I had a question to ask Mr Burell and since he was on Twitter more than his Gmail or Skype (which, he convinced basically the whole school to download), I decided to twit him. A few minutes later I received a very short, pleasing and precise answer and decided to track-down (haha) his follower-list. I realized how much names and photos act as a major part of first impressions - not necessarily the “good-looking” ones, but those “smart-looking” ones; haha. I clicked on “follow me” by entering their blogs and reading few posts, and found out about Bryan’s blog/website.

Although I couldn’t read all of his posts (yet I am planning to) he had some pretty interesting posts up there. He was leading the Social Media Breakfast 7,and this meeting was an involvement of many amazing people… gathered, I believe, mostly on twitter? His recent post was a little tip to expand connections by searching through his attendee list… and it did really help- not that I purposely INTENDED to expand my connections,

but the way how adults with passionate in their own areas expressed themselves through writing and words really impressed me.

I guess, the world isn’t so small as I expected it to be!
Grow up sweet-sixteen!

(above) a snapshot from BryanPerson.com

Third of May 2008 -
I’ll never forget this date.

I decided to take the SAT2 chemistry exa

m late November last year… I never considered taking one till my mom got convinced by one of the moms of our school. I was given with another textbook (not the school one) and loads of other practice tests. Studying together with 4 other people, I found out that I had limits to my ability of Science and Mathmatics… I even thought, “Australia… really wrecked me”

It’s possible to blame the difference of two countries’ education…and it is to be admitted that America’s education system is well organized and effective, since they focus on each subject of diferent areas every year, students are more capable to remember and focus on every chapters. But I, have missed every one of them for the past 5 years…

But I knew that I had to overcome my weaknesses. I knew that, excuses won’t help me get out of anything - lets face it; who really cares about the history? they only care about the result and the present. And that was where I was; no where close to all the other students. School Chemistry focused more on Calculations while SAT2 required more theories.

Theories, theories, theories, theories….

Spring break - I literally did not get sunshine nor wind. I cornered myself in the room and continuously read the textbook. I had no other choice - I needed to work 3 times more than the others to catch up. And the week after we gathered and decided to take a practice test to see where we were. I expected a high score - at least, higher than the other scores I got; but I lost 20 more points than my previous exam. I was devastated. Whilst, those who couldn’t study (because of their AP studies) got way beyond my score; or at least didn’t loose points.

And I realized not only I should work smart, but should work SMART - analyze my weaknesses and strengths and work “effectively” rather than “just work”. With helps from my auntie and my uncle, and not to forget my teacher Mr.Joo who helped me out VERY MUCH, I have reached a stage above 700, which is an impressive score for one year of regular Chemistry. The night before the exam, I took a “real” exam and got a 780…

On the day, I thought I was going to cancel the mark - I wasn’t sure of my ability. All the others had canceled their test papers, and I was the only one who did not.

Just about 10 minutes during the test, I thought to myself, “This isn’t so bad - I think I can make it” and answered fast and hard, and I could not cancel because of all my efforts that I had put in so far. I just couldn’t - many people here aim for 800s, the “perfect” scores. I aimed for a qualitative, proud, “MY” real score.

And I’ve reached it. This, australian, what-is-chemistry? girl worked hard and received a satisfying result. I am proud of myself.

It has finally ended, 2008 Swimming Season. To be exact, we finished with the last KAIAC swim meet at KIS (our school) on saturday 26th April, 2008. It was amazing - this season, compared to last year, made a miraculous progress. Our boys team composed of 6 members (half of an actual team which is of 12 members) had placed 5th place, beating 4 schools. Boys called them them “qualitative team” while the girls were the “quantitative team”. Our girls team had a lot of team members - our girls team was easily spotted in their blue swim suits from far away. This team, as well, made an extreme progress. Not only that we had many new students in the swim team (such as new Juniors: Siwon and Sophomores: Yeon-Su, Jihyung, Ilwon and Freshmens: SeungWoo, DeeDee, Timothy…) that made a BIG contribution, all the original members reduced their records by far by the end of the season.

Last year I had an experience of being one of the swimmers as I was the manager this year. Last year’s team was, in fact, the very first team in KIS after the creation of a swimming pool in the basement. And our team, compared to all the other school’s team, was like a little family, gone for a picnic in the pool, to watch the meet. We had absolute no choice which race we wanted to participate, in fact, we needed more swimmers to fill up the lanes.

This year, was a big change. The girls team were loaded with members - not that they were all great swimmers, their attitudes and their efficiency were amazing. They worked hard, they paced with the coaches ( although they had some trouble getting along with them)…and the managers

Swim managers have more work that everyone think… “behind the scenes” we call it, we worked during the spring break… put all times and organize every individual in pages and pages of excel… it was a lot of hard work, but it was absolutely worth it. This experience, of organization and “working for somebody” made me feel great responsibility and I was very proud of myself when the coaches complimented me by farrrr….

