"Early June." They Said Early June.
The university stage ended April 30th. It is now June 11th in Korea. NIIED has said nothing. My best friend is waiting. The flights keep getting more expensive. And someone finally emailed them — this week, they said. This week.
The NIIED published their 2026 timeline at the beginning of the year. It’s a document. Official. With dates, stages, windows. And somewhere in that document, under the second selection round, it says: early June.
Early June.
I have been staring at those two words for forty-two days.
Where we actually are
April 30th was the deadline for universities to recommend their candidates to NIIED.
That day came. The recommendation was submitted. The university stage ended, and control passed to a new set of hands — the NIIED. The national institution. The ones who will look at every recommended candidate from every university in the country and make the final decision.
And then: nothing.
No portal update. No announcement. No email. No post on their website, their Instagram, their anything. Just the document I’ve been reading since February, with early June on it, and the calendar turning over day by day, and June arriving, and passing its first week, and now being eleven days in — and still nothing.
It is June 11th. In Korea, where the NIIED offices are, it is already June 11th.
Early June, they said.
What forty-two days of this feels like in your body
I want to be honest about this part because I think people who haven’t been through a waiting process like this imagine it as something that happens in your head. Emotional. Abstract. Manageable.
It is not manageable.
My head has hurt almost every day for weeks. Not a dramatic migraine — just a low, persistent pressure behind my eyes that shows up every morning like a reminder. I don’t sleep well. Part of it is anxiety, but part of it is something more specific and harder to admit: <mark class="hl">I’m afraid that if I fall asleep, they’ll publish the results while I’m unconscious and I’ll wake up to an answer I wasn’t awake to receive.</mark> Which I know is irrational. Which has not stopped me from sleeping lightly, with my phone too close, waking up at two in the morning to check a page that hasn’t changed.
I can’t concentrate at work the way I normally can. I’m an AI engineer during the week and my brain is usually good at that — at being precise, at following logic, at staying inside a problem. Right now it keeps slipping. I’ll be mid-task and suddenly I’m somewhere else entirely, running the same loop: and if it’s no? and if it’s no?
And then I answer myself: and if it’s yes?
That’s the thing I’ve been doing to stay functional. Every time my brain asks the first question, I make it ask the second one too. Not as a denial — I’m not pretending the no isn’t possible. I’m just refusing to let my brain only rehearse one direction. <mark class="hl">If I’m going to imagine one outcome five hundred times a day, I’m going to imagine both of them.</mark>
The thing making this particular stretch harder
There’s a detail to this waiting period that the previous ones didn’t have.
BTS is going on tour.
I know how that sounds. I know. But stay with me for a second.
My best friend and I have been talking about going to see them in Colombia for months. It’s the kind of plan that lives in the category of things we actually mean — not a vague someday, but a real conversation, with dates and logistics and the specific city mapped out. She’s been waiting on me. I’ve been waiting on NIIED. And meanwhile, the flight prices keep climbing. Every day I open the tab and every day the numbers are higher than the day before.
I need an answer so I can buy the flights or not buy the flights. I need an answer so my best friend can stop holding her plans open for me. I need an answer so this thing that should be a pure joy — the concert, the trip, seeing someone I love — stops being tangled up in this other enormous thing I’m waiting for.
<mark class="hl">That’s what nobody tells you about long waiting periods: they contaminate everything adjacent to them.</mark> You can’t make plans. You can’t commit to things. Every decision that touches the future gets held in suspension because the one big variable is still unresolved. And the people around you, the ones who love you, end up suspended too — waiting alongside you, through no choice of their own.
The WhatsApp group at 11pm
There’s a group. All of us — or a lot of us — who applied to Jeonbuk National University for the 2026 GKS university track. Different departments, different countries, different timezones. All in the same silence.
We check in. We update each other on nothing, because nothing is what there is to update. Any news? — Nothing. — Me neither. — Same. Over and over, the same conversation, but it helps somehow. Shared helplessness is still sharing something.
One of the people in this group has become a real friend. She’s from India. We started talking because of the scholarship and now we talk because we actually like each other. She’s in this exact same position — same university, same wait, same headaches. There’s something specific about being anxious in parallel with someone you care about. You want good news for yourself, but you also want it for her, and the two things get braided together.
Two days ago, someone in the group sent an email to the NIIED directly. Just asked — plainly, politely — what was happening with the delay.
They responded.
<mark class="hl">This week. The results will be published this week, without fail.</mark>
The group exploded. Not with celebration — nobody has anything to celebrate yet. More like the specific relief of finally having a wall to push against. A this week. A container. After forty-two days of early June, which kept being early June until it wasn’t early anymore, we finally have this week.
It is Thursday in Korea. This week has a few days left. And apparently one of them will be the one.
The faith I wasn’t supposed to have
I’ve written before about keeping hope at arm’s length. Controlled exposure. Not letting myself imagine arriving because the distance between imagining and arriving is the most dangerous place to live.
I cannot do that anymore.
I’ve tried. I genuinely have. But something changed after the interview — after not yet and I hope to see you soon — and I haven’t been able to walk it back. The hope is not at arm’s length. It’s just there, in the room, fully present, not apologizing for itself.
What surprised me most about this whole stretch is that underneath all the anxiety — the headaches, the bad sleep, the concentration problems, the contaminated plans — there is something else. Something quieter and more stubborn.
<mark class="hl">I believe in myself. I actually believe, in the place where I don’t perform anything for anyone, that I might be one of the fourteen.</mark>
I don’t say this to jinx anything. I don’t say it with certainty — I know how many capable people applied, I know the competition is real, I know an outcome isn’t guaranteed by wanting it badly enough. I know all of that.
But I also know what I submitted. I know how I answered the technical questions. I know the professor said not yet and not no. And when I stop trying to protect myself from the fall and just ask myself honestly what I believe — I believe I did something worth selecting.
That’s new. It surprised me. I didn’t expect, after all this time trying to stay neutral, that what I’d find under the anxiety was faith.
This week
I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing.
True Education on Netflix in the evenings — something about watching other people’s fictional problems is exactly the right distance from my real ones. Working weekends at the restaurant: eight hours on my feet, orders and plates and tables, the beautiful exhaustion of a body that’s been too busy to spiral. And at least once a week, a café, by myself, two hours, the new Hunger Games book. That time is mine and I protect it.
The anxiety says: you have to be watching at all times, or you’re not in control. The anxiety is wrong about this, and I know it, and it doesn’t matter — the anxiety is still there. So I do what I can with it. I keep going. I don’t let it take the cafés.
This week, they said.
One of these days — maybe today, maybe tomorrow — I’m going to open a tab that looks different from every other time I’ve opened it.
And then I’ll know.
✦ days since university recommendation
I’ll write when there’s something to write about.
This week, they said.
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