This essay won the Excellence Award in the Category “Lesson” of the 2024 KAISTian Failure Story Essay Contest, by the Center for Ambitious Failure (CAF), a research centre of KAIST that is very dear to me.

2 March 2023. It’s my 28th birthday, the first one I celebrated in Korea since I moved from Brazil, on the other side of the world. I went to a nice restaurant, with my labmates and Professor. The girl sitting next to me was a feminist researcher, whom I had known for about a week, at that point, and we both felt that we would become each other’s best friend. We had tteokbokki and soju, they sang “Happy Birthday” to me, and I blew out candles on an ice cream cake, because I cannot eat gluten. It was colder than I expected, for early March. We would soon go out to find another bar, for a second round. We all had appointments the next day, but we stayed out past 3 in the morning, drinking and chatting. 

A year before, I spent my 27th birthday at home, with my parents and sister. We went to the movies to watch “The Batman,” and I had caramel popcorn (which I adore). We are the “birthday party” type of family, but we couldn’t do a lot that time. I was going through a busy season, preparing for what I assumed to be my last application for grad school in Korea, for a highly selective government scholarship. To give this opportunity a fair try, I devoted all of my energy to do well. The entire year before, since the previous birthday, had been dedicated to working on improving my qualifications. Every waking hour was spent on improving my Korean skills, networking with researchers (in spite of the restrictions of the pandemic), considering prospects and working to pay for the language classes and expensive documents I needed to prepare. 

After returning from the movies with my family, I stayed up all night—once I printed and validated multiple copies of all paperwork, I had to neatly label every page, order and assign them to different packages, to ship them safely. The day after, I sent a box with four thick envelopes to the Korean Embassy, and then, around three weeks later, I got an email saying I had been selected for the next phase. I was very happy, but not too surprised—that was the goal of all the hard work leading up to that moment, right? My face was puffy on the day of my online interview, from removing two wisdom teeth the week before. With the help of my language tutor, I prepared a speech in Korean, which I did not use, and I left the Zoom call feeling a bit disappointed by the questions they asked, about things I thought I had explained well in my application statements. Another participant told me she had seen my qualifications, and she was sure I was in. But, when we heard back by the end of the week, I was not on the list. They had not selected me. 

Upon failing that application, I realised I had not prepared myself well for the possibility of being unsuccessful. Perhaps because I wanted to feel confident in my hard work. But also, my life was going really well. Back when I decided to go all in for the scholarship, I thought to myself that, if I failed that round of applications, I would take it as a sign to focus on other things, and give up pursuing further education. On the side, I had turned my gigs teaching English to adults into a thriving small business; my students were growing, and there was a long waitlist of people interested in studying with me. I had also just landed a dream position as a storytelling consultant for artists in a music label, where my experience studying how K-pop fans interact online and with their object of fandom was very valuable. By all means, I had plenty of reasons to feel like I was winning, and that not getting into grad school wasn’t the end of the world. 

Nonetheless, I felt like a loser. As a writer, I know that the difference between “barking up the wrong tree” and “not all those who wander are lost” is a matter of plot, but the story I was telling myself about my application was not accommodating the latest events. I couldn’t stop replaying my frustrating interview with the Embassy. At that point, I had been active as an independent scholar for almost three years, but the interviewers doubted I could get into the top program on my list, KAIST School of Science and Technology Policy, because I had an Architecture major. Maybe, I thought, they hadn’t read my application thoroughly, so they didn’t understand how much work I had done since finishing my Bachelor’s. Or maybe they just thought it wasn’t good or convincing enough. Either version of the story left me feeling bad—I was either wronged, or lacking. I got the news right before lunch, and I immediately called my therapist to request an urgent appointment. Our session was an hour of crying about how I felt like I was constantly setting myself up for disappointment. I can be optimistic when it comes to the end of all our hard work—it never goes to waste, even if the purpose changes. But, more than the loss, I was grieving the fact that what I wanted, and what I could get, seemed to be out of sync. It seemed that I was able to do well, and accomplish a lot, but not enough for my dreams. 

I had a close friend who had been granted the same scholarship I was applying for, and who helped me enormously during the whole process. Instead of adding to my self-pity party, she presented me with a list of options of what I could still do. Even though I had told myself I wouldn’t apply again if I failed, I had set a small condition to giving it another try—if the opportunity came up naturally, almost seamlessly. My friend told me I could still use the same documents and apply directly to the universities, instead of the embassy. It was a Friday afternoon in my hometown, early Saturday in Seoul, and she was helping me find what schools still had deadlines that I could meet, with the time that it would take for documents to arrive in Korea. Of my three original schools of choice, KAIST and Yeungnam were still doable (the other one, SEOULTECH, was not). I decided I had some energy left to spend another weekend poring over papers. And then—and I do not remember exactly why I did that—, it was after this conversation that I decided to take another look through the programs of the universities I was considering, and that was the first time I looked into the Graduate School of Culture Technology, less than 12 hours after I was rejected from my original application. 