Wonderful experience, I hope to use the managing skills in the “Real world”.

A short notice, but PGC is coming up on May 17th. We’ve been preparing it for over the past 1 year… while other schools in Australia, Bangkok (etc..) were ready in a month. It’s quiet embarrassing, for many reasons.

1, is that Korea isn’t the best place to hold concerts like this, since many students and parents are too busy running around hakwons and prepare for their academic careers… when the world is dying right now.

2, is that our students insulted those people (in reason 1) and us, ourselves, are the ones who are like that…

3, are we really doing this because we care?

At first we were divided into different jobs…but a few months later we broke apart. Our websites were extremely well designed but writings or comments by KIS students were no where to be seen, when we called it “the student-running concert”. I may be being a little ironic here, but it was the reality…

Though for the past few weeks we made a very big progression. Our artists made amazing posters - in fact, I was absolutely proud of the great talent our artists had; it was stunning. We booked a club at Hongdae, our dates were set and all we had to do was raise money and search for bands. I had promised to request underground bands (such as Nastyona, No brain) and writing a perfect, short, eye-catching email request doesn’t seem to be that easy!!

you want to show off your piano skills; you want to tape yourself and show it the world -  your piano is out of tune.

 you have a speech due next week; you catch a cold and your voice sops falling out at the tip of your throat.

 April 2008 is my “slump”. This is not a blog - this is just written, to talk out loud my scratched inside…

Just like in the States, Korea had begun to release a reality TV show called “We just got married”. In this show, four women celebrities and four men celebrities were paired up to form four couples, living in four different houses. This show was targeted to show four different type of married couples and it is up to the audience to determine which type of couple is the most perfect out of all.

From the “cute-ees” to the “can’t-live-without-you” and the “I’d-rather-die”, its amount of entertainment can’t be described in words. Each time they meet together (since this is a SHOW, they do not live with each other; but they have a house that they decorated) there is a mission given by the producer of the TV show. For example, there are missions like “doing some sort of sports together” or “making Kim-chi (korean traditional must-have-on-table food) for the couples.

Online comments were attached, something like “I wish my newly weds were just like them” or “He is so cruel” or even, “I’d die if I live with a woman like her”. I sometimes get skeptical of the honesty of their actions. It is believable/possible that they would have a somewhat script to follow, though some characters carry overly strong personalities which makes their scenarios lack reality and fun, along with frustration.

Overall, teenagers joke around saying, “if they bought a house for themselves and also decorated them, why aren’t they spending their whole time before and after work? I bet if this was produced from the States, they would’ve done that”. I mean, they released the show “newly weds” with Jessica Simpson and Nick ***; why not?

Can’t wait till sunday!

You go to a bookstore and you see the section where it has books from “strategies to enter Harvard” or “Live like Clincton”. Well, I don’t know if Clinton or Olbama is a good statue to learn from, so I had a go for more objective subjects and found the book, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” out of all the Harvard-admirers. Scrolling up and down the blog page, I found myself worrying about something that’s going to happen, three years later. Am I mentally disordered or do I need self-relaxation through a book blessed by god; not necessarily, the bible. More about the start of living will be discovered through out my adventurous moments while the pages flip over every 10 minutes, since I’d be twitching my brain strings as much as Google is searching for web pages for every page-turn.

Today, I’ve faced reality. Well, that makes no sense. I’ve realized that “working hard” and “working smart” is really different. SAT2 Chemistry - yes, that’s what it is. For the whole spring break, I did not shine sunlight and read the text book over and over and over again. I knew calculations were my weaknesses, but I did not prepare for it; at all. Despite the fact that I knew my weaknesses, I did not do anything about it - I was stupid. Though I made perfection with the other side. All I have to do is to keep it up and in addition need to work on my weaknesses.

I am crying; in fact, I’m not crying for myself. I’m crying for my parents, who supported me and… *sigh*

Let’s face it, Let’s work on it.

today, is the worst day.
heard this music, more than 1000 times.
Sometimes, listening and jotting things down ( as we call it “stream of unconsciousness) helps relieving the dusts in me…

There’s a song that’s inside of my soul.
It’s the one that I’ve tried to write over and over again
I’m awake in the infinite cold.
But you sing to me over and over and over again.

So, I lay my head back down.
And I lift my hands and pray
To be only yours, I pray, to be only yours
I know now you’re my only hope.

Sing to me the song of the stars.
Of your galaxy dancing and laughing and laughing again.
When it feels like my dreams are so far
Sing to me of the plans that you have for me over again.

So I lay my head back down.
And I lift my hands and pray
To be only yours, I pray, to be only yours
I know now, you’re my only hope.

