I'm Going to Korea

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. like someone had called my name.

No alarm. No vibration from my phone. No sound in the house.

Just my eyes opening into the dark.

This is important because I am not that kind of person. I do not wake up gracefully, spiritually, or on time. I wake up through negotiation: one alarm, then another, then the small betrayal of the snooze button. And after weeks of bad sleep, headaches, and that particular anxiety that turns rest into a rented thing, my body had no reason to be precise.

Except that before I fell asleep, I had prayed.

I told God: if the results come out while I am sleeping, please wake me up.

So when my eyes opened at 4:30 a.m., my first thought was not why am I awake?

It was:

Oh.

---

The message

The first light of the morning was my phone screen.

There was a message from my friend in India.

I did not read it properly at first. I couldn’t. My brain skimmed the shape of it and caught only the dangerous parts, the words that were too big to hold while half-asleep.

Esteff 💜 I still can’t believe it… we actually did it. 😭 After all the waiting, the stress, the rumors about result dates, the sleepless nights, and all the conversations where we kept telling each other to stay hopeful, we both made it.

We both made it.

My body understood before I did.

My stomach dropped. My hands went cold. My chest did that strange little tightening it does when fear and hope arrive wearing the same clothes. There is a kind of panic that only happens when the thing you want most may have finally happened, but you have not yet seen the proof with your own eyes.

And this process had trained me to distrust anything unofficial.

Not her. Never her.

The process.

Months of refreshing, rereading, comparing dates, checking screenshots, searching for the one official sentence that could end the waiting. By then, verification was not a step. It was muscle memory.

So I got out of bed.

Half asleep, fully terrified, I went downstairs to my laptop.

I needed the page.

---

The list

The NIIED final results did not arrive like a movie scene.

No email with my full name. No confetti-coded subject line. No unmistakable congratulations waiting politely in my inbox.

Just a document.

A list.

And because of privacy, the list spoke in fragments: initials, country, university, asterisks where the most important letters should have been. Careful enough to protect people. Cruel enough to make every applicant become a detective at dawn.

I searched for Mexico first.

Then Jeonbuk National University.

Then the censored name beside it.

It was not fully visible, but it was visible enough for the air to leave the room.

I did not celebrate. I investigated.

The asterisks became a puzzle. The initials became evidence. I counted the hidden letters in my name and then in my last names. I compared the pattern, went back to the country, back to the university, back to the name, as if the screen were a witness and I could cross-examine it into certainty.

And little by little, the hidden thing became clear.

The country matched.

The university matched.

The shape of the name matched.

It was me.

---

The moment it became real

The crying came after the evidence.

First there was shock: a quiet, blank space where my body received the answer before my mind knew where to put it. Then the checking. The counting. The rereading. The final collapse of all the little walls I had built to keep myself from believing too much.

And then there was no wall left.

I had won the GKS scholarship.

The sentence looked absurd even in my own head.

After the documents and the apostilles. After the translations that almost broke me. After the DHL counter and the prayer in the parking lot. After the first-round email at 4 a.m. After twelve pages of interview preparation. After not yet. After the nomination. After forty-two days of NIIED silence. After headaches, bad sleep, group chats, rumors, refresh loops, and all the half-made plans waiting for permission to exist.

After every version of maybe.

The answer was yes.

---

Waking up the house

I ran to my parents’ room carrying a reality that was suddenly too large for one person.

The house was still dark. Everyone was asleep. Then I was there in the doorway, crying hard enough that my words came out broken.

They woke up scared, which is completely fair. There is no peaceful version of your daughter appearing before dawn in tears.

For one second, I think they thought the world had gone wrong.

And in a way, it had shifted.

Just not toward tragedy.

I told them I got it. My name was on the list. It was final now. Not nomination. Not another round. Not one more door with another hallway behind it.

Final.

Korea.

I do not remember the exact order after that. Memory kept only the important pieces: my parents awake, my voice shaking, the room filling with disbelief, the three of us trying to understand something that had outgrown ordinary language.

For months, the process had lived mostly inside me. The private rituals. The tabs I refreshed. The dates I counted. The fear I could explain but not fully transfer.

That morning, the dream crossed the hallway and became family news.

---

Ishika

After my parents, I wrote back to Ishika.

For months, she had been beside me in the strangest possible way: not physically, not in the same country, not even in the same time zone, but somehow in the same room.

Same university. Same department. Same silence from NIIED. Same early June that kept stretching until it no longer deserved the word early. Same headaches, questions, prayers, and attempts to keep each other hopeful without accidentally making the fall higher.

And now the symmetry felt almost unreal.

Two people from different countries, connected by a WhatsApp group and a process neither of us could control, had carried the same uncertainty to the same answer.

In about a month and a half, the person who sent me that message from across the world will stop being a notification on my phone.

We will meet as students.

At Jeonbuk National University.

The person who messaged me from across the world to tell me we made it is going to become someone I can hug in real life.

I do not know what to do with that except hold it carefully.

---

What winning actually felt like

I expected the joy to be cleaner.

Relief first, maybe. Celebration next. Disbelief underneath, but manageable.

Instead, the first clear thought after the crying was:

Someone like me actually did it?

Not as a caption. Not as a motivational ending. As a real question from somewhere older than this application.

Someone from here. From this house. From my family. From the public university system that shaped me. From a career built piece by piece. From the girl who applied alone, paid for it alone, read every instruction ten times, and practiced interview answers in her room until her voice almost disappeared.

Someone like me is going to Korea with a full scholarship.

I still cannot hold that sentence normally.

I got the life I wanted, and now I have to be brave enough to actually live it.

---

The next part

The anxiety did not disappear. It changed jobs.

Before, it asked: What if I don’t get it? What if everything I did still wasn’t enough? What if the list appears and I am not on it?

Now it asks smaller, sharper questions. How much can I save before I leave? What if I miss a document? What if I pack the wrong things? What if homesickness has a weight I cannot imagine yet?

Still anxiety.

But now it has tasks attached.

Save money. Prepare documents. Study Korean. Make lists. Choose what comes with me and what stays behind. Spend time with my family while this is still my everyday life. Learn how to say goodbye slowly, without treating grief like an interruption to joy.

For months, Korean was an act of hope: a way to walk toward a future that might never open.

Now every word has a different gravity.

I am not studying Korean for maybe anymore.

I am studying because I am going.

The waiting is over.

The life after the yes has begun.

---

Where we are

---

I am going to Korea

I have written that sentence a few times now, and it still feels borrowed from another life.

I am going to Korea.

Not conditionally. Not if the next round goes well. Not if NIIED selects me. Not if the list says yes.

It says yes.

My name was there, hidden behind asterisks and still somehow louder than anything else on the page.

Healthcare Engineering at Jeonbuk National University is no longer a line in an application essay. Jeonju is no longer a city I search at night when I let myself imagine too much. Korean is no longer just a hopeful routine in my room.

All of it has moved from possibility into calendar, paperwork, suitcase, flight.

I am scared.

I am grateful.

I am anxious.

I am proud.

All of those things are true at the same time.

This was never only about winning a scholarship. It was about sending something I had built alone across the world and having it come back as an answer. It was about being seen by people who did not know me personally but still read my work, heard my voice, looked at the path I was trying to make, and said yes.

It was about the part of me that kept asking, quietly, am I really someone who can do this?

And the answer, somehow, finally, is:

Yes.

I am.