Seoul to Cambridge, part 2 of 3
From Seoul to Cambridge
The first time I left a system I knew and had to learn a new one from the inside.
Context
I grew up in Seoul wanting to run Nike one day. I loved football, and I was fascinated by boots and jerseys: not just how they looked, but how the materials worked. I also believed, even then, that if you want to learn something properly, you go to where it comes from.
At fifteen I moved to the UK on my own, to Abbey College Cambridge. I wanted two things there: a stronger academic path, and the chance to play competitive soccer. I did the research myself: which schools took international students, how the visa process worked, and which ones offered the most scholarship money.
The problem
My English was already decent, so I assumed language would be the hard part, and that once it was fine, everything else would follow. It wasn’t, and it didn’t.
The hard part wasn’t the subjects or the language. It was how school worked. In Korea I knew what a good answer looked like. In the UK, classes ran on discussion, written work was expected to make an argument rather than just report, and much of the learning was supposed to happen on your own.
I could solve the problems. At first I couldn’t explain them the way the class expected, out loud or on paper. Outside class it was the same: making friends, and finding my place on the soccer team, ran on rules nobody had written down for me.
What I did
- Asked for feedback directly. I went to my teachers and asked what a strong answer looked like, and where mine fell short.
- Studied how other students answered. I paid attention to how the strongest students structured an argument or walked through a solution, and borrowed the structure before I had my own.
- Rebuilt my routine. Nobody was going to set my day for me, so I set a fixed structure for classes, independent study and sleep.
- Made friends on purpose. I worked at building relationships with classmates instead of waiting for them to happen, and leaned on the soccer team to do it.
- Kept playing soccer. I played alongside all of it, which meant the routine had to actually work.
Within a few months I was speaking up in class and felt more confident, and my grades held.
The UK track usually takes four years, two for GCSEs and two for A Levels. I finished the GCSEs in one year and the whole course in three, with A Levels in Mathematics, Further Mathematics and Physics, on an academic scholarship.
What I learned
Adapting isn’t giving up who you are. It’s learning the new place’s operating rules quickly, and at first that mostly means copying well. I didn’t find my own way of answering in a UK classroom by thinking hard about it. I found it by watching people who already did it, asking the people grading it what they wanted, and practicing until the structure became mine.
It was also the first time I chose discomfort on purpose. I’ve done it a few more times since. It hasn’t gotten comfortable. It has gotten familiar.