Sad Korean Soldier Trying to Be Productive

D-300: Hi friend. Welcome to my personal dev log. In here, I’ll record the progress I make on my projects and personal goals, and at times, chronicle my coming of age misadventures in the Republic of Korea Army.

I assume that any poor soul bored enough to visit this log is someone I know, but for full context, I’m currently in the middle of my military service here in Korea as a corporal serving under the Artillery Battalion as an administrative clerk.

I realize I’m incredibly fortunate to have a desk job, while the rest of my army mates are stuck in the armory, maintaining and handling howitzers all day. Still, I do have my fair share of drills, war games, hypothermic bunker visits, midnight rotations, and daily existential frustrations.

Anyways, why am I writing a dev log? For starters, I think the log can keep me publicly accountable and thus more committed to my projects. I also like the idea of having a written record of progress made. The original inspiration to start a log came from the Pixel Architect, the indie creator of Chef RPG. In his log, the Pixel Architect described the annoyance he felt being restricted to spending just 2~3 hours a day on the development of his game at one point because of his day job. An irritation that I can verily empathize with at the moment, what with tech usage being rationed at 3 hours per day here.

Sometimes, I expect this dev log will unconsciously masquerade as a blog, or dare I say, a diary - but I’ll try to stay on topic as much as possible so as not to bore you with tales of my daily mediocrities.

Obviously, motivation will be an issue, but this issue is clearly aggravated by the logistical challenges of army life. Granted, a number of my projects aren’t of a technical nature and can be done on Word, and I’ll still be able to somewhat organize my thoughts and plans through Notion. But web dev, data work, UI prototyping, or any meaningful project work is particularly challenging when armed with just a phone.

Here a few limitations I’ve noted:

1. I can’t use a personal computer: Thankfully, I was able to get permission from my battalion’s captain to bring in my Bluetooth keyboard (a plain Logitech MX Mechanical Mini) from home to connect to my phone. But while this does mean I will be able to write comfortably, I still won’t have access to the rest of my usual tools. What’s more, although the switches are marketed as “tactical browns”, they still sound like muzzled bullets in the silent void of my barracks, to the audible displeasure of my bunkmates.

2. I’m stuck using the computers from the 사이버지식정보방: The days I am able to run Chromium without kickstarting the computer’s fans are truly a blessing. To make matters worse, our base recently updated all computers to some blasphemous new Linux-based, security-focused OS, meaning even further restrictions (no access to the Terminal or Control Panel).

3. The army schedule is laughingly unpredictable: Case in point, one particular drill of ours was rescheduled 6 times in one month.

4. Studying is frowned upon: You can accurately describe the culture in the army as “if I’m sweating, you should be sweating with me.” If only studying was better at burning carbs.

Possible solutions:

1. Setting up a clientless HTML5 remote desktop gateway called Apache Guacamole (Ubuntu) on the base computers. I tried Parsec (a fantastic service), but was blocked by the army’s firewall. They key selling point of Guacamole is that it’s web-based (no install required), so with a bit of additional trickery, I’m confident I’ll be able to remote access my home computer from the base computers.

2. Get permission to bring MacBook to base: I’ve kind of given up on this idea. At first I had hope with my unit captain giving me the sign-off. But was promptly slapped in the face with a bunch of codes and regulations from the base security officer.

3. Get permission to bring iPad to base: This is the most realistic solution I have right now. Apparently, bringing in tablets is permitted, so long as they are for “educational purposes”. I’ve gone through my first consultation with the security officer, and once he reviews the serial number on my device and gets the final sign-off from HQ, I’ll be able to bring my iPad in. Then, by using JumpDesktop to remote access my computer at home, I suppose everything will be alright.

In this first entry, I’ll catalogue all the main projects and goals I have planned out for the next 300 days. These can be organized into 6 categories: technology, portfolio, filmmaking, education, personal, and the army.

Technology

Dongari Pages

I tried to launch Dongari in the past, and while I still love the idea, it’s too overly-complex to be realistically built at the moment.

I like to think Dongari Pages is a more lightweight version of Dongari. While not sacrificing the original focus on student extracurriculars that Dongari had, Pages will focus on allowing student societies to easily create beautiful profiles that showcase each group’s unique culture and achievements.