I give you my destiny.
I’m giving you all of me.
I want your symphony, singing in all that I am
At the top of my lungs, I’m giving it back.

So I lay my head back down.
And I lift my hands and pray
To be only yours, I pray, to be only yours
I pray, to be only yours
I know now you’re my only hope.

You could say that Koreans are the most “online” opinionated people in the world. Ironically, the fact that Korea has the most developed (including the high quality) internet connections, servers and web-tools might have been a result of those Korean online users that have “nothing better to do”. Make sense?

Though, it’s fairly interesting to see that Korea has a variety of portal sites that people can choose as their “start page” or “home-page” for their internet servers depending on their taste. In fact, compared to “you-tube” or “Google”, Korean portal sites look rather “safe” and “ad-free” with good organizations and layouts. That’s only my opinion, anyways.

Once I click on the internet server, the first tab I click on is “Facebook|Welcome..”, “Naver::” and “Cyworld”. The first one would be familiar to any english-speaking people; though “Naver” and “Cyworld” is not likely, but surely are for Koreans. Cyworld.com could be described as the Korean-version of “Facebook”, but rather sophisticated and is a better online-product in terms of marketing or business; explainations? Well, before talking more about their marketing and business skills, Cyworld not only offers personal profiles for people to build on and share, but also provide search engines of videos, music, online-shops, news, movie, etc. just like any other porter engines through out the “internet world”. It was (and still is) focused only for personal pages and profiles but it expanded on by branching into “group pages” (which is just like personal pages but for groups and is more detailed) and “baby pages”(which is personal pages made and amazingly “well-organized” just for new-moms to insert baby pictures and record memories… talk about, 21st moms?) and advanced profile pages called “home2″ and so much more.

Now, the effective business techniques in order to decorate the layouts, use pretty fonts, insert background music and so on, they need to buy it online. Not really unusual since many American profile pages do that ( and so many not, but still) though Cyworld does not use “won” or “$” which makes them look like “real money”. Instead, they use a fruit’s name, “nutshell” which, one of them represent W100 which is around 10cents in the US. One song equals to 5 nutshells, which does not sound very costly when they say “Five-nut-shells” but it really is, since it is in fact, 50cents… (my bad for transferring it into US dollars/cents since the value is totally different to the Koreans in terms of cultures and so on.)

Here’s a video that I found among the “Top 10 list” of Cyworld’s video page.Yuna-Kim, one of the world’s top young skaters, in fact won 3 gold medals in the previous 3 competitions in various countries, respectively, but unfortunately had to appreciate her bronze medal in the recent competition due to many reasons.

Mom and I were grilling meat on charcoals after school …. I’m going through a major breakdown these days. My thought, which was always supported by the teachers that “school work is important more than anything” is getting doubted minute by minute. I should have trained myself to work and study beyond school, and the biggest I wish I have at the moment…

is for me to have a better brain. Better brain? Not necessarily mean “smarter”, since smarter can be determined through people’s commitment of efforts…

but having a “better brain” and “better traits” concerns more about the genetics and so on…

Studying SAT2 Chemistry these days… and I’m starting to realize that my ability of “calculations” is beyond hideous compared to so many surrounding people. And while the meat was burning above the charcoals… I crawled back to my past.
Australia - it is, and it forever will be one of the major “turning point” of my life. You could say, that I have a lot of travel experiences (special thanks to dad, whose job is “international” based so we can travel around more)… India (well, that was the STARTING point of my english education)…but then I ended coming back to Korea because me and mom was ill for couple of weeks and so… Australia.
Wherever you go, I guess the “education” is the most important factor for all the students. “Choosing the right track” in fact, branches out of “education”. I went to big private catholic private school. The teachers’ goal was not only to succeed students with a high “academic level” but to make them behave as “people” and make them as “people”. Yes, those five years and australia cerntainly did not raise at least 10 points of my verbal&reading SAT scores. Though, it raised me as a better person - much more worth than raising the “reading skills”. I’ll talk about this more if I am in a better mood but I just want to record it, in case I need to look back later on my life how I felt at this moment about Australia.

After all, I am a 16-year old kid wants to chil on a sofa watching “gossip girl”. I have a future of years of 3~4times of my current age. So I encourage myself to boost up and try my best, for no regrets.

Life isn’t about how smart you are, I won’t be represented with “numbers” - I can be, in fact, defined with various words and various aspects involving all the 5 senses that humans have. Yes, a student’s “job” is to study, but a student, won’t forever BE a student. They will become adults, and those characteristics of adults will vary reflecting on the habits, the personalities and etc. of their “student” life.

I was looking for “motherly” videos.. and found these two. One is in some kind of language that I don’t know, and the other is a familiar cartoon for all of us…