Life Journey

Looking back, my academic life has itself been a journey driven by curiosity. Late in my PhD, as I was deciding on my own research agenda, I realized that my interest in epistemic curiosity had not emerged all of a sudden. It was something I had been following, in one way or another, throughout my life.

I grew up in South Korea, where enthusiasm for education runs very high. Competition for college entrance exams can begin as early as kindergarten (can you believe it starts around age five?), and a child’s life can become organized around exams that rank students against their classmates—daily, weekly, monthly, and twice a semester. While nearly everyone around me attended hagwons, private academies where students sometimes stayed until midnight after school to prepare for exams, my parents made a pretty bold, even wild, choice. Instead of sending me to private academies for exam preparation, they let me study whatever genuinely interested me, read whatever books I wanted, and find and choose my own path. Looking back, I think that freedom gave me something that has stayed with me ever since: a lasting love of learning, the confidence to pursue what I wanted to understand on my own, and the persistence to keep digging deeper into whatever captured my interest.

I was lucky to grow up in a home full of books, and I spent much of my time reading, especially philosophy and literature. When it came time to choose my undergraduate major, I began with Japanese literature in Japan—purely because I was so drawn to the musicality and delicate emotions of tenth-century kanshi, classical Chinese-style poetry composed in Japan. It wasn’t the most obvious major for a Korean student to choose, but by then I had already taught myself Japanese and prepared independently for both the Japanese language proficiency exam and university entrance exams. I was able to study at Kyoto University, where I had long hoped to go. Reading and studying that literature closely taught me a great deal about how flawed we humans can be, and how much drama can be contained within an ordinary life. It also gave me a deeper sensitivity to the complexities of human emotions and experiences. Later, somewhere in that process, I found myself wanting to make a more practical contribution to society, and I returned to Korea to shift my major to library and information science.

I had initially been drawn to the field simply because I loved classical writing, old texts, and books in general. However, positively, surprisingly, within library science, I came to recognize something I hadn’t seen before: the values embedded in libraries and those that flow between libraries and the people who use them. This realization led me to an interest in user studies. After completing my master’s degree, I put my strengths—native fluency in Korean and Japanese, and the ability to read classical Chinese—to work at the University of Michigan’s Asia Library. It was my first time in the United States. I had never imagined that I would eventually study here, as my interests had always been so deeply rooted in the classical cultures of Asia. At Michigan, I had the freedom to attend workshops and academic events held for researchers across the university, beyond the library community. Listening to conversations about artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, just as they were beginning to gain momentum, I found myself wanting to understand more deeply how people interact with information in environments where humans and new technologies meet. That curiosity eventually led me to pursue a PhD in the United States.

During my PhD, I began participating in research on creativity, and through that work, I gained research experience studying how people’s thinking processes connect to their interactions with information. Little by little, those experiences developed and expanded into a research agenda of my own: I wanted to study people’s intellectual development and thinking in relation to how they interact with technologies, and how to make that process joyful.

Then, late in my PhD, generative AI suddenly became dominant, and I went through something close to an existential crisis—both as a person and as a researcher imagining my own future. If AI can do almost everything and compress entire processes into mere seconds, and if people become increasingly willing to outsource their efforts, intelligence, and expertise to AI, what should I pursue? The despair I felt came close to depression. After struggling with these questions for some time (and, in some ways, I still am), I decided to bring them into my research agenda. Human intellectual growth, intellectual values, and the values worth pursuing as human beings became central to the future research agenda I am unwilling to let go of—whatever comes after generative AI, whether agentic AI or technologies further ahead, with far greater automation and increasingly less need for human input.

Looking back now, every choice I have made grew out of the interests and questions that held my attention most strongly at the time, and the experiences and insights I gained from each one led me toward the next. These interests may look different on the surface, but they have continued to widen, connect, and gather into a shared research/life agenda. I am grateful for this whole process, and I hope to continue it in academia—growing intellectual curiosity, turning it into good questions, sharing those questions with others, and developing better ones together.