The Email — First Round Results and What Comes Next
I said I would write here when April came. April came. This is what happened at 4am when I finally opened the email I was afraid to open.
I said I would write here when April came.
April came.
The delay that made everything harder
Jeonbuk was supposed to send results between April 3rd and 7th.
They didn’t. On April 5th, they sent a different email first — the kind that doesn’t give you an answer, just moves the deadline. Results will be shared no later than April 8th. Three more days of the same loop: checking, waiting, checking again.
By then I had found a WhatsApp group on Reddit — applicants from Jeonbuk, from different countries, all of us in the same window of not-knowing. It was oddly comforting. Not because it made the waiting easier, but because it made it visible. All those people doing the same thing at the same time: refreshing their inboxes, asking if anyone had heard anything, counting down to April 8th like it was a shared event we’d all registered for.
4am, without an alarm
I didn’t plan to be awake at 4am.
I had planned the opposite — I was going to stay up. I was going to be the person who watches the clock and refreshes her inbox and sees the email the moment it arrives. I had decided, in some version of myself that still believed she could control things, that I would be awake when it happened.
And then I fell asleep. Just like that.
I don’t know what woke me at 4am. There was no alarm. No noise. My body just decided, on its own, that it was time. The kind of waking that doesn’t feel like waking — more like surfacing. And the first thing I did, before I was even fully conscious, was reach for my phone.
That’s how automatic it had become. A month of checking email every morning, every afternoon, every time I set my phone down and picked it back up. My hands knew before my brain did.
There was a new email.
The sender was Jeonbuk National University.
But before I opened it, I did something I can’t fully explain: I opened the WhatsApp group first.
The messages were still coming in. Screenshots. People who had gotten their emails already. And some of them — the ones who had opened to a different kind of answer — were sharing their results too. I didn’t pass. Third year trying. Maybe next time. The quiet, devastated kind of updates that people type out at some hour of the night because they don’t know what else to do with the feeling.
I read those messages knowing my email was sitting unopened one screen away.
I don’t know why I did that. Maybe I needed to feel the weight of what this actually meant before I let myself find out. Maybe it was a way of honoring what the process costs — not just me, but everyone who tried. Some of them had been trying longer than I had. Three years of applications, of apostilles, of waiting.
I put the group down. I went back to my inbox.
Schrödinger’s inbox
I stared at it for a moment without opening it.
I know that sounds strange. But there’s something that happens in the space between seeing the notification and tapping on it — a kind of suspended reality where nothing has been decided yet. Both outcomes still exist. You’re still inside and still outside simultaneously. You haven’t been accepted and you haven’t been rejected. The email is just a subject line, and the subject line tells you nothing, and for a few seconds that is actually a mercy.
I sat there in the dark, phone in hand, knowing that whatever was on the other side of that tap was going to land differently at 4am than it would have at noon. There’s no armor at 4am. You’re too tired to protect yourself. Whatever you feel, you feel fully.
I opened it.
The part I had to read twice
My eyes caught the sentence before my brain processed what it meant.
We are pleased to inform you that you have successfully passed the document screening stage.
I blinked. Read it again. Read the whole thing. Read it again.
I pinched myself. I actually pinched myself — the way you do in movies, the way you think you’d never actually do, and then you find yourself at 4am pinching your own arm because the alternative is believing something you can’t quite make real.
My eyes went blurry. Not crying, exactly — just the way your body responds before your mind has caught up. The involuntary kind. The I don’t know what’s happening but something is happening kind.
I passed.
I passed the first round.
The doubt that lived here for a month
I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters.
I didn’t believe I was going to pass.
Not in the performative way people say it — not oh I’m not sure, we’ll see said with a small smile that means they actually feel pretty good. I mean it in the real sense: I genuinely spent most of the last month convinced that the email, if it came, would say something else. That Jeonbuk had looked at my application and found some gap I hadn’t filled, some detail I’d missed, some version of me that didn’t quite make it.
The self-doubt wasn’t loud. It didn’t paralyze me. It just sat there, quiet and patient, like it lived in the apartment and had stopped bothering to announce itself.
So when I read congratulations at 4am with my arm still slightly sore from where I’d pinched it, there was a particular quality to the feeling. It wasn’t just relief. It was something closer to oh. I was wrong about myself.
That’s a strange and specific thing to discover at 4am.
What I did next
I read the email again. And again. I counted the times and lost count.
Then I set the phone down, pulled the blanket back up, and went back to sleep.
That’s it. That’s genuinely what happened. No calls, no messages sent, no celebration — just me, in the dark, reading the same email until my eyes couldn’t stay open, and then falling back asleep like my body had decided the most dignified response was rest.
I think maybe that was right. Some moments don’t need an audience. Some things are allowed to be just yours, at least for a few hours, before the world finds out.
I let it be mine until morning.
What comes next
The next stage is the interview.
With the department I applied to. In English.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous — I’m very nervous. It’s been a while since I’ve had a real conversation in English, the kind where the stakes are real and the words need to come quickly and correctly and without too much silence between them. There’s a version of me that knows the language. I need to find her again, dust her off, and remind her that she’s actually capable.
So that’s what I’m going to do. Practice. Speak out loud to myself, to recordings, to anyone who’ll let me. Review vocabulary. Learn how to talk about my research and my goals and my reasons in a way that sounds like a person who knows herself — because I do know myself. I just need to say it out loud in someone else’s language.
I’ve come too far to let a language barrier be the thing that stops me.
To anyone who also got the email
If you passed: congratulations. Whatever you felt when you read it — the shock, the tears, the pinching yourself — it was real, and you earned it.
If you’re still waiting: I was you two weeks ago. I know what the inbox-checking spiral feels like. I know the specific dread of April 8th approaching and the silence still holding. Whatever happens, the work you did was real. The eight months, the documents, the emails you sent and the essays you rewrote — none of that disappears based on what one email says.
And if the answer wasn’t what you hoped: I read your messages at 4am. The ones you posted in the group when you didn’t know what else to do with it. I saw the screenshots. I saw third year trying. I want you to know that I thought about you when I opened my own email — that your courage to share your result, in the middle of that feeling, stayed with me. This process doesn’t measure everything you are. It only measures one window, one cycle, one year. You’re not done unless you decide to be.
The interview is next.
I’ll write here when it’s done.
Whatever the answer is.
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