Korean students celebrate Chuseok

The Korean Student Association (KSA) and the Korean Graduate Student Association (KGSA) collaborated to host the KSA Chuseok Picnic on Saturday. This event was designed to celebrate Chuseok, a national Korean festival that historically commemorates the fall harvest.

Each year, the holiday takes place on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month. This year, the official date of the holiday fell on Sept. 8, and the picnic celebrated this holiday with a social gathering consisting of traditional Korean food and music.

“We hope this picnic event will be a lead-up to our later events by gathering more people and making them more conscious about our organization,” Jay Kim, a biomedical engineering Ph.D. student and KGSA president, said. “Our purpose will be to introduce our group to more people.”

The picnic was initially scheduled to take place in the President’s Garden, but due to inclement weather conditions, the event was moved indoors to the McCoy Multipurpose Room.

Each student paid a fee of $5 for a complete meal, including kimbap — steamed white rice and various other ingredients rolled in dried seaweed — and songpyeon — small, half-moon-shaped rice cakes that are traditionally eaten during the autumn festival.

Despite the rainy weather, the event had a fairly high turnout of both graduate and undergraduate students. The majority of the students who attended KSA’s Chuseok celebration were Korean.

Like other culture-specific campus groups, the KSA and KGSA target Korean students for their events. Kim said one of the goals of both the KSA and the KGSA is to broaden their membership beyond the Hopkins Korean community.

“That’s something that we really do have to work on,” Kim said. “We’re not heavily involved with other cultural associations, and we are not that widely known across the campus. I think it’s important that we reach out to other associations and be involved with all sorts of events that are campus-wide and school-wide.”

The KGSA will work to increase their campus presence through the wide array of upcoming activities that they have planned for the rest of the school year. These activities will include a volunteer service trip in October, an annual wine party in November, a concert featuring Peabody students in February, a graduate student-led talk geared towards undergraduates in March and an end-of-the-year banquet in April or May.