The Waiting Game — What Happens After You Send Everything

There’s a moment — right after you hand over the package — when all the noise stops.

Not because everything is suddenly fine. But because there’s nothing left to do.

I stood at the DHL counter on March 13th and asked the woman helping me everything I could think of. But will it actually arrive? The tracking number — you’ll give me a tracking number, right? It’s snowing in Korea, what if the documents get wet? She answered everything patiently, kindly, like she could tell I needed someone to answer. And then she placed the package on the belt, and that was it.

I exhaled. One of those deep, involuntary sighs — the kind that tells you your body had been holding something without ever asking your permission. I didn’t even realize I’d been holding my breath for eight months until I finally let it go.

Eight months of work. Two packages. And now it was someone else’s turn.

What eight months actually looks like

When people ask how long the GKS process takes, I never know where to start.

The paperwork — notarized copies, apostilles, translations, forms — took about two months. That’s the version people usually mean when they ask. But that’s not where it started for me, and it’s not where the hardest part happened either.

The hardest part happened earlier, in a stretch of weeks I don’t talk about much.

I had already chosen a university: Kumoh National Institute of Technology. I’d done real research — not just browsing rankings, but reading about specific laboratories, specific research lines, specific professors. I found one whose work aligned with mine. I wrote to him. He wrote back. He said my profile matched what his group was looking for.

I had a plan. I had a name. I had a direction.

And then the 2026 GKS call came out, and Kumoh wasn’t on the eligible list anymore.

I don’t have a word for what that moment felt like. Something between the floor dropping out and a door slamming shut. I went back to the drawing board — Chonnam National University, Incheon National University, Konyang, Pukyong, others. I sent emails asking about the application process. Pages didn’t load right. Responses didn’t come. Research lines that looked promising on paper turned out to be something different when you dug deeper.

In less than a month, I rewrote my essays ten times. Not because I kept changing my mind about who I am or what I want — but because I couldn’t find the university that made me feel like I could say this is it. This is where I belong. Every version of the essay was true. None of them felt finished, because I was writing toward a destination I hadn’t found yet.

I remember sitting with all of it one night and thinking: what is the point of any of this? And also: is there genuinely no research line in all of Korea that connects to what I’m looking for?

There was. I just hadn’t found it yet.

When I found Jeonbuk National University — and the Healthcare Engineering program with its focus on neurological research — something settled. It aligned with my thesis topic. It aligned with the direction I’ve been building toward for years. And Jeonju, the city it’s in, turned out to be one of the most culturally significant and gastronomically celebrated cities in the country. Traditional architecture, real food, a pace that felt different from Seoul.

When I finally wrote that essay — the one for Jeonbuk — I didn’t rewrite it ten times. I wrote it, and it felt true on the first version. That’s how I knew I’d found the right one.

The prayer I said in a parking lot

I’m not the most devout Catholic. But I believe in God the way you believe in a best friend — not because of rules, but because of trust. Someone you can be fully honest with, even when what you’re saying is: I’m scared, and I don’t know if this is going to work, and I’ve given everything I have.

So when I got back to my car after DHL, I said this out loud. Just me, in the parking lot, alone:

God, today I place in your hands everything I’ve worked for. You know the hours, the dedication, and the dreams behind these documents. If this path is meant for me, open the right doors and guide me with wisdom. If something better is prepared for my life, give me the peace to accept it. May everything I’ve worked toward bloom at the right moment. I give you my plans, my fears, and my hopes. Amen.

I don’t know if other people do things like that. Maybe it sounds strange. But I needed to mark the moment — to put a period at the end of the doing and acknowledge, out loud, that the rest was no longer mine to carry.

It helped. More than I expected. More than I can fully explain.

What waiting actually feels like (day by day)

The first-round results are supposed to come between April 3rd and 8th. Which means I have about two weeks from today.

Two weeks sounds short. It doesn’t feel short.

Days move strangely right now. Each one feels longer than it should — stretched at the edges, like time is adding hours it doesn’t announce. I wake up and the first thing I do is check my email. Then I check it again. Then I spend a few minutes in a small spiral: Did I write my email address correctly on the forms? Did I put the right phone number? What if there’s a typo somewhere in the documents and they can’t reach me?

I know, rationally, that I checked everything. I know I did. But anxiety doesn’t really respond to rationality — it just keeps asking the same questions on a loop, louder each time, until you find something else to put your hands on.

So I’ve been deliberate about what I put my hands on.

