KIAT Wraps Up ‘2025 Uni-Week & STOB League,’ Spotlighting Future High-Tech Talent

- The 2025 Specialized Uni-Week & STOB League, organized by the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology (KIAT) and the Ministry of Education, brought together 1,500 students and major corporations to nurture future talent in high-tech industries through immersive experiences, networking, and career programs.
- The event featured expert lectures, job fairs, mentoring, and the STOB League competition, where university teams solved real-world problems in semiconductors and secondary batteries, with top teams receiving awards and overseas training opportunities.
- KIAT President Byung-joo Min emphasized that the participants' challenging spirit will drive both individual growth and South Korea's competitiveness in global markets.


In a strategic move to nurture young technical talent pivotal to the competitiveness of the nation's high-tech industries and to broaden the interface with industrial sites, the ‘2025 Specialized Uni-Week & STOB League’ was held for three days from Nov. 19 to 21 at KINTEX Exhibition Center 2 in Ilsan, Korea.

Organized by the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology (KIAT) and hosted by the Ministry of Education (MOE), the event established itself as a large-scale participatory growth platform. It saw the attendance of approximately 1,500 students from universities specializing in high-tech industries, alongside 20 leading domestic and international corporations and seven graduate schools.

2025 Uni-Week & STOB League / source=IT dongA

Marking its second year, the event was anchored by the slogan "Who is Next?" and centered around three key themes: Experience, Connection, and Transformation. Participants were able to concretize their career paths and design their professional trajectories through immersive experience content, networking with experts and peers, and career matching programs.

From Talk Concerts to Corporate Job Fairs

The overall program was bifurcated into the ‘2025 Specialized Uni-Week,’ a growth support program, and the ‘STOB League,’ a practical competency competition. Uni-Week featured opening and closing ceremonies, expert lectures, job information sessions, mentoring, and an experience/event zone. Meanwhile, the STOB League hosted the finals and awards ceremony for competitions in core industrial sectors such as semiconductors and secondary batteries.

Day 1 kicked off the festivities with the opening ceremony. On the main stage, a ‘Uni-Live’ talk concert hosted by science communicator ‘Orbit’ and PhD in Pharmacy ‘Yak’ was held, sharing trendy science and technology topics with students in real-time. This was followed by a special lecture by Tae-woong Park, Chairman of Hanbit Media, which broadened students' perspectives on future technologies.

Day 2 focused on satisfying students' practical demands for career exploration. A series of job information sessions featured a massive lineup of core domestic and global companies, including Hyundai Mobis, Silicon Mitus, ADTechnology, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Oracle. Following this, motivational lectures by Professor Nak-joon Lee (author of the webtoon Trauma Center: Golden Hour) and the production team of the KBS documentary The War for Talent resonated deeply with the youth. Lectures on core competencies for future talent by Professor Yong-seok Seo and discussions on books and films by Professor Beom-joon Kim were also praised for instilling humanities literacy in the participants.

Day 3 began with the ‘Uni Golden Bell,’ a web-game campus battle where future talent university students gathered to compete on basic knowledge of high-tech industries. The afternoon featured the event's highlight, the ‘STOB League Finals & Awards Ceremony,’ bringing the three-day journey to a close.

Throughout the event, the Seminar Zone operated programs for balanced growth, including job sessions, book/film discussions, and posture correction lectures. The Experience/Event Zone attracted participants with diverse content such as screen sports and VR, while F&B options like Old Ferry Donut were provided for the students.

In the Mentoring Zone, customized counseling was offered by matching students with experts in core fields such as semiconductors, batteries, and bio-health. Twenty booths provided practical employment support, including resume and interview consulting. Participation motivation and a sense of achievement were simultaneously heightened through a stamp tour, a level-up system, and individual growth activity logs.

STOB League: The Cradle of Future Tech Talent and Industry-Practical Competition

The STOB League, a major pillar of this event, is an industry-practical competition where students from universities specializing in semiconductors and secondary batteries compete on technical competencies by executing problem-solving projects from actual industrial sites. 37 teams that survived the fierce preliminaries presented their creativity and problem-solving abilities before a panel of judges through a 15-minute presentation and a 10-minute Q&A session.

The STOB League Awards Ceremony on the afternoon of the third day was the highlight of the festival. The 2025 STOB League is a ‘Semiconductor Industry Pain Point Resolution Competition’ hosted by the Ministry of Education, KIAT, and the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association (KSIA), and sponsored by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. This year, the scope was expanded to establish a ‘Secondary Battery’ sector, hosted by the Korea Battery Industry Association (KBIA) and sponsored by LG Energy Solution.

Participants took on the challenge of solving technical difficulties in the semiconductor and battery sectors. In the semiconductor sector, a total of 11 problems were presented: 5 in the circuit/design/system fields dealing with chip design and yield improvement, and 6 in the device/process/materials/parts/equipment/packaging fields dealing with miniaturization processes. In the secondary battery sector, two problems centered on the industry's technical tasks were presented. Participants went through two rounds of preliminaries and were evaluated through face-to-face PT judging during Uni-Week.

In this year’s finals, three teams in the semiconductor field—Ajou University’s ‘CosMOS’, Chungbuk National University’s ‘Power Cooling’, and the Korea University-Inje University joint team ‘BOTS’—and one team in the secondary battery field—Chonnam National University’s ‘NPChangeUP’—clinched the Grand Prize.

Team 'CosMOS' Receives the Grand Prize at the 2025 Specialized Uni-Week & STOB League / source=IT dongA

The Grand Prize-winning teams were awarded the Minister of Education Award, along with special perks such as overseas winter training opportunities, a cash prize of 5 million KRW, and a plaque of appreciation for their advising professors. Seven teams winning the Top Excellence Award received overseas training opportunities and 4 million KRW, while seven Excellence Award teams received the KIAT President Award and 3 million KRW.

Min-gyeom Kim, a student from the semiconductor Grand Prize team ‘CosMOS,’ stated, “In the semiconductor field facing the limits of micro-processes, I was able to build broad knowledge by proposing new ideas and systematically acquire the process and design capabilities required by domestic semiconductor companies.” Park Jeong-won from the ‘BOTS’ team remarked, “I grew by studying with team members and gradually improving the completeness of our work. Based on this experience, I have set a goal to unfold my ideas in the actual field.” Yang So-min from ‘NPChangeUP,’ the Grand Prize winner in the secondary battery sector, said, “I have a lot of interest in systems that verify battery safety, and the STOB League was a great opportunity to dig deep into one specific area.”

Meanwhile, Byung-joo Min, President of KIAT, commented, “At the core of South Korean companies gaining competitiveness and brand power in the global market was the development of manufacturing and innovation in industrial technology, and behind that was the contribution of excellent talent.” He added, “I expect that the challenging spirit of the students who participated in the STOB League and Uni-Week will become a great force for the growth of South Korea as well as individual growth in the future.”

By Ye-ji Kim (yj@itdonga.com)