I thought picking a school was just about the ranking until I actually got here

Watching the numbers shift on the rankings board

I remember sitting in my room back in Seoul, scrolling through those endless QS rankings for hours. It’s funny how you convince yourself that if you just stare at those numbers long enough—you know, the ones comparing DGIST’s citation indices to places like Caltech or MIT—you’ll suddenly understand what a school actually feels like. I spent so much time comparing Stony Brook to Purdue or looking at Boston University’s acceptance rates versus UC San Diego that I forgot I was looking at spreadsheets, not places where real people actually eat lunch or sleep.

The reality of the commute and the cost

When I finally landed in California, the first thing that hit me wasn’t the academic prestige. It was the absolute, crushing realization that everything is so far apart. I had this romanticized idea of walking across a campus like King’s College, but instead, I was dealing with the reality of living near UC Davis. My housing rent was around $1,400 a month for a studio that was barely big enough to turn around in. I kept thinking, ‘Is this really part of the dream?’ I spent a week just trying to figure out how to get a decent internet connection and a usable bike because the campus is so sprawling that walking feels like a punishment.

Why I stopped checking the stats

There was a moment about three months in when I stopped caring about who was ranked higher between UCLA and some other top-tier school. I was just trying to finish a lab report while sitting in a coffee shop that had terrible lighting. I realized that the ‘prestige’ of the institution matters so much less than how annoying the professor’s grading criteria is or how long the line at the dining hall is during finals week. I had this weird, sinking feeling that I had traded my comfort for a name on a degree, and half the time, I wasn’t sure if the exchange was worth it.

The strange quiet of the campus trees

I ended up going for a hike near some ancient bristlecone pines—someone mentioned they were thousands of years old, way older than any of these institutions we worship—and it felt oddly grounding. It was a stark contrast to the pressure-cooker environment of the university. At school, everything is about ‘international cooperation’ and ‘research outcomes,’ but standing next to a tree that has survived for nearly 5,000 years, the anxiety about whether I chose the right major or if I should have gone to a school in Boston just felt silly. Nature doesn’t care about your GPA or your research citations.

Not exactly sure where this leads

Sometimes I still look at the news back home, reading about how my old peers are doing in Korea, and I feel a bit disconnected. Did I make the right call? Maybe. Maybe not. I still have another year left, and my budget is tighter than I expected, forcing me to cut back on those weekend trips to LA that I thought I’d be taking constantly. I’m just trying to get through the next semester without having a total breakdown. I don’t feel like I have some grand wisdom to share, and honestly, the whole experience feels less like a success story and more like a long, complicated adjustment period that I’m still currently stuck in. If I had to do it all again, I think I’d worry a little less about the brand name and maybe just worry more about whether the local transit system actually works.