The law library was my second home, which was either poetic or depressing depending on how you looked at it.
I'd been working here since sophomore year, after my original convenience store gig wasn't covering expenses and I needed something closer to campus with more flexible hours. The pay was slightly better than minimum wage—not by much, but enough to matter—and the main perk was that I could study between tasks.
The librarian who'd hired me, Ms. Song, was a stern woman in her fifties who ran the place like a military operation. She didn't care that I was poor or on scholarship. She cared that I showed up on time, knew the classification system, and could handle stressed law students without taking it personally.
I was good at all three.
By the time I clocked in at 11:03—three minutes late, but Ms. Song was in a meeting so I got away with it—the library was already filling with the late-morning crowd. Students camped at tables with laptops and thermoses of coffee, study groups huddled in the corner rooms, and the desperate ones who'd clearly pulled all-nighters and were now passed out on their textbooks.
"Ji-Mang." One of my coworkers, a sophomore named Ji-Won, looked up from the circulation desk with obvious relief. "Thank god. It's been chaos since nine."
"What happened?"
"Professor Lim assigned a twenty-page research paper due next week, and apparently half his students don't know how to use the database." She gestured to a line of anxious-looking freshmen and sophomores waiting near the reference section. "They all need help finding cases."
I suppressed a groan. "How many?"
"Seven so far. And more keep coming."
Teaching panicked underclassmen how to do basic legal research wasn't technically in my job description, but it had become an unofficial part of it. Mostly because if I didn't help them, they'd wander around the stacks pulling random books and creating chaos that I'd have to fix later anyway.
"Alright," I said, dropping my bag behind the desk and putting on my professional face. "Send them over."
The next two hours were a blur of showing students how to use LegalBase, explaining the difference between primary and secondary sources, and resisting the urge to ask how they'd made it to university without basic research skills.
"So I just type the keywords here?" A freshman—couldn't have been older than nineteen—pointed at the search bar like it might bite him.
"Yes. Keywords. Just like Google, except it searches legal databases instead of cat videos."
He laughed nervously. "Right. Okay. And then..."
"Then you filter by date, jurisdiction, and whether it's still good law. See this button? Click that first." I walked him through it step by step, patient because I remembered being this lost, this overwhelmed.
Except I'd been too proud to ask for help, so I'd figured it out at 2 AM in an empty library, crying from frustration and caffeine overdose.
These kids were smarter than I'd been. At least they were asking.
"Thank you so much, sunbae," he said earnestly when I finished. "You're a lifesaver."
"Just don't wait until the last minute next time," I said, but not unkindly.
He scurried off to a study carrel, and I moved on to the next student.
By the time I'd worked through the entire line, it was past 1 PM and my stomach was eating itself. I'd skipped breakfast after the run, survived on Yoo-Na's coffee, and was now running on fumes and spite.
"I'm taking lunch," I told Ji-Won.
"You've earned it. It's quieter now anyway."
I grabbed my bag from behind the desk and headed to my favorite spot in the library—a small alcove on the third floor, tucked between the comparative law section and a window that overlooked campus. It was out of the way enough that most people didn't know it existed, which meant I could eat in peace.
I pulled out my pathetic lunch: a triangle kimbap from the GS25 near my apartment, a banana that was more brown than yellow, and a bottle of barley tea. Total cost: 3,000 won. Total nutritional value: questionable.
But it was food, and I was hungry, so I ate mechanically while pulling out my LEET prep book.
The book was used—I'd bought it off a senior for 15,000 won, half the retail price—and the pages were already annotated with someone else's notes. Normally that would bother me, but right now I was grateful for any advantage I could get.
I flipped to the reading comprehension section. LEET wasn't like the old bar exam—it didn't test legal knowledge directly. Instead, it tested reasoning ability: reading comprehension, logical analysis, essay writing. The idea was to measure whether you could think like a lawyer, not whether you'd memorized statutes.
