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A KAIST undergraduate student who developed and sold a smart phone application donated USD 26,000 to his alma mater.
Seung-Kyu Oh of the School of Electrical Engineering gave his donation to President Steve Kang of KAIST on November 24, 2015. This is the largest amount donated by an enrolled undergraduate.
In 2010, at a time when android smart phones were just being released, Mr. Oh decided to develop a subway app because existing subway apps were not user-friendly.
Mr. Oh’s “Subway Navigation” app checks the current operation hours and gives users the shortest path when the user selects points of departure and arrival. The calculation for the shortest path involves factors such as which train comes first, where and to what train to transfer, the first and last trains of the day, transfer passageway usage time, etc.
To make the app useful to the largest number of people, Mr. Oh distributed it on the open market. Currently, the app is ranked the second most downloaded subway app, and has even made considerable advertising profits, having accumulated more than 5,000,000 users. This year, Mr. Oh received an offer from Kakao, an Internet company based in Seoul, Korea, to take over the app and sold it to them.
Mr. Oh said that making a donation KAIST was the first thing that came to his mind when he earned this profit.
Mr. Oh, who graduated from the Korea Science Academy, a science magnet high school, said that he felt a sense of responsibility for receiving support from Korea since high school, and that he decided to donate to KAIST as a way of returning the support that he had received so far.
He further said that “if an individual’s efforts and talents created some profit together with what he or she learned from school, then the school that supported the student in furthering his studies has also played a significant role,” and that “likewise, our stellar alumni can contribute more to our younger classmates’ growth and development.”
Mr. Oh, who is at his last semester, plans to join Kakao and will take on a job managing his subway app.
President Kang said he hopes that “all KAISTians will emulate Mr. Oh’s example to support the school” and that “the university will use the money to invest further in its future.”
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