I’m not skilled enough to build Pages with raw code (still studying). Plus, a codebase would be hard to maintain in the army. For now, the most efficient method would be to use Webflow as my front-end, Memberstack for authentication, and Airtable as my back-end. In theory, with Zapier integrations, it’ll be a friendly enough onboarding experience. I am essentially aiming to first create something with the functionality of a basic CRUD app, with room for improvement in the future.

If the project scales and attains a dedicated user base, hopefully I’ll be able to create a purely native platform that’s not completely reliant on no-code. What’s more, I do think Pages has the potential to grow much further than its current scope. The larger ambition is to be able to host the entire student extracurricular experience through Dongari, whether that be through virtual club fairs, event directories, open communities, and more. But I’ll only focus on the profiles for now.

Sunbae

I think coffee chats are great. I just don’t think they are a very scalable solution for sharing advice. Won’t go into too many details about this specific project because I’m still working out the kinks, but I guess it’s just an effort of mine to make curated academic/personal advice be presented in a more accessible web format.

In theory, Sunbae could grow into something outside of a specific education periphery, and could just become a general platform for sourcing or storing curations in general. Perhaps it’ll pivot to something like “Joah” in the future, who knows. For now, I’ll just focus on the most basic functionality of the platform.

Certee

It’s a universal frustration - having to setup your own system to keep track of your certificates and school accomplishments, especially in preparation for college applications. Personally, I used a mix of Excel, Notes, and LinkedIn to list out my extracurricular activities, or used the horrendous templates provided by each school’s admissions office that put a carpel tunnel emphasis on manual data entry (dates, descriptions, presenter, etc), on top of scanned copies of each certificate.

From what I can recall, the Common Application platform also has its own system of extracurricular tracking, but it has the base functionality of a text box with no backend logic for verification, which leaves the burden of verifying the authenticity of a student’s extracurricular activity on each individual school (refer back to horrendous template).

It’s pretty ridiculous how there is not a system for managing student certifications. I realize that there is e-certificate software out there where institutions can build their won customizable e-certificates/smart contracts, some even built-in with blockchain level encryption, but their interfaces were obviously not built with students in mind.

Anyways, enough ranting. I’m going to try to create a student-centric e-certificate/badge system.

Dongari Library

Another relatively mundane, CRUDesque or even static site. Essentially, I want it to make it easier for students to be able to access free high quality resources about extracurriculars like debate, MUN, science fairs, and others. It’d be an open source library of guides, files, interviews, advice, forum commentary, FAQs, and other resources for anyone from anywhere to be able to have a productive start or progression to their extracurricular journey.

Basically, what I’ll be doing is scraping the web for as many resources as possible and pestering/stalking friends with experience from specific extracurricular fields for advice.

Hopefully the project will grow to a point where I will no longer have to find resources by myself, but let the growth of the library be community-driven, autonomous.

Untitled Extracurricular Management Platform

This is the big idea. Dongari, Pages, Sunbae, Library are all branches of a larger future project that I hope to work on someday. What I know for now is that it’ll be targeted to campuses or school districts.

I think extracurriculars have the extraordinary power of making learning fun. There’s a direct correlation between the choices you make later in your career and life, and the extracurriculars you choose in school.

Combined, all of my projects are essentially a love letter to extracurriculars. I could spend hours writing about what excites me about extracurriculars. But what I’ve found is that the tools we use to manage extracurriculars (and perhaps, education in general), feel like enterprise software that have just been white-labeled with an “insert your school name” tag. Unintuitive systems that make it hard for students to manage, record, and discover their extracurriculars. Hopefully I can come up with some better solution.

Haksaeng Labs

Haksaeng is a small team of student engineers, designers, researchers and more, committed to solving grand challenges in education by building the OS for students.

This so-called “OS” can be web tools and apps (Dongari, Sunbae, Certee), but can also include events, workshops, courses, partnerships, open curriculums, etc.

Honestly though, the whole reason for Haksaeng is that it’s pretty lonely working on projects by myself.

Portfolio

The following are some case studies and product explorations that I am working on. I’m following the framework set by Brian Lovin’s incredible Design Crit series, where I’ll be looking at different web tools and looking for actionable ways for improvement. This whole endeavor will probably help me get more accustomed to product documentation.

Webflow Editor Redesign

Webflow is my go-to tool for front-end web development. By using visual div blocs instead of a blind drag and drop interface, one can create semantically structured websites that translate into clean HTML/CSS and JS. Though, this means that there is a pretty significant learning curve to using Webflow.

