Not Yet — The Interview I Had Been Preparing For All Week
I filled twelve pages with possible questions. I practiced until I almost lost my voice. And then the director said two words that brought my soul back into my body.
I said I would write here when it was done.
It’s done.
The week before
I should tell you about the week before, because it explains everything about the state I was in when the call started.
I studied. That’s not the right word for what I did — studied sounds too calm, too organized. What I did was something closer to obsession with a deadline. I filled twelve pages with possible questions they might ask. Twelve. I went back through them every day. I answered them out loud, to my reflection, to my phone’s camera, to no one. I recorded myself, played it back, listened to the parts where my English got tangled, tried again.
There’s something particular about preparing alone — really alone, not just physically but in the specific way of wanting something that no one around you fully understands. I’ve written about this before. The people I love are supportive. They just don’t know what this feels like from the inside. So the practice sessions were mine and only mine: a girl in her room, talking to herself in a second language, asking and answering questions about cognitive decline and research methodology and why she chose a university in a country she has never set foot in.
At some point during that week I started thinking in English. Not translating — actually thinking in it. Simulating the interview in my head in real time, running scenarios, anticipating follow-ups. I was having a conversation with a stranger I hadn’t met yet, in a language I don’t live in, about research that would determine the next chapter of my life.
It sounds strange when I write it out. It was stranger to live it.
By the end of the week I had nearly lost my voice.
That’s the version of me that opened Zoom on interview day.
The fear I couldn’t shake
I had a lot of fears. The general one — going completely blank, losing every sentence I’d practiced, sitting there in silence while a department director waited — that one was always in the background.
But the specific fear, the one that sat with me all week, was technical questions.
My imposter syndrome has always been louder than it should be. And with the anxiety piled on top, it kept whispering: what if he asks you something you don’t know? What if he finds the gaps you’re already afraid of? What if you sound like someone who doesn’t belong there?
The thing about imposter syndrome is that it doesn’t go away when you prepare harder. If anything, the more you prepare, the more it finds to pick at. I’d learned twelve pages of potential answers and my brain had responded by generating twelve pages of new doubts. But what if he asks something outside those twelve pages? What if your accent throws him off? What if he can hear how nervous you are?
That’s the voice you carry into a room you’re not sure you’ve earned yet. You carry it because you can’t put it down — you’ve tried, and it doesn’t work that way. So you just bring it with you and hope the rest of you is louder.
안 들려요? — the first ten seconds
I joined the call and someone spoke to me immediately. In Korean.
A research assistant, I think. There on behalf of the professor — doing a sound check, making sure everything worked before he arrived. And with the small amount of Korean I’ve been studying, I actually understood her: 잘 들려요? — something like can you hear me okay?
I panicked, then didn’t. I said: “Sorry, I don’t speak Korean.”
She switched to English. The professor appeared.
And just like that, it had started.
Twenty minutes
The other applicants in the GKS WhatsApp group — people from different countries, all of us heading to Jeonbuk, strangers with one thing in common — had their interviews around the same time. They came back reporting five, maybe ten minutes. Questions about whether they liked Korea. What they enjoyed about the culture. Light things.
Mine lasted twenty minutes.
And from the first question, it was nothing like that.
The director asked about cognitive decline. He asked why I chose that department, that university. He asked whether I was more interested in prevention — identifying risk before decline sets in — or in the response side, once a diagnosis has already been made. He asked if I’d be willing to change my research line if the department needed it.
He asked if I had experience with medical image processing.
I didn’t. I said so. It was the second time in twenty minutes I’d had to say some version of I don’t have that experience yet.
And then he said something I wasn’t prepared for.
”Not yet”
When I told him I had no experience with medical imaging, he looked at me and said: “not yet.”
Two words.
I don’t know if he meant it exactly the way I heard it. Maybe it was nothing — a small verbal filler, something professors say without thinking. But it didn’t land that way. It landed like that’s fine, you’ll learn. Like I’m not asking you to arrive already finished. Like there was a version of the future where I was already there, already learning, and he could see it even if I couldn’t.
My soul came back into my body.
That is not an exaggeration. Something in me had been very quiet for twenty minutes — holding its breath, measuring each answer, bracing for the moment it all fell apart. And those two words did something that twelve pages of preparation hadn’t been able to do: they made me feel like I was allowed to be exactly where I was.
I have thought a lot about why two words from a stranger could carry that much weight. I think it’s because the fear underneath all of this — the real one, not the technical questions or the English — is the fear of being found incomplete. Of someone looking at everything you have and deciding it’s not enough yet. And when someone looks at your gaps and says not yet instead of not enough — when they frame absence as a beginning instead of a deficiency — it changes something. It’s such a small thing. It’s not a small thing at all.
I spent a week preparing for every possible question. I couldn’t have prepared for those two words. I don’t think you can.
Hola
Near the end of the interview, the director said something I wasn’t expecting.
“You know — if this were a casual conversation, I’d tell you I’m learning Spanish.”
