Sookmyung Women’s University has been appointed as an outstanding university in the comprehensive evaluation of the “Program for Industrial Needs-Matched Education Project (hereinafter “PRIME Project”)” which is jointly organized by the Ministry of Education and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF).

PRIME is a project which provides financial aid to radically reform universities and to preemptively respond to reduction in student population, increase in youth unemployment rate, mismatch of human resources per sector, etc. Among a total of 21 university participants, our university was selected as the only women’s university in the large-scale category. Since then, our school has implemented diverse programs for enhancing students’ major and career competencies while taking decisive action toward reform of academic affairs for the past 3 years. As a result, we’ve succeeded in achieving the “outstanding” rating, which is the highest rating among the 3 ratings of outstanding/satisfactory/unsatisfactory, in this year’s comprehensive evaluation.

Our university received high marks from the review board in areas related to the new establishment of College of Engineering majors in consideration of promising fields, establishment of educational curriculum customized to school-wide industrial demand, liaison with the local community, systematic management of humanities development plan, support toward demand-oriented career/employment/entrepreneurship, etc. The Review Board of the PRIME Project announced “We applaud Sookmyung Women’s University for the clear awareness of the project’s aim and achieving substantial results and reform.”

By forecasting future industrial demands, we expanded the College of Engineering to a total of 5 departments and 8 majors, and have established a creative and converged educational curriculum through the development of engineering-based curricular/extracurricular programs. In line with the wave of the 4th industrial revolution, we have also expanded hands-on field lectures. The Capstone Design subjects, which provide the students with creative problem solving skills for the issues found in industrial fields, was increased by fivefold from 10 in 2015 to 49 in 2018. In addition, the industry-academic curricular and extracurricular activities with reinforced hands-on experience were also dramatically expanded.

With the support of the PRIME Project, diverse programs are held annually such as Capstone Design Competition, lectures related to entrepreneurship, and 3D printing experiential events.

Our university also established an all-around career searching program by assigning career counseling professors per major and introducing the comprehensive student career management portal SNOWAY in order to enhance our students’ employment and entrepreneurial competencies. Not only that, with the operation of the engineering-based convergence education program PRIME Tech School, WINE (Women In Engineering), and WIC (WINE Intensive Course) along with the advancement of diverse entrepreneurship programs, our school achieved the 1st ranking in employment rate and the 1st ranking in maintained employment rate at the same time among the 4-year women’s universities in the Seoul region.

Workshop for Expanding PRIME Project Performance Held at the End of Last Year

The Head of the PRIME Project Group Jung-san Oh said, “It is true that there were voices of concern when we first began the PRIME Project and there were many hurdles to overcome. However, we were able to achieve the merit of successful conclusion with the help of many professors and staff.” He also added, “We will continue to press forward so that the achievements of the PRIME Project which innovates educational curriculum and reinforces our students’ career, employment, and entrepreneurial competencies can lead to the university innovation project starting this year in hopes of bringing further innovation to our educational, research, and industry-university cooperation.”