Dear Mina:

I read that on the CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test) day, the stock markets open late, buses and subways are increased to avoid traffic jams so that students won’t be late to the testing sites, planes are grounded so that noise will not disturb students. Members of students’ families gather outside testing sites to cheer on the students.

According to my go-to source of information, Wikipedia, 552,297 examinees took the CSAT in 2016, over half a million. If this is the year you took the test, then you were one of  5,523 top 1% students. In Sky, unlike high school, you are among the five thousand and a half population (the 1%). No wonder “college is a totally different thing than high school”. In high school you “used to #1 in almost everything but everyone here, they are as smart and as intelligent as me”.

Back to Wikipedia, it reads that South Korea is a top performing country in reading literacy, mathematics and sciences, has one of the world’s highest educated labor forces, and is “well known for its obsession with education, which has come to be called ‘education fever’“. It reads further that “Higher education is an overwhelmingly serious issue in South Korea society, where it is viewed as one of the fundamental cornerstones of South Korean life… Academic success is often a source of pride for families… Graduating from a top university is the ultimate marker of prestige, high socioeconomic status, promising marriage prospects, and a respectable career path… pressure to succeed academically is deeply ingrained in South Korean children from an early age. Those who lack a formal university education often face social prejudice… The top three universities in South Korea, often referred to as “SKY”… Intense competition and pressure to earn the highest grade is deeply ingrained in the psyche of South Korean students at a young age.”

It goes on: “The system’s rigid and hierarchical structure has been criticized … described as intensely and ‘brutally’ competitive. The system is often blamed for the high suicide rate in South Korea… Former South Korean hagwon teacher Se-Woong Koo wrote that South Korean education system amounts to child abuse…The system has also been criticized for producing an excess supply of university graduates creating an overeducated and underemployed labor force… in the first quarter of 2013 alone, nearly 3.3 million South Korean university graduates were jobless, leading many graduates overqualified for jobs requiring less education”,

This explains to me why you “have tried to talk to a few of my friends here but they seems like they are doing ok. Not so well but the stress is bearable for them” I understand better the pressure you experienced as well as your ex boyfriend (can I refer to him as Gyunnie, or is it your private word for him?)

I am thinking students are not likely to talk about their stress, they are just doing their best to ignore it and keep their focus on the studying, knowing they have no option but to keep going, study and study. Just like you feel there is no option, no way out. At this very point I have better understanding of why your ex boyfriend broke up the relationship, the pressure to succeed academically is just too intense to allow a love relationship. No, he didn’t reject you. He ejected you from his overwhelming life.

This is also leading me to think that the counseling available in SKY is going to promote the “education fever” mentality, aiming at you focusing on this fever and putting aside anything in its way.

anita