BIO
Minjae Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1988. He was born to two parents and grew up with an older sister; his father worked in the finance industry, and his mother worked at the Federal Reserve of Korea before quitting to take care of the household. He attended grade school and junior high at public schools in Seoul before moving at age 16 to attend a private high school in the United States. After graduating high school in Colorado, Kim attended the University of Chicago for his undergraduate years and graduated with a B.A. in Political Science in 2012. Soon after, Kim received his PhD in Management (Economic Sociology) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 and was employed as a post-doctoral fellow at Northwestern University from 2018-2020. Currently, Kim works as an assistant professor of management at the Jones Graduate School of Business School and an affiliated assistant professor of sociology at Rice University. In this interview, Kim discusses his early memories with his family in Seoul, his upbringing with his parents, his early career aspirations, his personal choice to attend high school in the States, differences between Korean and American education systems, his experiences with the Asian American community in Houston and other cities, his experience with UChicago and its Korean community, his journey to becoming a teacher, his experiences in teaching, his study on the Granovetter’s weak tie theory, his future research interests, his thoughts.