② So I met students outside

In a lecture hall packed with seventy students, you can spend an entire semester without learning most of their names. You take attendance, advance slides, ask for questions, sit through the silence, and watch everyone leave. This is not a bad day, but rather the default. And as the feeling I described in the first essay, that my lectures had become a kind of performance, grew harder to ignore, I found myself wanting something different. Fewer students. Less distance. Actual contact.

Around that time, I noticed something. The same students who barely stayed awake in lectures were pulling all-nighters for their extracurriculars. Consulting clubs, investment clubs, case competition teams. Students who sat motionless in my classroom were suddenly bright-eyed and obsessive the moment they walked into a club meeting. The easy conclusion would be to say they're unfocused, but that reading doesn't survive contact with the evidence.

These students aren't lacking drive. They're lacking conditions in which that drive has somewhere to go.

Here's what makes it even more interesting. From a professor's perspective, a lot of (if not entirely) what they are doing in these clubs is wrong. The analysis is shallow, the frameworks are misapplied, the conclusions don't hold up. And yet they throw themselves into it. They stay up until 3 a.m. producing work that wouldn't pass a midterm. Why? Because they chose the problem. They built something with their own hands. They argued with teammates and saw whether their ideas survived. Right or wrong, the work was theirs. In the lecture hall, by contrast, they copy what a professor has decided to teach, at a pace the professor has decided to set. One is active. The other is passive. The problem was obviously in the structure.

I wanted to bring this observation inside a classroom. The conditions that make students voluntarily lose sleep: small group, open-ended problem, something to build, immediate feedback. Can those be made into a course?

Hanyang University Business School runs a program called BizLab. Professors operate small labs where a handful of students spend an entire semester on a single project. Full commitment, for 9 credit hours. It's a semester of making something instead of a semester of sitting through something. I run one of these labs: LABA, the Lab for AI and Business Application. The broad theme is interpreting and applying AI and emerging technology in business contexts. I take four students per semester. Fifteen to twenty apply, typically the most motivated in the school.

Getting this right took time. The most painful early lesson was that a single semester is absurdly short. By the time we'd chosen a topic, built foundational skills, and started creating anything real, midterms had arrived. So now I run a boot camp during the break,AI tools, basic coding, background reading... so the semester can begin with the project itself on day one. This wasn't part of any grand design. It came from failing and adjusting.

Once the semester starts, we hold weekly lab meetings. But the real rhythm of the work is much more frequent than that. Students come by my office when they're stuck, when they need to think something through, sometimes just to sit and talk. Looking back, the most consequential conversations almost always happen in these unplanned visits, not in the formal sessions.

There is one pattern that repeats and I find it endlessly revealing. These students are, by any conventional measure, excellent. They ace exams, deliver polished assignments, handle structured problems with ease. But when I ask them "What problem do you want to solve?", they all stall. Almost without exception.

When I think about why, the answer seems clear: they have essentially never been asked to find a problem on their own. From middle school through university, problems have always arrived pre-packaged. Textbook exercises, professor-assigned papers, corporate case studies. The system has produced people who are extraordinarily good at solving problems someone else defined, and almost completely inexperienced at figuring out which problems matter.

What actually happens to students inside this environment, and how this small structure produces results so different from a seventy-person lecture hall is what I am about to discuss in the next piece.