Writing | Sanghyuk Chun

After 7.5 years, my journey at NAVER has come to an end. I’m excited about what’s next, but deeply grateful for everything I’ve experienced and learned from NAVER. Leaving NAVER, I’d like to put my thoughts and emotions into words.

My Journey at NAVER

Before joining NAVER, I had already started questioning whether I was meant to do research. I completed my master’s degree in machine learning before the deep learning boom. While I enjoyed solving problems, I wasn’t confident that I had any talent for research or that continuing down this path would bring me happiness. At the end of my master’s, I felt increasingly uncertain about the purpose of what I was doing. Instead of continuing the ambiguous academic career, I decided to work on something closer to the real world.

That’s how I ended up at Kakao as a research engineer, building recommender systems. There was fast feedback, real users, and tangible impact. I learned a lot from this experience. But over time, I felt the limitations of what I could do. I wanted to solve more challenging problems, rather than reproducing the previous solutions. However, I wasn’t prepared to approach work in that way.

After two years at Kakao, I moved to NAVER in early 2018. At the time, NAVER was expanding its AI research group (then known as CLOVA AI Research) and was open to hiring young people with more passion even if inexperienced. I was fortunate to be given a chance to join the research team at NAVER, even without a publication to my name (literally, the only thing I had was a rejected paper, which later became my master’s thesis; my first publication is CutMix and WCT$^2$ in ICCV 2019).

My first goal at NAVER was simple: I wanted to probe whether I could actually do research. During my master’s and time at Kakao, I had lost a lot of confidence. I was unsure of my abilities and deeply insecure about whether I belonged in this world at all. If research turned out not to be for me, I planned to accept that and return to a software engineer position, where I already had a stable 4+ year career and good offers.

In 2018, I tried several research projects. Most failed. But in 2019, things started to click. I had my first publications (CutMix and WCT$^2$) and many exciting research projects were ongoing. That gave me the clarity I needed: maybe I could do this. Maybe I could even be happy doing this.

That same year, I visited NAVER Labs Europe for three months and led a research project for the first time. That project became PCME, which was accepted to CVPR 2020. It was my first first-author paper, and the first research I had truly led since starting my master’s in 2014—seven years earlier.

Why I’m Leaving

Slowly, I became someone who not only received help from brilliant colleagues, but could also help others. I began to stand on my own as a researcher. And with steady work and collaboration, I recently crossed a milestone I never imagined—over 10,000 citations—something that feels surreal even now.

Throughout all of this, one question never left me: Can I live a life built around research? Am I capable of it? Not just technically, but emotionally, sustainably?

When the answer finally felt like “yes”, my path became clear. I wanted to become a faculty member; I wanted to build my own research team, pursue my own research agenda, and teach students to help train the next generation of great researchers. But to do that, I needed a Ph.D.–and I didn’t have one.

Over the years, I quietly applied to Ph.D. programs a few times. I was rejected at the final round more than once. During COVID, I hit pause. In 2022, I got married. My priorities shifted. But the dream never went away. Eventually, I realized I couldn’t keep postponing it. So I tried again. This time, it worked.

It wasn’t an easy decision. This has been a momentous decision for me and my family. NAVER has been my professional home for recent years. But I’ve reached a point where I feel the need to go deeper into research and into long-term thinking.

What’s Next?

Starting this fall, I’ll begin my Ph.D. at Princeton University. It will be a new chapter in my journey as a researcher, one that I hope will sharpen my thinking and open new directions.

At Princeton, I hope to explore directions of research that were harder to pursue before, while also continuing the lines of work I’ve come to know well. Most likely, I’ll end up somewhere in between: building on familiar foundations while pushing toward questions that are uniquely mine.

I’m looking forward to focusing more deeply on my own research agenda—and to finally spending time on curiosity-driven questions. I hope Princeton will be a place where that’s possible.

In Closing

As I look back on my time at NAVER, a few critical turning points stand out. Moving from a project-driven team to a research-driven one was a major shift. Being part of the CutMix project as a co-author was an incredible stroke of luck. But in hindsight, these milestones weren’t just lucky breaks—they were the results of actively seeking out opportunities and pursuing them with intent.

This decision to pursue a Ph.D. at Princeton feels similar: a new goal, and a new opportunity that I’ve worked to create.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time at NAVER, it’s that opportunities rarely come on their own. You have to create them. And when you do, they can become inflection points, moments where the gradient of your life changes.

To all of my colleagues at NAVER who helped me along the way: thank you. I’m deeply grateful, and I’ll carry everything I’ve learned from you into this next chapter.