The Webflow Editor feature is probably the best channel for non-technical Webflow users (clients) to be able to interact with a site’s components without having to enter the actual Designer.

Unfortunately, the Editor is not completely optimized for collaboration, so the idea is that a separate annotations feature within the Editor and not the Designer will make client-developer communication smoother.

This case study was actually my first attempt at a UX case study a few years back. I’d joined the Femke Design Community and participated in one of the Crits to receive feedback from the one and only Femke herself. I paused progress on the full case study midway, only finalizing the high-fidelity prototypes. To be honest, I was too lazy to do the actual documentation, but I guess I’ll try to finish what I started.

AlphaFold Redesign

It goes without saying that the existence of a program such as AlphaFold is a landmark by itself and that the visual coherence of its exterior shell, the interface itself is of no real consequence - after all, the program itself works and the public-facing interface is but a database. With that said, I still think that improvements can be made, and since these case studies of mine are theoretical explorations of UI alternatives, AlphaFold is a prime target - the “Views” feature tells the whole the story. The interface is unintuitive, to a point where key components are warily mistaken as static images, rather than interactive blocks you could use to zoom into a specific section of the protein sequence.

Not only should the UI be optimized for smooth manipulation by researchers, but it should also be naturally informative.

Defog.ai Redesign

With the onset of BloombergGPT and the sudden influx of “ChatGPT for Data” offerings like Defog.ai (YC W23), I thought that exploring/predicting the possible interface solutions for such programs would be interesting. In the case of Defog, the service’s key selling point is its conversational AI widget, which allows for data of a third-party repository to remain private and not be moved around. But what if we explored further than this API embed concept. For example, what would it look like if datasets were housed within a separate, native Defog platform, or behave like a Chrome extension and follow the user. What would be the best way to organize and present the data following a CSV upload? Much fun.

Also, I’d propose some fixes and improvements to Defog’s current design, for example its “Explanation” tab.

UNdata Redesign

Redesigning this public database system by the UN so that its datasets are more digestible to the average user. This process would include a rethinking of its filtering, search, and export processes. I suppose the project would also be a chance to explore common flaws in other so-called “public” or open databases. Public data needs be presented in a way that is accessible and properly indexed, but also be easily manipulated for researchers to analyze and export.

It also would help if there weren’t so many differentiated points of entry for their varied metadata repositories - simple navigation is critical. This whole obsession over clean presentation of web-based databases came from seeing table designs from Glide and Attio. An unfair comparison, one might say, seeing how Attio is an enterprise CRM and Glide is a modern day titan in intuitive interface design. Still, I’m focusing on navigation, so I hope my point still stands.

CleanMyMac Recent Uses

CleanMyMac is one of my favorite apps. My one caveat is that although I love how thoroughly I can look through and clean the digital waste in my Mac, I’m always flabbergasted by the sources of this junk. From where does my junk usually pile up from, and if applicable, why is it that I suddenly have 5GB less in my system memory?

A feature that I think CleanMyMac should have is a catalogue or timeline of most recent data/storage usage, using the last recorded cleaning session as a starting point. Not only is it a summary of recent activity, but can also be used to inform users of unpredictable spikes in data usage or lost performance, and pinpoint the reasons, events, and relevant applications that might have caused such lags. For example, I recently found out, after painstakingly digging through my hard drive, that one of the reasons I regularly found my self with less and less memory than anticipated every month was because I had automatic cloud syncing on for some unnecessary apps. A timeline could have informed about the unplanned irregularities within certain apps, and help me act with more information on hand.

Synced YouTube Downloads

Sometimes, the YouTube Download Recommendations section gets it right. Most of the time, all I am really looking for is a unified library of downloaded videos, so that if I download a YouTube video on my iPad, I can then access that same download on my iPhone, or at least have a record of that download. A central library of downloaded videos attributed to a specific Google account. This should, at the very least, be an option - how is there a toggle button for recommended videos, but not for syncs across devices? Would make YouTube Premium a little more worth its price, and accentuate the Downloads feature.

iPhone Emergency Alert UX

I still need to do more research on this specific project. The main hypothesis behind this case study is that we have recently been bombarded with a large influx of daily emergency alerts from phones here in Korea, 99% of these alerts being reports of local COVID spikes. My yet unquantified theory is that this has given rise to a psychology in which most users either ignore the alerts, or dangerously, turn off the alerts as a whole.

