91 · Mentally Poor Kingdoms

There are genuinely levels to this. In Korea you think SNU and med school are the highest echelon. Then you go global, and there's the Ivy League and the Russell Group. Even within universities, most people do random things — and there's a small minority of savages driven toward startups and beyond. Then even among those, there are people on the track of insight days, spring weeks, summer analysts, return offers, masters, industrial placements — and there are people who do all of that at 10x volume, take first-class honours, run startups, serve as treasurer of three societies and president of the student union, while swing trading and building a scalping algorithm on the side.

The world is a game of pendulums, and there are certain paths you leap onto where you can sort the waves you want. The leap takes risk, stress and pain tolerance — usually the culmination of hard work on things that are different, new, novel, uncertain and risky. So you are doing great — perfect, but never content. You can technically finish all ten degrees in six months, and that would still be less than a billionth of what your youth can hold.

The Korean scholarship criteria taught me something. Challenge — 뚜렷하고 구체적인 학문적 목표를 가진 학생: specify the aim, make the goal clear and eminent. Creativity — 탁월한 학습능력과 창의성, 열정을 지닌 학생: show the drive, the fire; let it manifest into the text. Contribution — 국가 및 인류사회에 헌신하고자 하는 신체 건강한 학생: clarify how this manifests as a net positive force for good. And from someone who won it: 그리고 면접에서는 경제적인 어려움이나 생활비의 필요성을 어필하는 걸 안 좋게 받아들이셨어요 — in the interview, appealing to financial hardship was received poorly. Entirely separate from money: how much promise do you have, how confident are you in contributing academically, do you carry the ambition of a future Nobel laureate? Being a true intellectual — showcasing creativity, the will to contribute, love of the subject — is profoundly important. 동기 장학생들을 보면 대학/전공은 다양하지만 모두 하나같이 우수하고 출중한 분들이셨고, 학부장학생 이후에 대학원장학까지 이어서 수혜받으신 분들도 계셨습니다 — fellow scholars across every field, excellent without exception, funded from undergrad through doctorate. To get a fully funded undergraduate, masters and DPhil at Oxbridge and London — that is going to be wild.

Materials needed for the 관정이종환교육재단 application: gather them. The only strategy I know that opens doors is being brutally honest — open about everything I've gone through these past years. My story is so unorthodox, at least locally, that it carries enough volatility to strike something real.

Korea is just mentally poor. Almost everyone chases the highest salary with no interest in what work fulfils them. And the deepest local trap: the obsession with academic accolades, titles, looking good on paper — the CV as propaganda canvas. I reject it — and I'm still sitting its exams, still applying for its scholarships, still grateful for its furnace. Both things are true. You can use a system's fuel without adopting its gods.

Even my hometown pride bends here: I want to eventually represent South Korea at a scale nobody from my city has — to revamp the trajectory of the city I'm from. You can reject the matrix and still carry the flag. That's the shape of it.