This study aimed to compile a small corpus of essays written by international students studying at South Korean universities, extract high-frequency vocabulary from the corpus, and analyze the content of the essays to research the perceptions of international students about university life. To achieve this, the researchers compiled a small corpus of 68 essays written by foreign international students about their university experiences. The researcher manually typed and saved the materials written by the learners in Word files, preserving any errors made by the learners in the raw data. Subse quently, the raw data were refined by correcting the errors. The processed data were subjected to morphological analysis using the Kkma morphological analyzer, and a word frequency list was generated using the AntConc word module (version 4.2.0). The extracted words were then searched in the essays to understand the context before and after their usage and to analyze the learners’ perceptions. The learners' experiences revealed that the difficulty level of university life could be influenced by their friends and that they attempted to overcome the challenges of their studies with a positive attitude. They also faced challenges in various fields, especially when engaging in team projects or presentations in Korean. Furthermore, university life was evidently not just about academic learning; it also involved ac quiring knowledge related to life’s principles and various aspects of life in general.