There are issues with the general copy (“Public Safety Alert” can mean different things), typography, iconography, information hierarchy, and most definitely the logic and system design behind the iPhone emergency alert technology. Plus, there is an opportunity here to use some of the screen real estate reserved by the emergency alert to allow users to access expandable information on methods of response, tips and FAQs, etc, not just one-liner statements on a supposed emergency without background.

There should also be minimum customizations that the user should have access to (i.e the ability to toggle off COVID alerts only), and an accompanying government interface that allows for more efficient, geo-specific, and informative alerts to be sent out to users. It’s the Boy Who Cries Wolf problem, scaled nationally across all iPhone devices.

Untitled Data Visualization Project

This is just a theoretical project that I’d like to work on to apply my very nascent data visualization skills. The inspiration for such a project came from Creating Bubble Charts with D3v4 by Jim Vallandingham. The key to this project will probably be either finding an interesting, large-enough dataset to visualize (like the demo “Gates Foundation Educational Spending” dataset they visualize on the doc), or just gathering my own raw data for a completely new topic.

General Portfolio Redesign

When I have the time, I’d like to rethink the typography of my site, reduce its word count, redesign the case study thumbnails, and maybe add some custom embeds/code. This is not a priority though.

Filmmaking

“Noise Cancellation”

I’ve been making movies since primary school. My childish dream continues to be becoming a film director. Most of my cinematic endeavors so far have been for school, UCC contests, company promos, and the occasional local film festival, but nothing that I could confidently label a film.

“Noise Cancellation” is a short film, perhaps very short film, that I’ve been silently writing up for the past few months, although progress has lagged recently. It’s about a young girl living her life through the protective vacuum of her AirPods - an Apple ad with a twist. Although “Noise Cancellation” will be my first major project, with a dedicated crew and gear, I’m going to use this chance to learn as much about cinematography beyond the Rule of Six. In one way, this is the perfect chance for me to get my hands dirty and get a guerrilla film school education, seeing how some of the most creative and daring cinematography on screen these days comes from commercials and short films rather than studio films.

Another one of my film-related goals is to properly archive my past projects - some files I’ve lost, some files are corrupted, most are scattered across different machines.

Education

Programming

I’ll just list out the technologies that I am currently teaching myself through textbooks, Freecodecamp, YouTube, Leetcode, and random Internet forums.

• Python: “Python Crash Course” by Eric Matthes

• Structured Query Language (SQL): “SQL QuickStart Guide” by Walter Shields

• Javascript: “A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript” by Mark Myers

• React: “React - The Complete Guide (incl Hooks, React Router, Redux)” by Udemy

• HTML/CSS: “Responsive Web Design” by Freecodecamp

• Webflow: “Webflow University” by Webflow

• Framer: “Figma to Framer Plugin” by Framer

• GitHub (want to perfect my ability to navigate this platform - after all, it is where most programming traffic lives)

• C# (if I have the time)

• Swift (if I have the time)

Languages

• Spanish: Goal is to reach C1 (DELE).

• Chinese: Was HSK 5, but now I’m probably 4. Don’t expect to reach HSK 6 anytime soon, so I’m going to aim for a return to HSK 5 levels.

• Korean: For years, I’ve been avoiding the reality that my Korean is mediocre and that without some focused effort, I’ll regret not trying sooner my entire life. Don’t know what a specific goal should be for this though.

Product Management

Once I’m done with service and get back to school, I plan on finding a job or internship as a PM. In preparation for such a possibility, I’ve been reading up on “Cracking the PM Interview” and trying out mock problems on estimation, product strategy, system design, product design, coding and algorithms, and of course, working on the basics like improving my resume and portfolio, practicing answers to interview questions, etc.

Personal

The following listing will probably give further cause to why one of my teachers in high school told me I reminded him of Max Fischer from Rushmore. I’m a recovering extracurricularic, who has graduated from chronic club participant to chronic hobbyist.