Resident Evil. I picked up Village, which I’d been meaning to play for ages. Then kept going — the whole saga now has my full attention. There’s something genuinely useful about a game that demands enough focus to crowd out everything else.

One Piece. I stopped at the Wano arc when the scholarship prep got too intense. Coming back to it now feels like returning to a part of myself I’d set aside. It feels good.

Programming. I’ve been building personal projects — this blog included. There’s something quietly powerful about making things when the one big thing you’re waiting on is completely out of your hands.

Korean. Still studying. Every day. And the thing about Korean is that it doesn’t hurt the way you might expect — it doesn’t feel like a painful reminder of a thing that might not happen. It feels fun. Every time I open the book, I learn something new. It’s one of the few things right now that feels like pure forward motion.

Actual life. Exercise, friends, fresh air. The things anxiety tries to convince you you don’t have time for.

None of these are distractions in the empty sense. They’re just life continuing forward. That’s the whole point.

The fear I can’t fully shake

I’d be lying if I said any of this has made the waiting easy.

There’s one thought my brain keeps returning to, no matter how full I keep my days: what if nothing comes?

Not a rejection — the university I applied to doesn’t send those. If you don’t advance, you simply don’t receive an email. You wait until the window closes, and then the silence becomes its own answer. No closure. Just April 8th becoming April 9th and you understanding what that means.

That’s the version that scares me most. Not a no. A nothing. Watching the date pass and realizing that everything — the eight months, the ten rewrites, the apostilles, the sleepless nights, the parking lot prayer — was met with silence on the other end.

The particular loneliness of wanting something people around you don’t understand

My mom knows I applied. She’s supportive in the way she knows how to be. But she doesn’t fully understand what this would mean for my life — how much of myself I’ve pointed in this direction, how long I’ve been building toward this specific dream. That’s not a criticism of her. It’s just the quiet weight of wanting something that’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t watch you build it.

My friends are good people. Really good people. But they don’t understand why someone would choose, willingly, to keep studying. They’d point me toward jobs, toward other paths, toward “why not just work for a while?” They’re not wrong about anything — they’re just oriented differently than I am.

And so when my documents arrived in Korea — when the tracking said delivered and I stared at my screen knowing that a physical part of me was now on the other side of the world — I couldn’t fully share that with anyone. I sat with that moment mostly alone. A kind of excitement that had nowhere to go.

That’s what this whole process has been, actually. Not lonely in a sad way — just solitary. This thing I built by myself, funded by myself, carried by myself. There are moments where the fear is bigger than I can hold quietly, and there are moments where the excitement is so full it needs to go somewhere, and I find that I don’t have anyone to send it to. So I swallow it. And I keep going. And I try to remember that doing something alone doesn’t make it less real.

On hope and self-preservation

I’ve had to be very deliberate about this part.

I don’t let myself imagine getting the interview email. I don’t rehearse answers to questions they might ask. I don’t picture my first week in Jeonju — what the campus would look like, what it would feel like to arrive somewhere I’ve only ever seen in photos, what it would mean to finally be in the country whose language I’ve been studying, whose research I’ve been following, whose food I’ve only read about.

Not because I don’t believe it’s possible. But because I know myself.

The higher the expectation, the further you fall. And I’ve learned — the hard way, more than once — that the disappointment you feel when you didn’t expect too much is survivable. The other kind is the kind that rewrites how you see yourself.

Some people call this pessimism. I call it self-preservation. I call it still being able to get up in the morning no matter what the answer is.

What I’d tell someone standing exactly where I am

The waiting is hard. There’s no version of this that isn’t hard, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But here’s the truth of it: the moment you sent those documents, you genuinely ran out of things you could have done. That work is finished. Whatever happens next is a decision being made about that work — and you can’t reach it, change it, or influence it anymore. Spending your days living inside that space, turning it over and over, doesn’t protect you. It just takes away time that’s actually yours.

You still have now. Use it.

Keep learning the language. Keep building things. Let yourself cry if the One Piece soundtrack hits you in the middle of a Tuesday. Carry the loneliness gently — not because it stops hurting, but because it’s part of the work, and the work was worth doing.

Ivankov (One Piece) said it better than I ever could: Miracles only happen to people who don’t give up.

So we keep going. We play the games, we watch the shows, we learn the language, we build the things. We don’t give up before the email arrives — and if the email doesn’t come, we don’t give up then either. We figure out what’s next. We find another door. We try again.

I’ll write here when April comes.

Whatever the answer is.