My younger sister got home from work, and walked into my room, to see how I was doing. As she sat on the floor, I talked about how I had just found The Perfect Program to conduct the research that I wanted. My room was dark, with nothing but the soft glow of my computer screen, as I showed her the website of the Social Computing Lab. The homepage donned a tagline that got my heart racing—The Nonidentity of Society and Interaction. That was the kind of energy I had been looking for since I first became interested in my research topic, back in 2019. Finding that lab after a failure was making it seem like nothing else had worked out before because that was the right one. Around 1am that day, I emailed Professor Wonjae Lee; I sounded equal parts resolute and desperate—“A lengthy email isn’t the best way to contact prospective research supervisors, but I need more than two paragraphs to explain why an Architect is emailing you, and why we should work together.” 

When I woke up, my friend in Korea texted me to say we misunderstood the deadlines: KAIST was no longer accepting scholarship applicants. That threw cold water on my latest flicker of hope and I had to, once again, change the story I was telling myself about this whole process. Things were not over yet, I still had a chance to try—and one does not always get a new opportunity right after losing something. At that point, it was all very different from what I had envisioned, but I wouldn’t turn down a good chance just because it wasn’t the ideal scenario. The rest of the weekend was spent preparing documents for Yeungnam, and organising my feelings about what I was doing. The plan for Monday morning was to go validate new copies of my documents. Instead, I woke up early to an email waiting in my inbox; it was Professor Wonjae Lee, telling me he would be very happy to receive my application for the Social Computing Lab. 

As it turns out, KAIST was no longer receiving scholarship applicants, but they were still open to regular applications. But the deadline was very tight—I would have to put everything together in less than 72 hours, to ship my documents in time. My family made it a collective project; with their help, I pushed through until Wednesday, with little to no sleep. Out of what had seemed to be my last straw, I pulled two sets of applications, dispatched to Daegu and Daejeon. The stress lasted for a bit longer—UPS lost track of one of my packages, and delayed both of them, and I had to get lawyers involved to manage the situation. Yeungnam did not accept my documents, but KAIST did, even though they arrived almost a week after the deadline. And then I waited, and I put my heart into other things, and I got content enough with the multiple possibilities of life, so I could face the chance of another rejection with more grace. 

It was late June, 5 in the morning, when I read “Congratulations” on my phone screen, and learned that I had been admitted to KAIST for Fall 2022. Around two months after results came out, I boarded the first of two flights, from São Paulo to Seoul, with 75 kg of luggage, bright blue hair and the confident feeling that this was the way that things were supposed to be. I thought about the night when I first found my lab’s website, and how I was right—that nothing else had worked out before, because that was the right place for me. But this only makes sense because I am standing on the other side of this process: I have been wrong about timing before. Looking back at the couple of days between failing the scholarship, finding my lab, and then thinking KAIST was no longer receiving applications, before I found out they were, I don’t think the lesson is “just wait a bit and your dreams will come true” or “if you are sure about something, keep pushing” because these are misleading beliefs, not conducive to a an honest outlook of the possibility of failure. We don’t always get some deus ex machina unexpectedly changing our circumstances; more often than not, we just lose, and then we have to move on. 

At the beginning of this application process, I established that failing was supposed to be a sign to focus on other things, but I was not willing to accept the terms of the failure. I was not willing to accept myself as a loser, almost as if that was not a compulsory part of the decision to apply. It is unrealistic to expect a life of victories, even more to attach our meaning and validation to winning, when losing is inevitable, even in unjust ways — but it seems like we do it anyway. Even after getting accepted into CT, I still catch myself replaying the frustrating scholarship interview. I see that I regarded the application process more as personal validation of my intelligence and capacity, than a good chance to advance my plans and dreams. So, as much as I wouldn’t trade my current life for the scenario that didn’t work out, it has been hard to make peace with not being deemed “enough” for it. 

But lingering on what was lost, or what could have been, only keeps me from enjoying the possibilities ahead. With hindsight, I have been as happy getting what I wanted as living the surprise results of unexpected events. And my feelings towards things I desired, at one point or another, have changed a lot over the years. What frustration has repeatedly shown me is that a closed door isn’t the end of the road, even if it feels like that, for some time. Everyone will be a loser at some point; part of learning how to deal with it is accepting that not all opportunities are for me, and that is just how things go. Life is always changing, new possibilities are always coming up, and we cannot anticipate the new paths waiting on the other side of the most frustrating moments of loss. The story is still being written.

9 June, 2024. It is a Sunday morning, I am sitting at a convenience store, having breakfast with my best friend, a feminist researcher, and two other friends I met in Europe the year before, in a Summer School, which I joined with a classmate from Spring 2023. The guy sitting next to me asked me if I had to take a Korean language test to apply to KAIST, and I said no, but that I had taken it because I had applied for a scholarship first, but failed it. “But,” I said, “if I hadn’t failed that scholarship, I wouldn’t have come to CT, and I also couldn’t have applied to the Summer School, because I wouldn’t have really started my Master’s until Fall 2023.” “So this moment wouldn’t be happening right now if you hadn’t failed!” my friend said. This thought had crossed my mind many times, but that was the first time I heard it from someone else. She was right. We laughed about it, as we tried different protein bars, I taught them how to prepare the best convenience store latte, and then we went for a walk along the stream across my house, under the sizzling Sun of late Spring.