'My research reflects my exploration and discovery'

Max Nam: English

5/15/2026

Max Nam

English
Seoul, South Korea

Why did you choose Cornell?

I was drawn to Cornell's emphasis on interdisciplinary learning – not necessarily because I wanted to study multiple academic subjects myself, but because I felt that it would allow me to place my own personal studies in literature in conversation with the studies of students from a range of other academic disciplines.

In particular, I applied to Cornell with an expressed interest in the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity, a program that emphasizes collaboration between students across STEM and humanities departments. It was important to me that, as someone with a much stronger orientation toward the arts than the sciences, I nevertheless had access to cross-disciplinary spaces that would encourage me to keep engaging with people of fundamentally different intellectual mindsets than my own. Over the past four years, I've definitely managed to find some of those spaces.

What is your main extracurricular activity and why is it important to you?

Since sophomore year I've been a member of Shimtah, the Korean traditional drumming club on campus. It was through Shimtah that I made many of my closest friends at Cornell, and being part of the club has provided me with a crucial recreational outlet.

What are the most valuable skills you gained from your Arts & Sciences education?

The most valuable skill that I've gained over the past four years is learning how to read (or how to read better). For me, learning how to examine texts in class – how to trace a personal reaction to a literary text back to the elements that provoked it – has been inseparable from learning how to examine the "text" that is the world around me. Becoming more literate in the classroom has equipped me to be a more literate reader of my own life.

What have you accomplished as a Cornell student that you are most proud of?

I've had several opportunities to engage in research throughout my time at Cornell. For my junior year project in the Milstein Program, I conducted a series of interviews on "Re-Humanizing the Academy," in which I spoke with various Cornell students and faculty on pertinent issues faced by the humanities in the university – how writing professors are approaching the emergence of generative AI, how reading ought to be taught in class, how humanities departments should model themselves in an increasingly STEM-focused world.

In the Humanities Scholars Program and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, I've spent the past two years developing an independent thesis on Korean literature, focusing on the concept of "landscape" (as in landscape painting) to think about how Korean writers across time have used linguistic representations of nature to generate notions of historical continuity, tradition and national identity (notions that we still rely on without realizing it).

Finally, for my English honors thesis I wrote a comparative study of Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne, two canonical British authors who have never really been placed in conversation with one another, and through the comparison, I'm attempting to rethink conventional ideas about things like the history of the novel, the novel form itself and the ways in which we draw "meaning" from literary texts.

More than the final products themselves, what I'm proud of is the personal effort and growth that these projects represent. Four years ago I wouldn't have been able to articulate a single topic that interested me enough to engage in long-term research on it, let alone two or three. For me, the very existence of my research topics is a reflection of just as much exploration and discovery as the work within the actual projects. Each of the three projects matters to me for a different reason – but all three are proof that I have, in fact, found something that matters.

Every year, our faculty nominate graduating Arts & Sciences students to be featured as part of our Extraordinary Journeys series. Read more about the Class of 2026.