I spent a week sitting in consultants’ offices feeling smaller than I expected

Walking into the glass office on a Tuesday afternoon

I didn’t really have a plan, just a vague, persistent anxiety about my nephew’s future. He’s in middle school now, and every time I see him, I wonder if he’s actually learning anything that sticks or if he’s just memorizing patterns for tests. So, I found myself in the lobby of one of those study abroad consulting places near Gangnam. I think it was called The Masters, though the name blurrily blends into the others I visited that week. It felt clinical. The air smelled like expensive coffee and printed paper. I had a pamphlet in my bag that cost me nothing, but the consultation fee for an hour was sitting around 150,000 won in my head, which I guess is the price of admission for someone to look at your life and tell you it’s salvageable.

The strange disconnect in the boarding school brochures

They talk about ‘boarding school placement’ like they’re matching socks. The consultant, a man who looked like he hadn’t slept since 2010, pulled out a stack of glossy brochures. He pointed to schools in the American East Coast that looked like castles. I kept thinking about how these buildings had nothing to do with the actual, sweaty reality of a fourteen-year-old trying to navigate a new language in a dorm room. He mentioned ‘financial aid programs’ that could supposedly shave off some of the heavy costs, which sounded great until he started listing the extracurriculars required to qualify. I remember staring at a photo of a student holding a fencing sword and wondering if my nephew even knows what a foil is. It felt like a different world entirely.

Why I skipped the bigger fair last weekend

There was a massive Australia-focused fair scheduled for June, where the schools themselves were supposedly showing up. I looked at the logistics—the interpreters, the 1:1 sessions, the sheer volume of parents—and just felt exhausted. It felt like a cattle market. I realized that if I actually went, I’d probably just walk around, collect a few more brochures that I’d eventually lose in my car, and come home feeling more confused than when I started. It wasn’t that I didn’t want the information; I just couldn’t stomach the idea of treating a kid’s education like an acquisition strategy at a trade show. I ended up staying home and just looking at random forum posts on a platform called ‘Dagachi’ instead, checking out what actual expats in Nepal were saying about schools, which was honestly a weird, disconnected detour.

The lingering doubt about professional guidance

I keep reading these headlines about agencies—some have been around since the late nineties—and how they promise to prevent kids from ‘wasting tuition’ and coming home early. It’s a terrifying pitch. It makes you feel like if you don’t pay these professionals, you’re essentially setting your bank account on fire and ruining your kid’s confidence. But is that true? I still don’t know. I walked out of the office that day with a folder full of requirements: standardized test scores, essay prep, teacher recommendations. I looked at the list and wondered if I should just let him finish middle school here and figure it out later. The consultant told me I was ‘on the edge of the window for planning,’ which is just a professional way of telling you that you’re already behind. Maybe I am. Or maybe it’s just noise.