• Debate: Since 2019, I’ve been stuttering my way around the Korean debate circuit, with average success. In my last Nationals, my team broke first, but was eliminated in the semifinals (again). My saving grace was that I placed 2nd in the individual speaker tab, but honestly, I lucked out in round 3 by matching with a favorable judge. In the end, I think the truth is that I’m a second-rate debater with no meaningful accomplishments in my belt. If I ever hope to break in the bigger Asian circuits (Japan, Taiwan, Northeast Asia) or at Worlds, I need to deconstruct my current oratory and study more theoretical argumentation. Also, aside from competitive goals, I‘ve been writing some short essays on debate theory, tho I can’t say whether they achieve any meaningful level of contribution. YUU First and The Best, btw :)

• Chess: Chess has been a small obsession of mine since 2017, ever since I got hooked on the streams of Hikaru Nakamura, Agadmator, Gotham Chess, Anna Rudolf, and others. I play chess on a daily basis here in my barracks - I’m proud to report that I’ve successfully spread the chess bug to my fellow bunkmates, with a friendly game of chess becoming a lunch break tradition. I’m reading up on “How to Reassess Your Chess” by Jeremy Silman - I still make blunders on the daily, barely understand notations, and my IQ plummets whenever I reach the endgame or play speed chess, so a reassessment is very much needed. Some specific goals I have include reaching 1800 Rapid, 1400 Blitz, Bullet 1100, and Puzzles 3020 on Chess.com, and maybe, in the far, very far, perhaps unreachable future, attain a Candidate Master (CM) title or at least an official FIDE rating, as low as it might be. If you’d like to play a game, reach out to my Chess.com profile!

• Tennis: My favorite sport. Whenever I open up my phone, one of the first things I do is search up match highlights from the ATP or WTA tours (recently saw Alcaraz win Indian Wells and Rybakina continue her kryptonite streak against Swiatek). I used to play tennis every weekend back in Colombia and the States, participating in a local junior league hosted by the Northbrook Racquet Club. Haven’t played regularly for years though, so my form is in poor shape. Fortunately, there is a tennis court on-base, but the ground has been muddied to a point where the ball sinks into the brown of the ground, so rallies are out of the question. The temporary remedy is playing on the “hard-court” floor of the futsal field. But the other good news is that the new battalion commander is an avid tennis player, to a point where he encourages/forces his unit captains to receive tennis lessons from him. There aren’t many tennis fans on base, so news of my slapstick efforts to play tennis on a futsal field has reached his ears, so he has reassured me with future plans to restore the on-base tennis court to its original glory, and has hinted the possibility of hitting some rallies with me. That’d be interesting. I’ll report on this still-imaginary rally, if ever it does happen.

• Taekwondo: Since middle school, I’ve been in love with this sport. At one point, as unbelievable as it might sound, I was actually the 2x city champion of Chicago in my middle school years! I was scheduled to participate at Nationals and the Jr. Olympics, but with my family suddenly moving to China, I never had the chance. I’ve already accepted that my experience with taekwondo peaked years ago, and that my legs will never be as flexible as before, but if there’s anything I’d like to take away from the military, it’d be a chance to revisit this amazing sport. Fortunately, they have taekwondo Dan promotion tests every 3 months, so at the very least, I’d like to aim for a 2nd or 3rd Dan during my stay here.

• Table Tennis: The most accessible sport on base, with tables on every floor. Apart from simply enjoying the game, I do need to improve my form. Back in uni, my varsity team seniors kept telling me off on the way I hit my forehand drives - apparently, my elbow twists awkwardly, preventing me from hitting the ball effectively. One of the things that they told me that has stuck with me was “You might think that you’re hitting hard forehand, but you’re actually hitting really slow drives with that form of yours”. They followed up by easily receiving every single drive I threw at them. So, goals in the military would be to improve my forehand drive, practice more difficult serves, and definitely practice my backhand everything.

• Writing: Essays, journals, written rants keep me sane in the army. I have some topics I’d like to explore: some pieces regarding my views on tech and education in Korea, some likely-inaccurate futurist predictions (inspired by the hyper-optimistic, yet surreally accurate “Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte), debate theory, foreign policy and, if I’m brave/foolish enough, some stories about my family’s past.

• Journalism: My mom was a student journalist during the tumultuous 80s, Korea’s campus protest generation. I grew up reading my mom’s curated collection of articles like “Who’s Responsible For The World’s Tragedies” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Are the liberal arts outdated” by Arthur Levine, “Sex, Money, and the Press” by A.M. Rosenthal, and more. Essentially, I think journalism can teach one the best practices on how to collect and record data, and then find a story within that data. But how does one study journalism by one’s self? Aside from re-re-reading “Elements of Style” by Strunk and White, I’ll force myself, to a point of possible self-harm, to write anything consistently. I’ll curate my favorite articles and try to copy the greats. Then I’ll find a specialization. Maybe I’ll join the newspaper society! While writing this, I just realized that I’m in dire need of a much better plan. I do know that I find inspiration for this field from people like Nicholas Kristoff and lately Izobel Yeung, and stories like the one of a Columbia student who found out she won a Pulitzer while in class.

