That group is half of what you leave with. |
| Cohort | Arrive | Programme | Depart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summer 2027 — first | Fri 25 Jun | Mon 28 Jun – Fri 10 Sep | Thu 16 Sep |
| Autumn 2027 | Sat 2 Oct | Mon 4 Oct – Fri 10 Dec | Sun 12 Dec |
| Winter 2028 | Sat 1 Jan | Mon 3 Jan – Fri 10 Mar | Sun 12 Mar |
| Spring 2028 | Sat 1 Apr | Mon 3 Apr – Fri 9 Jun | Sun 11 Jun |
| Summer 2028 | Sat 1 Jul | Mon 3 Jul – Fri 8 Sep | Sun 10 Sep |
Applications for the first cohort open January 2027 and close 31 March. Decisions late April. The programme is confirmed to run on 10 May — eight weeks out, before anyone buys a ticket. If a cohort does not reach twelve students it merges into the next quarter, and you choose between a guaranteed place then or a full refund. We would rather tell you that now than explain it later.
This has not run before. That cuts both ways and you should hear both.
The honest downside: there are no alumni to ask, no credit transfer agreements yet, and the industry host agreements and insurance policy are still being finalised. The full status is written out on the fact sheet, including what is not settled.
The honest upside: first cohorts are the ones that get remembered, and the ones that get shaped. The tracks and the questions are being designed right now. Twenty people will have been in the room when this started.
Write one line — your university, your year, and which industry you would pick. You will hear from us when applications open, and before the public announcement.
Email · info@platoschool.us
If you are a faculty member or study abroad office, the one-page fact sheet and the week-by-week syllabus have the health and safety structure, the insurance position, the visa detail and the credit situation stated plainly. Write to us before you approve anything — the first cohort is the moment a credit arrangement can be designed in rather than retrofitted.
Mail is received by Plato School (Undenominated Church of Christianity), the programme's US partner. A dedicated 999 Forum address will be published here when it is set up.