I don’t know how to explain what happened to me in that moment except to say that I am, apparently, a golden retriever in a human body. I light up. I make noise. When something good happens I cannot contain it — it just comes out.
I said: “Oh my god, really?”
He smiled. Said yes.
And then I thought: should I say something in Spanish?
I did the only thing that made sense. I looked at him and said: “Hola.”
He paused. Looked at me. Then he laughed — genuinely, the kind that isn’t performed — and said: “Hola.”
I smiled back.
Twenty minutes of technical questions about cognitive decline and medical imaging and whether I’d change my research line if the department needed it. And somehow the moment I’ll remember most clearly is a Korean professor learning Spanish and the two of us saying hola to each other across a Zoom call.
I think that’s allowed to be my favorite part.
How English sounds when you’re nervous
I want to be honest about this part, because I think it matters.
My English isn’t bad. But when I get nervous, it stops being English and starts being something else — a version of my thoughts that comes out faster than my brain can organize them, with filler sounds in the gaps, with the sentences running slightly ahead of the ideas. I know it’s happening. I can hear it. I just can’t stop it.
I didn’t answer the way I’d practiced. The twelve pages felt far away. The recordings didn’t sound like me when the stakes were real.
But I answered. I kept answering. And the director was kind — genuinely kind, not in a performative way, but in the quiet way of someone who is actually listening and not just waiting for you to finish.
I gave everything I had. Even the imperfect version of it.
How he ended it
At the end of the call, the director said: “I hope to see you soon at the university. Good luck with the next stages.”
I have thought about those words more than I should probably admit.
I hope to see you soon. Not good luck, we’ll let you know. Not the careful neutral language of someone who could go either way. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Probably I’m reading too much into it. But the thing is, when you’ve been in a process this long — eight months, twelve pages, one week of practice that nearly cost you your voice — your brain doesn’t let the good parts go quietly. They stay. They echo. You replay them at 2am and try to figure out what they meant.
So I’m holding it loosely. But I’m holding it.
What the rest of the day was like
I closed the laptop and sat there for a moment.
Just sat there.
And then: relief. The specific, physical kind — the kind you feel in your shoulders, in your jaw, in the parts of you that had been clenched without your permission for seven days straight. The weight lifted. Not all of it — the waiting doesn’t stop, it never really stops — but enough. Enough to breathe. Enough to remember that I was a person who existed outside of this process, who had a body that needed food and water and to not be sitting rigidly in front of a screen anymore.
My mom had been waiting. She said tell me everything in the tone that means she actually wants everything, not the summary — the version where you skip the feelings and just report what happened. So I told her all of it. The Korean at the start. The technical questions. The second time I had to say I didn’t have that experience. Not yet. The hola. All of it.
She listened the way moms listen when they’ve been holding their breath on your behalf.
Later I talked to the friends I’ve made through this process — other GKS applicants, people I’ve never met in person but who understand this specific kind of waiting better than almost anyone else I know. We shared our stories. Compared notes. Laughed at the differences. There’s something that happens when you’ve been through the same strange thing and can finally say out loud to someone my interview was twenty minutes and fully technical and have them go wait, really? mine was five minutes and they asked if I liked kimchi — it doesn’t fix anything but it makes the weight of it communal instead of just yours.
The anxiety came back the next day. Of course it did. That’s just how this works. But for a few hours, there was something lighter than that.
Something that felt a little like: I did it. I actually did it.
A small note to myself
I’ve been hard on myself throughout this entire process. That’s not a new thing — the imposter syndrome predates the GKS, predates the application, predates most of this story. But this process gave it so much material to work with. The gaps in my biomedical experience. The English that isn’t my first language. The question of whether someone like me — from here, with this background, with this particular unfinished version of a research path — was ever supposed to make it this far.
Here is the thing I want to remember, even when the waiting gets loud again:
I rewrote my application essays ten times until I found the university that felt true. I sent the package and said a prayer in a parking lot and meant every word of it. I passed a document screening I didn’t believe I was going to pass. I spent a week in my room practicing out loud until I nearly lost my voice — alone, because this is the kind of thing you do alone, because some dreams are too specific to be fully shared. And then I got on a Zoom call with a department director at a Korean university, a man with more years of research experience than I have years of life, and I talked to him for twenty minutes in a language I don’t live in about the work I want to do and the person I’m trying to become.
That is not nothing.
It is, in fact, a lot.
I don’t know yet if I passed the interview. The waiting continues — that part is always true. But whatever the answer is, I showed up as myself. The most prepared version of myself I knew how to be, which is the only version that was ever available. I told the truth about what I know and what I don’t know yet. I said hola to a Korean professor who is learning Spanish and made him laugh, which is maybe not a standard metric for interview success but felt, to me, like something.
I gave everything I had.
I think I get to feel good about that. Not in a conditional way — I’ll feel good about it if I pass. Just: I did something hard, and I did it well, and I am allowed to sit with that.
So I’m going to.
For at least a little while, before the waiting finds me again — I’m going to sit with it.
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The waiting continues.
I’ll write here when there’s something to write about.
Whatever the answer is.
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