One Strange Bastard
My schedule had definitely been nerfed from a university student’s point of view.
Starting with Professor Hwang Junhak’s class, I was taking advanced courses that even seniors dreaded signing up for.
“But why’d you suddenly change your schedule like that? It was basically a gold mine.”
“I’m just trying to get on good terms with the professors who matter. You never know when or how you’ll need their help.”
“You’re going to stay busy anyway. How are you planning to handle assignments and exams?”
“By studying and doing well. I’ll make it work.”
Everyone in the club was shaking their heads, but I was satisfied.
For the time being, we had a lot of development work to do ourselves, so I wanted to take as many strong classes as possible.
And, like I’d told the others, it wasn’t a bad idea to make myself known to the professors who mattered.
“So what class are you taking this time?”
“Professor Hwang Junhak’s class. Deep Learning for Artificial Intelligence.”
“Huh?”
At my answer, everyone clammed up and went quiet.
Of course, I also knew why the existing club members had gone silent all at once.
Only Seonghun-hyung looked around at us with a face that said he had no idea what was going on.
“Why? Because it’s Professor Hwang Junhak’s class?”
“No. It’s because some strange bastard is taking that class.”
“How do you know that bastard’s in the class?”
“Word got around. And you know he’s always liked Professor Hwang Junhak.”
“Who the hell is ‘he’?”
Choi Yeonghun quietly dragged Seonghun-hyung over to a corner.
“It’s fine. I can handle it. Text me later and tell me whether or not you want to drink.”
Right. He really was an irritating bastard.
If things had gone according to the future I knew, he would keep annoying me in other ways too.
“Yeah. I’ll just deal with it myself.”
But the future that had been set in motion and the future I was building now were not the same.
Starting with me, everything had changed completely.
“Do you think you can keep taking the class while staring at Ji Minhwan the whole time?”
“I’m fine.”
“What if that weird bastard does something weird again?”
“I’ll handle it. I’m heading to class~”
I left the club room behind the others, who were getting angry on my behalf, and headed out for class.
As I walked to the lecture hall, I kept thinking back to my younger days.
“Mm. Still crystal clear.”
Ji Minhwan.
The guy the club members and I called the strange bastard.
The reason he had earned that nickname was simple.
Last year, he had copied our group assignment exactly as it was and submitted it before we did.
So when we, after running test after test, finally turned ours in on the deadline, we nearly got saddled with an F as the “kids who copied the code.”
The professor for that course was close to Ji Minhwan’s family, which made it brutally hard to explain ourselves.
We even went to the professor’s lab and wrote the code from scratch in front of him.
And even then, only our club members were the ones who took the hit.
“Hah. He’s reminding me of JH Medical.”
Ever since then, our club members had refused to even look at Ji Minhwan.
When we were signing up for classes this semester, we even joked, “If Ji Minhwan’s in it, let’s drop the course.”
Still, that kind of brazen move wouldn’t fly in Professor Hwang Junhak’s class.
“Forget it. Just let it go.”
I sat down in the lecture hall and looked only at Professor Hwang Junhak, who had already arrived before me.
Yes. If something like that happened in Professor Hwang’s class, he wouldn’t sit still for it.
“I’ll call attendance for Deep Learning for Artificial Intelligence.”
Professor Hwang Junhak was calling the roll in his calm voice, and for some reason, he looked reassuring.
I was smiling with relief when our eyes met.
“Why have you been looking at me and smiling strangely since earlier, Kim Siwon?”
“No reason at all. I’m sorry.”
At Professor Hwang’s reaction, the sixteen people in the lecture hall all turned to look at me at once.
Ji Minhwan was among them, of course.
Everyone looked thoroughly flustered.
“What the hell? Professor Hwang Junhak remembered a student’s name.”
“Damn it, what is this? What if he knows that guy and only gives him good grades?”
“Forget it. This class is pass/fail anyway.”
A university professor remembering and calling out a student’s name was not a common thing.
So I could hear the other students whispering and making wild guesses.
Well. It wasn’t enough to really bother me, so I was fine.
“As I’ve been saying since orientation, this lecture will focus on AI for image, video, and audio analysis. Both the midterm and the final will be replaced by papers, but they’ll still need to be written in proper academic format, so you should all start thinking now about what you’re going to do.”
Professor Hwang’s class was famously brutal.
Unlike courses where you could cram and sit for an exam, this one required you to write a report in paper format as an exam replacement, and even after all that work, there was no guarantee what grade you’d get.
Even so, the seventeen students taking this class were all running after one thing: Professor Hwang Junhak himself.
Some were thinking about graduate school. Some were thinking about his network.
It was not a class for ordinary college students.
“Last time I showed you examples, so this week I’ll explain things directly from a developer’s perspective.”
He pushed ahead without even stopping for basic conceptual explanations, so most of the students couldn’t stop taking notes.
Except me.
[What are you going to choose for the paper topic?]
[I’m thinking of doing something related to our product.]
[Yeah. The more published reference papers you have, the better. Are you focusing on AI performance?]
[I was thinking of focusing on the technology.]
[Write down all the paper titles you’re considering.]
I argued fiercely with Badugi over how to handle the assignment.
Of course, I was still glancing up at the lecture and listening.
I’d already seen and experienced the practical application stage of every theory and example being introduced in class, so just watching it unfold like this made it easy to keep up.
