Twenty-One Universities Have Said Something. Mine Hasn't.

The Facebook groups started filling up around a week after the interviews.

One person got a result. Then another. Then someone posted a list — universities that had already communicated something, one way or the other. Seven schools. Then twelve. Then fifteen.

I watched the list grow the way you watch a storm radar, tracking something you can’t control but can’t stop looking at either. Each new name that appeared was someone with an answer. A real one. A thing they could hold.

I kept scrolling and looking for mine.

Jeonbuk wasn’t on the list.

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The list

At the time I’m writing this, twenty-one universities have announced results.

Korea University. Hanyang. Dongguk. HUFS. Kangwon National. Ajou. Kongju National. Chosun. Hongik. BUFS. KoreaTech. Soonchunhyang. Chung-Ang. Keimyung. Kyungsung. SeoulTech. Inha. Hannam. Hoseo. Seoul National University. Yeungnam.

Twenty-one schools. Twenty-one communities of applicants who now know something I don’t know yet.

Jeonbuk National University has said absolutely nothing.

And I mean absolutely nothing. Not an email. Not a portal update. Not a vague announcement in the group chat that someone’s friend’s cousin heard something. Nothing. The silence from my university is so complete it almost feels intentional, which I know isn’t true, which doesn’t make it feel less true.

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What it’s like to watch from the outside

There’s a particular texture to this kind of waiting — different from the waiting before the interview, different from the waiting after the first round.

Before the first round, I was waiting in the dark. I didn’t know what was coming, but neither did anyone else around me. We were all in the same place.

Now I’m waiting in a lit room where everyone else has gradually gotten up and left. I can see them — across the group chat, across the WhatsApp threads — getting their news, processing it, moving into whatever comes next. Some are relieved. Some are devastated. Some are already planning next steps.

And I’m still here, at the table, waiting for my name to be called.

That’s not a complaint. It’s just what this feels like from the inside: watching the room empty out and still not being allowed to leave.

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The deadline math I keep doing

Here’s the thing that makes this particular stretch of waiting feel different from every other stretch: the deadline exists and I know what it is.

Universities are supposed to recommend their selected candidates to NIIED by April 30th — and Jeonbuk has said they’ll send an email before that date.

April 30th is two days from now.

I’ve done the math approximately four hundred times in the last week, and it always comes out the same way. The email is supposed to come before the deadline. Which means the next two days are not just the next two days — they’re functionally the last two days.

Either something comes, or it doesn’t.

I oscillate between two interpretations of the silence. The first one: Jeonbuk is just slow. Not every university moves at the same pace. They’re going through their process and the email is coming. The second one: no news is no news.

I hold both of these at the same time, which is not comfortable but is apparently what my brain has decided to do.

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On refreshing

I want to tell you how many times I’ve refreshed my email in the last week and I can’t, because the number is genuinely embarrassing.

There’s a specific ritual to it now. I open the tab. I look. I see nothing new. I close the tab. Forty-five seconds later I open it again — just in case, because what if it came in those forty-five seconds — and there is still nothing. I know this doesn’t help. I know the email will not arrive faster because I checked. That information has had no effect on my behavior.

At some point you stop doing it out of hope and start doing it out of compulsion. The motion of checking becomes detached from the expectation of finding something. You check because checking is the only action available to you, and doing nothing at all feels worse.

This is the specific irrationality of waiting for something you cannot influence. The brain finds a proxy for control — even a completely useless one — because the alternative is just sitting with the absence of control, which is harder.

So I refresh. And nothing is there. And I close the tab. And I refresh again.

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What twenty-one feels like when you’re not one of them

I want to be honest: there’s a thing that happens when you watch other people get answers.

It’s not quite jealousy. It’s something softer and more complicated — something closer to longing, with a side of something you’re not proud of. You’re happy for the people who got good news. You genuinely are. And then there’s this other, smaller feeling underneath, the one that asks: why not me yet? Why does my university get to be the quiet one when I’ve already been patient for this long?

You don’t say it out loud. But it’s there.

The people I’ve connected with through this process — other international applicants to Jeonbuk, different departments, different areas, none of us with any news — they’ve been good about it. We ended up in the same WhatsApp group and now we’re all just sitting in the same silence together. We check in. We compare notes. We confirm, over and over, that no one has heard anything, which is somehow both useless information and genuinely comforting. We send the “thinking of you, it’s going to be okay” messages and we mean them.

But there’s something no one can do for you, which is be inside the silence with you. That part is still just yours.

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The version of hope I’m currently holding

I’ve been careful about hope this whole process. Deliberately careful. Controlled exposure, you could call it — letting myself want this without letting myself live inside it, because the gap between imagining and arriving is the most dangerous place to spend time.

That’s gotten harder to maintain.

After twenty minutes of technical questions about cognitive decline and medical imaging. After not yet instead of not enough. After I hope to see you soon.

After all of that, keeping hope at arm’s length requires effort I’m not always sure I have.

So here’s what I’ve settled on, in these last two days: I’m holding it loosely. Very loosely. Barely holding it at all, really — just enough pressure to keep it from floating away.

I’m not building a life around it. I’m not packing anything. I’m not looking at Jeonju apartment listings or researching what the weather is like in September or calculating exchange rates. I’m doing none of that.

But I’m also not pretending the hope isn’t there, because it is. It’s been there since he said not yet and it didn’t leave. And at some point pretending it isn’t there takes more energy than just letting it exist quietly in the corner of the room.

So it’s there. In the corner. Quiet. I’m not going to feed it too much. But I’m not going to starve it either.

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April 30th

Two days.

In two days I’ll either have an answer or I’ll have a new kind of silence — the kind that doesn’t leave room for interpretation anymore.

I’ve thought about what that second version would feel like and I think I can survive it. I’ve thought about the first version and I think it would change something in me permanently, in the specific way that only getting the thing you’ve been building toward for years can change you.

Both of those versions are possible. Both are two days away.

Until then, I’m going to do what I’ve been doing.

Tomodachi Life has become a serious coping mechanism — something about the absurdity of a tiny virtual island full of Miis demanding attention is exactly the right amount of distraction. And I’ve been working weekends. My old boss from a Japanese restaurant where I used to work at seventeen reached out recently, and I said yes — so during the week I’m an AI engineer, and on weekends I’m carrying plates and running orders and being present in a way that leaves exactly zero room in my brain for spiraling. Eight hours on my feet without stopping. I come home, I sit down, and I’m already asleep. It’s not glamorous. But it works. Some days the best thing you can do for your anxiety is exhaust your body until your mind has no choice but to go quiet.

And I remind myself that the outcome was determined at some point before now, and nothing I do in the next forty-eight hours will change it.

The answer already exists somewhere. I just don’t have it yet.

Two days.

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I’ll write here when there’s something to write about.

Two days.