South Korean tradition

  One of the fun facts about South Korean tradition is that we calculate one’s age differently from western cultures. In the USA, I am still 28 years old, but in South Korea I am 30. Reason for this is that we assume a newborn baby as 1 year old. As I am 28 but also 30, this age of 30 made me look back on my life. As a result of that, I realized that this whole journey to applying to law school started from the year 2006. Raised from an international family, I always wanted to study English in the USA and its culture. At the age of 12, I finally got the chance to go to winter school in New Jersey only for a month on my own. There, even though I was the only foreign student in that class and I couldn’t speak English a bit, one thing that I could be excelled at was Spanish because every other classmate was also learning Spanish for the first time in their life. The fact that I could be remarkably better at Spanish than any other students made me fall in love with Spanish and this made me decide to go to Foreign Language High School back in South Korea. Here in High school, it was my first experience that I realized that I could develop my own skill and interest to the highest level. During 3 years, I wrote papers in Spanish about Spain and achieved DELE B1. I always thought I could still pursue my desire to learn languages in university, but not expectedly, I went to university to study Education. I chose Education major but, I realized this was not my path right away. While I was in academic and career concern, I met a girl in the study club and saw her studying for the CPA exam. At that moment, which I still remember, I was inspired by her and her enthusiasm to studying accounting. Over 20 years, for me, I was more of an emotional, artistic, philosophical person and deep down in my mind, I craved to be someone more logical, realistic and the field of accounting looked very new and fresh to me. That area was something that I first met in my life and I got charmed by accounting. Since then, I started to have a dream to be an accountant. While I was studying for the CPA exam in my hometown, I remembered that I always wanted to study abroad, so I changed to study AICPA. Here, one more life changing moment came. My brother was already in law school in the USA at that moment, and he was inspired by me, and he also started to study CPA exam. This helped him to get into LLM to study tax, particularly. Thanks to my brother, I could hear great experiences in law school and learn how accounting and law could be a great match together. All through this, I had a thought that my desire to pursue foreign languages, academic knowledge and logical and analyzing mind could be finally realized in law school in the USA.