[Have you thought about the product name?]
[Since it uses X-rays, I’m wondering whether I should put an X in it, or use VET since it’s a medical device for animals.]
[Decide before your next meeting with Professor Shin Dongjin. He’s a lot less patient than he looks, so he’ll hate it if you drag this out.]
[True. I should settle it quickly. Once we finish talking with Your Paw, he’ll probably tell me to call him right away.]
I immediately started gathering everyone’s opinions on the product name in the club chat.
He was the kind of person who would suddenly call us up to his lab at the most unexpected time and then ask out of nowhere about the product name and company name.
[When do you think the professor will go meet the Your Paw people?]
I typed the vague thought into my memo app, and Badugi narrowed its eyes at me.
[He’ll meet them faster than you think. Definitely.]
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Badugi wasn’t wrong.
The moment Kim Siwon was still agonizing over the product name, Professor Shin Dongjin was already making the meeting with Your Paw’s CEO happen.
“Oh, Professor! Thank you so much for coming all the way out here.”
“Not at all. I was due to stop by the shelter next door anyway.”
“Ah, yes. I heard they had a rough time of it with the parvovirus.”
“They did, which is why I came.”
Professor Shin Dongjin had a strong affection for animals.
He would stop by shelters across the country at random and give them simple checkups and treatment.
In the same vein, he was also active as a representative for Your Paw, the nationwide stray-animal adoption platform.
That was why Professor Shin’s heart had actually started racing the moment he heard Kim Siwon’s proposal.
An opportunity had finally come to massively upgrade the Your Paw app, which he himself felt was lacking.
“Did you review the proposal I sent you by email?”
“Ah, yes. You mean the proposal where your students at Korea University handle the app update in exchange for sharing your animals’ X-ray images with us going forward, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, that would be wonderful for us. If Professor Shin Dongjin is recommending them, then they must be truly trustworthy people.”
“I see.”
At the CEO’s words, Professor Shin let a small smile touch his face.
Truly trustworthy people.
He wondered if it was really appropriate to use such an overgenerous expression for a bunch of college students.
But when he thought of Kim Siwon, Professor Shin could say it with confidence.
“It’s a place led by a brilliant young man who seems like he’s on his second life. They’re trustworthy.”
At Professor Shin’s generous appraisal, the Your Paw CEO looked faintly surprised.
“It’s rare for you to speak so highly of anyone.”
“This was a genuinely unusual case. Even Professor Hwang in computer engineering, who’s stricter than I am, was praising him to the skies.”
He was talking about Hwang Junhak.
“But is it really okay for them to make an app and even handle a certain level of maintenance just in exchange for a few X-ray files? I’m a little worried about heat-bleed controversies or things like that later on.”
“What do you mean? If you tried to buy each and every one of those data sets with money, it would be even more expensive.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Requests like this are going to keep coming in later, too, so if you get an offer like that, make sure you tell me. I’ll check whether it’s worth doing.”
AI did not just appear out of thin air.
It had to learn from a large volume of data before it could become an AI, and then that AI could become even smarter.
For that reason, the value of data used to train AI would only keep rising, and Professor Shin Dongjin understood that very well.
That was why he had told the Your Paw CEO not to hand their data around carelessly to just anyone.
“Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.”
The CEO of Your Paw smiled faintly too.
It was strange to see a professor, clearly keeping his guard up and stressing the point so firmly, bring in a proposal on behalf of someone who had not even finished registering a business yet.
It was also proof that Professor Shin held Kim Siwon in higher regard than most people would have expected.
But Professor Shin wasn’t the only one talking up Kim Siwon and spreading his name around.
Professor Hwang Junhak had also, without even realizing it, played a major part in raising Kim Siwon’s reputation.
“What kind of student is Kim Siwon?”
The other professors in the computer engineering department were surprised that Professor Hwang had become the capstone advisor for Kim Siwon’s club.
So curiosity about Kim Siwon had grown very strong among the professors as well.
His image had shifted completely, from “a student who studies well” to “a student who has something special about him.”
That was why so many people came to ask Professor Hwang directly what kind of kid Kim Siwon was.
Professor Hwang’s answer, to put it in someone else’s words, was ridiculous.
“Well, he’s the top student, isn’t he? Of course, when he talks, he sounds like a businessman with an MBA. But his coding and his knowledge are all better than what you’d see from most people who’ve finished doctoral programs. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
He said it as though it were nothing, but the answer was packed with every compliment imaginable.
Most people who heard it had no idea how they were supposed to react.
That was because none of them had expected Professor Hwang to go that far.
“He must be very smart, then. If Professor Hwang Junhak says it like that.”
“He’s just a genius. Ah, you don’t know what project he’s working on this time, do you? Want me to show you?”
There were even times when he would lay out Kim Siwon’s proposal point by point and deliver a whole lecture on why Kim Siwon was impressive.
So the professors couldn’t help but find Kim Siwon strange.
They couldn’t understand why that deadpan, pessimistic man had ended up praising one undergraduate like that.
Meanwhile, Professor Hwang himself never even realized he was praising anyone at all.
From Professor Hwang’s point of view, he was just stating the facts as they were.
“Minhwan. You know Professor Hwang is Kim Siwon’s capstone advisor, right?”
And that news reached Ji Minhwan’s ears as well.