By IndieGame.com Editorial Team | December 30, 2025
Gachon University (President Lee Gil-ya) successfully hosted its “2025 Pre-graduates Performance Presentation and Job Matching Exhibition” on December 27. The event targeted third-year students from the Department of Game & Media, an early-employment contract department designed to bridge the gap between academic theory and industry practice.
Bridging the Gap: The Early-Employment Model
The exhibition featured the Class of 2023, who are scheduled to graduate in the spring of 2026. These students presented the culmination of three years of intensive, specialized education combined with corporate-linked practical training.
Attendees from the gaming and digital content industries showed significant interest in projects utilizing cutting-edge technologies, including Unity, Unreal Engine 5, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Unlike traditional academic showcases, this event highlighted portfolios developed while students were already integrated into professional work environments.
Voices from the Field
Several students currently working at prominent game companies through the university’s program shared their experiences:
- Lim Kyung-min (Masangsoft), Lee Soon-hyung (SuperXcon), and Lee Hyun-woo (Delicious Games) noted that the primary strength of the early-employment contract department is the organic connection between classroom learning and real-world projects.
- “Being able to immediately apply theories to actual development cycles helped us build professional problem-solving skills and adaptability even before graduation,” the students stated.
Global Recognition: CES 2026 Best of Innovation
The department’s commitment to innovation was recently validated on the global stage. “STORYSYNC,” a real-time interactive AI media facade content project involving Professor Kim Jeong-yun’s research team and current students, was awarded the Best of Innovation at CES 2026.
This achievement is particularly noteworthy as it is the only award won by a Korean university at this year’s CES, proving that Gachon’s industry-academic cooperation model is of a world-class standard.
A Vision for Future Talent
Professor Kim Jeong-yun, who led the award-winning research, expressed pride in the students’ growth. “This exhibition was a place where the capabilities accumulated through a unified process of education, research, and corporate practice were revealed as concrete results,” he said. He further committed to advancing the industry-academic model to produce talent equipped with both technical mastery and industry sensibility.
Supported by the Ministry of Education and the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology (KIAT), Gachon University plans to continue strengthening its system for nurturing creative, field-ready talent across the gaming, media, and AI convergence sectors.