• Poetry: Most people don’t know this about me, but one of my favorite pastimes is reading and memorizing poems and epic Shakespearean soliloquies. It all started when I saw this Guardian Culture series of Shakespeare solos by British actors 5 years ago - I was immediately hooked, and for a long weekend, dreamed myself a member of the National Theatre. Thank goodness that short-lived psychopathy passed, but the enjoyment stayed. Some soliloquies I’ve memorized include “Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2”, “Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1”, “The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1”, and a few others. Next are “Richard III, Henry IV, Part 3”, Othello, Act IV, Scene 3”, and “All the World’s a Stage”.

• Music: One of the sharpest cruelties of bootcamp was the absence of music. After living a mostly soundtracked life, I don’t think I was prepared for the panicked breathlessness that a tuneless life would bring. Anyways, I’m glad that music is back in my life, and in that spirit, there are a few “musical goals” that I have set for myself. Some of these goals include relearning how to read sheet music, memorizing a few songs, and practicing a form of Gaelic music called Sean-nós singing - if you’ve never had the pleasure of listening to a Sean-nós performance, do have a listen. Ideally, I should also aim to practice an instrument (relearning the violin or the piano), but perhaps I’ll do that after service when it’s more sensible.

• Cooking: Want to be able to cook something that’s not instant ramen. My knife skills are non-existent and I can barely boil eggs, so I’ll stick to the basics. One of the crazier ideas that I have at the moment is to volunteer a bit of my time at the base kitchen to cut onions - like in Julie and Julia!

• Sketching: I used to draw all the time, but now, the closest I get to drawing is the Figma pen tool when I draw vector shapes. A symptom of my membership in the sprawling internet age. While in the army, I’ll try to keep a shetchbook.

• Wikipedia Editing: I am of the opinion that Wikipedia is one of the greatest inventions of the internet age. I’ve already made the occasional contribution on Wikipedia, focusing mostly on Korean figures and the international politics of pettiness. For example, I was the one who updated Choi Minjeong‘s Olympic record the second she won gold at Beijing plus added a few lines on her educational background (Yonsei pride). I also edited out the unnecessary ass-kissing of political figures like Duterte (dropping “His excellency” from neutral descriptions), and updated some information on the pages for the Inter-Korean Peace Summit page as well as North Korean sanctions. I also did a few check-ups on Faker’s page. The next immediate contribution that I have planned is updating Seo Chaehyun’s absolutely ridiculous profile image. I found out that the image contributor poached the image out of a flash-screenshot of a tournament livestream on YouTube. I’m going to try to find a more suitable profile image for one of South Korea’s up-and-coming champion climbers. She deserves that much.

• Sign Language: Unfortunately, there’s no universal sign language for me to learn. As such, I’ll focus on ASL and KSL, keeping it to the absolute basics like conversational phrases, the alphabet, my name, swear words, etc.

• Miscellaneous: Go, Rubik’s cube, Mahjong, Blender animation/Unreal Engine, etc.

Army

If I could build a time machine to fast-forward into an army-less future, I’d do so right this very moment. Unfortunately, time passes here at snail pace, so it’d do me good to set some army-related goals.

• Achieve eligibility for early promotion: To become eligible for a 1-month early promotion to Sergeant. This means a nice bonus in pay.

• Become a 특급전사 (Special Warrior): This is highest honor and physical performance designation in ROKA. Only a small percentage of soldiers per unit are able to attain this title. You get 5 days of leave, 1-month early promotion, and a flashy badge to pin on your uniform for bragging rights. While there are theoretical assessments, the most important steps to becoming a “Special Warrior” (sounds childish in English - better in Korean) are the physical exam and one’s record at the shooting range. 72 push ups, 86 sit-ups, each task in less than 2 minutes, and then a 3km run in less than 12 mins 30 secs. You also have to hit at least 18 out of 20 targets in the shooting range.

  • Progress so far: I’ve already reached the necessary target numbers in push ups and the 3km run. I’ve only achieved level 2 for sit-ups (71), and am hopeless at shooting (my last record at the range was 13 shots - just above the fail cutline of 12).

Of course, this plan is all proper and nice, but it’ll mean nothing if I decide to do nothing but drool at my phone. The plan requires effort.

Wish me luck!