Founder · 999 Forum
Kent Kim spent eight years running an admissions academy in New York and Seoul, and thirteen in education. The 999 Forum is that work pointed the other way.
He arrived in the United States at sixteen, in his first year of high school, and was admitted to Harvard three and a half years later. He studied economics. Then he spent most of a career on the machinery of getting students from one country into another country's universities.
From 2003 he ran Ivy Plan, an admissions preparation school with three locations in New York and New Jersey, and reopened it in Seoul in 2008 with a fellow Harvard alumnus — eight years of the academy, inside a stretch from 2003 to 2016 spent in education, which also included a directorship at the Chungdahm Institute. He has published twenty-three books, the first of them in 2000, most of them about admissions and how to study. He wrote and presented a twenty-episode education series for MBC. He has spoken to more than a million people across Korea since 1996.
All of it pointed the same way: students, toward a university in another country.
The 999 Forum is the same expertise pointed the other way. The world's students, inward. The logistics are identical — recruitment, visas, housing, safety, credit, families who need convincing. Only the direction changed.
From outside it looks scattered. Painter at kentkim.us. Game developer and novelist at de-other.com. Composer. Author. A motivational speaker who has stood in front of Korean audiences for thirty years.
From inside it is one habit, repeated. Twenty-three books. Five hundred songs written and four hundred and seven released — he started composing at forty. Ten games built alone, without an engineering background, and shown at CES, Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show. A 75,000-word novel. Paintings. A short film that won its category at a Hollywood festival. He goes inside a thing, makes something, and puts it out.
That is also, exactly, what this programme asks of a student. Go inside an industry and come out with something you made. It is not an accident that the person who designed it works that way.
And the speaking matters more than it looks. For three decades he has stood in front of Korean teenagers — university orientations of three thousand, parents' seminars of a thousand, a juvenile detention centre, an orphanage — and told them to start. Over a million of them. The 999 Forum is that same sentence, addressed to students anywhere in the world, with an industry and a plane ticket attached to it.
The ambition is not modest: a Davos for Asia, founded in Seoul, on a date that never moves. That is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up, because the obvious objection deserves an answer.
Davos works for one reason that has nothing to do with the mountain. The same people come back every year for fifty years. It started in 1971 with about four hundred people and took half a century to become what it is. What a forum needs is not a venue and a speaker list — those are easy to buy. It needs a reason for people to return, and it needs to keep producing participants.
A forum with no mechanism to make its own people is a conference. It runs three editions on enthusiasm and then quietly stops. Korea has watched this happen more than once.
So the school comes first and the forum is where it settles up. Students come to Korea every quarter, go inside an industry, and write. On 9 September the year's work is presented, and the next year's question is set. The forum is not the point of arrival; it is the annual closing of a loop that runs all year.
The speaking record in full — every engagement with its date and audience size as reported by the organiser — is available on request.
A founder page that only lists achievements is an advertisement. Here is the other half, because a study abroad office will work it out anyway and it is better said here.
He is not an academic. He has never held a faculty post, and the assessment of student reports will be done by university faculty, not by him. He has never run a study abroad programme. Running an admissions academy is adjacent to this work, not the same as it — the health and safety apparatus that a US university requires is being built now, with a dedicated staff hire who will know more about it than he does.
And the first cohort has not run. Nothing on this site is a track record for this programme; it is a track record for the person starting it. Those are different claims and we are only making the second one.
If you run a study abroad office, teach somewhere you think should send students, or want to open an industry, this is the stage where a conversation actually changes the programme.
Contact · info@platoschool.us
Programme, for students · Fact sheet, for study abroad offices · Tracks · 999 포럼 (한국어)