I thought one session with a consultant would clear things up

Why I ended up at that small office near Jamsil

I remember sitting in a stiff chair at a study cafe near Jamsil station last summer, staring at a screen that just wouldn’t load properly. I had been told by so many people—mostly parents at the local community center—that if I didn’t get some kind of professional insight, I would be shooting in the dark. It felt like everyone was talking about ‘Dae-gyo-hyeop’ and some magic GPA conversion tables that only the initiated seemed to understand. I paid around 200,000 won for a single hour of guidance. Looking back, that feels like a lot of money for someone who just needed to know if their current grades for Gachon University had any actual merit. The consultant had a stack of files that looked like they hadn’t been updated since the previous spring, which made me slightly nervous from the jump.

The disconnect between data and reality

We spent the first twenty minutes just trying to reconcile my school transcript with the online tools. Everyone keeps pointing to the portal that supposedly tells you everything, but when you’re actually sitting there, clicking through the menus, it never feels quite right. My consultant kept insisting that I look at the previous year’s cut-offs, but they felt like ancient history. The irony is that the more I looked at these charts, the less I understood about my own situation. He kept mentioning how common it was for students in general high schools to struggle against the profiles of those from autonomous private schools, which wasn’t exactly the kind of encouragement I was hoping to hear. It felt like I was being told that the system was already tilted against me, regardless of how many hours I logged at the library.

Stumbling through the mock interview process

Later that month, I heard about a mock interview session hosted by a university in Busan, though they had some regional branches, too. I traveled quite a bit, thinking the face-to-face feedback would finally make it click. It was exhausting. The waiting room was filled with students who looked like they’d been doing this for years—some were already carrying thick folders of extracurriculars that I hadn’t even thought to document. When it was my turn, I got stuck on a question about why I chose my specific major. I knew the answer in my head, but under the bright lights and with the interviewer staring at his watch, it came out like a jumbled mess. I left that room feeling like I had just wasted a perfectly good Saturday, yet I was still grateful for the, what, fifteen minutes of actual talk? It’s hard to tell if it helped or if it just made me more anxious about the real thing.

The lingering doubt about professional help

Sometimes I wonder if I should have just spent that time at home, maybe trying to organize my own records without paying someone else to point at a spreadsheet. There was this constant pressure to find a ‘consultant’ who could predict the outcome, like it was some kind of financial investment rather than an education. I see all these new books coming out every season with titles like ‘Admissions End in Middle School,’ and I just feel tired. Is it really that deterministic? I’m still not sure if the money spent on that hour in Jamsil changed my trajectory or if I would have ended up in the same place anyway. It’s an strange, hollow feeling when you realize that even with all the ‘expert’ advice, you’re still the one who has to show up on the day of the exam and just perform.