🎓 Presenting at the OKAS Career Forum

Through a contact’s introduction, I was invited to speak at the annual Career Forum run by the Oxford Korean Academic Society (OKAS). Once I got connected to the president of the society, I introduced my wife and one of our church’s Oxford-educated deacons as well—which meant that out of six speakers on the day, three were members of Ealing Korean Church. Glorious over-representation. God was clearly in that room before we even arrived.

The day itself had a striking backdrop: it happened to fall on the coronation day of King Charles III. We watched the coronation service together as a family in the morning—an extraordinary thing in itself—before driving to Oxford in the afternoon.

I had prepared a talk titled “From Academia to Industry,” covering two main themes:

• The transferable skills that genuinely cross over from academic work into industry roles
• The importance of knowing where your lines are and holding them—because integrity over the long run is what separates people who last from those who don’t

For the second point, I shared the story about the name of Jesus—a real incident from my own workplace—framing it as a narrative rather than a lecture. The room locked in. You could feel the shift.

What happened afterward was what stayed with me. Several people—including one of the other speakers—approached me privately. They told me they were believers, but that they had been standing by silently as the name of Jesus was trampled in their academic and professional environments, doing nothing. They said they’d been challenged, and they were going to find their courage.

I don’t take credit for that. I just told a story. God did the rest.

My wife also presented—on the topic of “How to Become Someone People Want to Work With Long-Term,” drawn from her experience at FutureLearn. Honestly? She got the best response in the room. The moment that stood out most: she looked directly at the women in the audience and told them plainly not to make the mistake of delaying marriage or children for the sake of a career—because careers can be rebuilt, but there are biological and circumstantial windows for marriage and motherhood that don’t stay open forever.

The undergraduates shrugged it off. But the postgraduates and postdocs—the women who were already feeling the weight of those decisions—came to her one by one afterward, nearly in tears, saying things like: “I wish someone had told me this years ago.”

Though, honestly? They probably wouldn’t have listened then either. Some things you only hear when you’re ready.