Kwangwoon University - History

History

• Kwangwoon University has a 77-year-old history in high-tech and advanced education and research areas.

• Born in April 20, 1899 and having lived during the period of Japanese colony, Hwado (nickname) Cho, Kwangwoon was actively involved in the Korean independent movement in Shanghai, China during his teen age. However, the independent movement leader recognized that Cho, Kwangwoon's talent lay in the academia and decided to train the boy so that he could contribute to the Korean education field in which was a move away from the Japanese enforcement of Japanese culture and writings teachings. The boy Kwangwoon was sent to Japan and enrolled in Waseda University, at the time only private university in Japan.

• From late teen age up until his early 30s, Kwangwoon makes a change in his career path to a businessman. First working as a rice-bag carrying worker, taxi driver (at the time equivalent to an airplane pilot), and a general manager at a rich Japanese family, he often received high praise from many Japanese property owners for his diligence and the masters would go on to tell the other workers and Japanese to learn from Kwangwoon Cho's work ethics; Kwangwoon was paid a premium for his diligence, wisdom, and his work talent. While working for his master, he invested part of his earnings on stocks (electronics) and he hit a jackpot; the stock price shot up so high that he suddenly became a millionaire; in today's currency, his wealth was about 100 million dollars and he was only 16 years old at the time. With his first lump-sum wealth, he decides to start any business possible. However, he was too young and inexperienced to quickly jump into the hotbed; he ends up blowing up 90 percent of his wealth and fell into a conman's trap. During his business career, Kwangwoon imports from Japan the incandescent light bulbs to Korea for the first time in Korean history since Thomas Edison invented it in 1879; this was a significant moment and a new era for Korea because in the early 1900s Korea's main source of light was the lantern. Kwangwoon later imports Japanese raw electronic products and establishes assembling factories and dominates the electronics trading districts from southern part of Korea up to Manchuria of China today. Kwangwoon Cho in his 20's was already running multi-million dollar businesses comparable to Samsung or LG of today. Later in his business career, he wanted to do something more meaningful with his money and he listens to the advises from one of his closest friends, Konosuke Matsushita (founder of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., today Panasonic and also known as the god of management field in Japan) to do education business in Korea. Thereafter, Kwangwoon spent all of his wealth on establishing a college in Korea and started as Chosun Radio Training Centre in 1934, in 1963 Kwangwoon Institute of Technology was established. Kwangwoon became a 4-year degree granting university in 1988 as Musung Cho, the second son of Kwangwoon and the first president of Kwangwoon University was the main person to lead the way.

• Today, Kwangwoon University has seven colleges and an independent division of Korean language and literature: College of Electronics & Information Engineering, College of Engineering, College of Natural Science, College of Social Science, College of Law, College of Business Administration, and College of Norteast Asia.