I Slept Through the Email That Changed Everything
The email came at 2 a.m. I was asleep. Some things don't wait for you to be ready.
I tried to stay awake.
That was the plan — the last plan of the last night of the two-day wait I’d been counting down to for weeks. April 29th into April 30th: I would stay up, I would be there for it, I would not let the email arrive to an empty inbox. After all of this, I wanted to be awake when it came.
The sleep had other ideas.
I don’t know exactly when I went out. I remember lying there, phone in hand, refreshing the way I had been refreshing for days. And then there was nothing — and then it was 6 a.m.
6 a.m.
I saw the notification before I was fully conscious.
My brain registered: WhatsApp. The group. And before I even opened it, I could see the reactions — the hearts, the messages stacking up — and I knew. My stomach knew before my mind finished loading. I sat up.
Then I opened my email.
The first line visible in the preview read: Congratulations!
I don’t know exactly what happened to my body in that moment. I sat up very fast, like something in my chest had suddenly needed more room. And then I was crying — quietly, because my family was still asleep in the rest of the house, and even in a moment like this my instinct was to not wake anyone — and I was reading the email again. And again. And again.
Not because I didn’t understand it. Because I needed to confirm that I was not constructing it. That it was real. That I had not dreamed the whole thing in some elaborate, cruel simulation of the relief I’d been waiting for.
It was real.
What the inside of that moment felt like
I want to try to describe the feeling accurately, because “I was happy” is not accurate.
It was more like five things happening at once, each one slightly incompatible with the others, each one arriving in layers — not one after the other, but all at the same time, crowding.
The first one was something like I knew it. Something in me had always known, quietly and without permission, even in the weeks when I was being careful about hope. There’s a part of you that has been tracking this thing for a long time — calculating, paying attention — and that part recognized the result before your conscious mind finished reading the sentence. It was almost calm. Like confirmation, not surprise.
And then, immediately underneath that: oh my god, I actually passed. Which is strange, because if you knew, why the shock? But the body doesn’t care about logic. My hands were shaking. My chest was doing something I didn’t have a name for. Apparently the knowing and the feeling are stored in different places.
And then — this is the one I didn’t expect, the one that made me cry the hardest and the longest, the one that’s still sitting with me as I write this: oh my god. I’m worth it.
I don’t know exactly where that came from or why it arrived with such force. But there’s something about being selected — not accepted by luck, not let through on a technicality, but genuinely chosen after a process that looked at your work and your words and your ideas and said yes, this one — that reaches somewhere in you that achievement alone doesn’t always reach. It wasn’t about the scholarship. It was something older than the scholarship. Something I apparently needed to hear.
The fourth feeling arrived almost simultaneously, because my brain is not capable of letting me have anything uncomplicated: now I have to wait two more months. The email was careful to remind me — this result indicates your selection as a university nominee, and the final selection will be confirmed by NIIED — and I understood immediately that this was not the ending. Only the next landing. The door I just walked through opens onto another hallway. I knew this going in. It didn’t make it less exhausting to confront at 6 a.m.
And then the last one, the quiet one that arrived after the others had settled: should I start preparing? Just in case. What would I even bring?
I let that one stay.
The first person I told
Her name is Ishika. She’s from India and applied to the same department I did — Healthcare Engineering, Jeonbuk National University, same cohort, same round of interviews. We ended up in the same WhatsApp group of Jeonbuk applicants and spent the last two weeks sending each other the same “still nothing” messages on rotation.
She had messaged me at 4 a.m. my time. I didn’t see it until 6.
When I finally responded, it was to tell her: I passed.
She told me: me too.
Two people. Same department. Same university. Same silence we’d been sitting in together for weeks. Different time zones, different hours — but the same news, arriving into both our lives on the same day.
I don’t have a word for what that was. Something between relief and recognition — the feeling of finding out that someone who had been waiting in the same room as you also got to leave.
The WhatsApp group
I told the group shortly after.
Hearts. A lot of hearts.
There’s not much else to say about that part except that it mattered — that those people, most of whom I’ve never met in person, had been a kind of company I didn’t know I needed. The group had served exactly one function for weeks: to confirm, collectively, that none of us had heard anything yet. And now some of us had.
I scrolled back through the old messages afterward, the weeks of nothing yet and same and fingers crossed for us all, and I felt something I can only describe as the specific relief of having finally been allowed to put something down.
What I let myself think about afterward
There were things I had specifically, deliberately not let myself think about. I mentioned them in the last entry — apartment listings, September weather, exchange rates. Proxy hopes. Dangerous territory.
By 7 a.m. on April 30th, I had already looked up what the weather is like in Jeonju in October.
I thought about the snow. I’ve never seen it in person. Not once. The idea that I might, finally, see actual snow — not on a screen, not in photos — sat somewhere warm in my chest and I let it stay there.
I thought about my friends, and how I needed to spend time with them. How I should be present for the months I still have here, before anything is certain, before anything is final — but present in a different way now, the way you are when you can feel a goodbye coming from somewhere in the not-too-distant future.
I thought about what I would bring. Which is a ridiculous thing to think about in a moment like this, I know. And I thought it anyway.
The person I wanted to call
There’s a man I can’t tell this to.
His name was Alberto — Beto, to me. He ran a small corner store across the street from the elementary school I attended, and I have a memory of knowing him from the time I was approximately three years old. He was just there. Every day. A fixed point.
I was apparently a very persistent child, because at some point I decided it was my personal mission to convince him to stop smoking. I was relentless about it in the way only small children can be relentless — without embarrassment, without letting it go, completely certain that I was right and that he would eventually see it too. And eventually he did.
He was there for all of it. The years of secondary school. High school. University. Every stage I crossed, I crossed it past his store. He would ask me — every time, genuinely — and how many years left until you become a professional? And I would tell him. Five. Four. Three. And he would nod like this was important information, like he was tracking it.
He died of COVID during the pandemic.
I would like to be able to tell him that I became a professional. That I’m an AI engineer now. That I’m close — not certain, not yet, but close — to going to Korea.
I think he would ask me what Korea is like and then listen to every word of the answer. I think he would be proud in that quiet, steady way he had — the way of someone who had been paying attention the whole time and wasn’t surprised at all.
I can’t tell him. But I’m writing it down.
What comes next
The NIIED round happens now. Their evaluation runs through June, and the final candidates are expected to be announced around June 30th.
Two more months. Another wait.
But here’s what’s different about this one: I’ve been chosen. Not by a system, not by an algorithm — by a committee of people at Jeonbuk National University who read what I wrote and heard what I said and looked at what I’ve built and decided: this one. That happened. It’s recorded somewhere. My name is on a list that it wasn’t on before.
The previous waits were all about not knowing. Waiting to find out if I was enough. This one is different in a way I’m still figuring out how to hold — I’m waiting, but I’m waiting as someone who was already chosen. That’s a different room to wait in.
I said in the last entry that I was holding hope loosely. Barely holding it at all, just enough pressure to keep it from floating away.
I’m holding it a little more firmly now.
Not all the way. NIIED is a real round with real stakes and I’ve been in this process long enough to know that nothing is guaranteed until it’s guaranteed. But today, on April 30th, at 6 a.m., with my family asleep and the WhatsApp hearts still coming in — I let myself feel it. The full specific weight of having gotten this far.
Not everything. Not yet.
But more than before.
Beto, wherever you are — I became a professional. And I might be going to Korea.
I think you’d like that.
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