Mumbaydan Seulgacha.

I grew up in India aiming for the IITs. I took a drop year after 12th grade to make it happen, the kind of year where everything else gets put on hold so you can sit JEE one more time. When JEE Advanced (2016) results came out, I had not made it.

Back then, it felt like my life was over. I joined a local college in Mumbai because it was the option in front of me, and it felt completely meaningless from day one. I could not explain it cleanly at the time, but I knew I was in the wrong environment for the kind of life I wanted. (I've talked about this in more detail in my YouTube videos.)

So I started looking elsewhere. I searched for scholarships at the bachelor's level abroad, and that is how I found GKS and a handful of other undergraduate scholarships in Korea. I gave it everything I had.

I applied for the Global Korea Scholarship, the program that covers full tuition, a monthly stipend, and a year of Korean language training. In practice, I spent three months trying to make sense of information that lived in fifty different university PDFs, on fifty different websites

There was no one to ask. Forum threads were years out of date. My parents could not help. Every program had its own document list, its own deadline, its own way of asking for the same thing. I did not even know which schools were a good fit for me, only which ones had pages I could decode.

In the end, I only applied to 2 scholarship programs: EGPP from Ewha Women's University (which I wasn't accepted to) and GKS-U (Embassy Track, which I was accepted to). Not because two was enough, but because two was all I could track.

I graduated in February 2022, started working at startups as a software engineer, being a GKS student + from India made me eligible for a recommendation letter from NIIED so I got my F-2-7 (Long-term residency visa) immediately after graduation, 3 years later, in December 2025, I got my permanent residency in S.Korea, and I've built a life + career here. Seoul stopped being a chapter and became home.

Along the way, something else happened. I started sharing the journey on YouTube and Instagram, mostly as a way to process and express my journey.

Years later, I can say it clearly: not getting into an IIT was the best thing that ever happened to me. The path I would have taken does not exist on the other side of that result. Living in Seoul, software career in Korea, permanent residency, none of it would have been on my radar otherwise.

If you are sitting with a result that feels like the end of the road right now, I want to gently tell you what I wish someone had told me: you cannot see the door this is opening yet, but it is opening.

Students and worried parents message me almost every day with the same question: how do I apply to study in Korea? A lot of them have a story similar to mine. They failed to get into their IITs, but they are smart and qualified, and they are about to make the exact mistake I made: applying to a tiny handful of programs because tracking more alone is overwhelming.

I built KoreaAdmit so that never has to happen again. One place to see every Korean university and scholarship you actually qualify for. Real guidance from someone who has been through it. Help with the documents, the deadlines, and the human support when things go wrong.

If you are reading this, you are where I was before 2017. The opportunity is real, the scholarships are real, and you are more qualified than you think.

You should not have to apply to two programs when you qualify for ten. Let's find all of them, together.