Which sounded fair in theory but was actually brutal in practice because you couldn't just study facts. You had to train your brain to process complex arguments quickly and accurately.
I read through a sample passage—something about contract interpretation theory—and answered the multiple choice questions. Got four out of five right. The one I missed was a subtle distinction that I should have caught.
Dammit.
I checked the explanation, understood where I'd gone wrong, and made a note in the margin. This was how I studied—obsessively, incrementally, attacking weaknesses until they became strengths.
My phone buzzed. Text from my mom.
Mom: Did you eat lunch?
I looked at my sad kimbap and brown banana.
Me: Yes, I ate well.
Mom: Your brother needs new school supplies. Can you send 50,000 won?
I stared at the message, doing mental math. I had about 180,000 won in my account right now. Rent was 200,000 but Yoo-Na had reduced it to 150,000. I owed 40,000 for textbooks I'd bought used. Convenience store shift tonight would give me about 30,000. Library shifts this week would add another 80,000.
If I sent 50,000 to Mom, I'd have 130,000 left. Minus rent, that was negative 20,000. Which meant I'd be short until next week's paychecks hit.
I could skip meals. I'd done it before.
Me: I'll send it tonight after my shift.
Mom: Thank you, Ji-Mang. You're such a good daughter.
The guilt was immediate and familiar. My parents weren't bad people—they'd just had bad luck. Dad's business failed when I was in high school, and they'd been struggling ever since. Four younger siblings, all still in school. I was the eldest, the one who'd made it to SNU, the one who was supposed to lift everyone up.
No pressure.
I finished my kimbap, feeling each bite settle heavy in my stomach, and went back to my LEET prep.
The afternoon shift was quieter. The post-lunch lull meant fewer students, which gave me time to actually do my job—shelving returned books, processing new acquisitions, updating the database.
I worked through it mechanically, my body on autopilot while my brain churned through everything else. Constitutional law midterm paper. LEET prep. Money for my brother. The business card from Professor Kwon, still in my wallet, promising something I was almost afraid to hope for.
"Excuse me?"
I looked up from the cart of books I was shelving to find a guy hovering nervously in the aisle. He looked vaguely familiar—maybe a sophomore or third-year?—and was holding a printout of what looked like a citation list.
"Can I help you?" I asked, shifting into customer service mode.
"I'm trying to find this case." He showed me the printout. "But I can't figure out where it would be shelved. It's from 2015, Supreme Court decision on defamation law."
"Supreme Court cases aren't shelved; they're in the database. But we have bound volumes of Supreme Court decisions if you want the physical copy." I gestured for him to follow me. "This way."
I led him to the reference section where the Supreme Court reporters were kept, found the right volume, and handed it to him.
"Thank you," he said, then paused. "Wait, aren't you Han Ji-Mang? From Constitutional Law II?"
Oh. So he'd been in class this morning.
"Yeah, that's me."
"You were amazing today. The way you answered Professor Kwon's questions—I was honestly impressed."
I felt my face heat slightly. Compliments always made me uncomfortable. "I just did the reading."
"Still. Most people freeze when she calls on them. You made it look easy."
"Trust me, it wasn't easy. I was internally panicking the entire time."
He laughed. "Well, you hid it well. I'm Kang Min-Jae, by the way. Third year, same as you."
"Nice to meet you." I glanced at the cart of books I still needed to shelve. "I should probably—"
"Right, yeah, of course. Thanks again for the help."
He headed off to a study table, and I went back to shelving, but the interaction stuck with me. Because that was the thing about being visible in class—people noticed you. Remembered you. Which was good for networking, for making a name for myself, but also exhausting because it meant I always had to be "on."
No room for weakness. No room for mistakes.
By 4 PM, my feet hurt and my eyes were tired from reading spine labels. I still had an hour left on my shift, but the library had hit that late-afternoon dead zone where nothing much happened. A few dedicated students grinding away at assignments, but mostly quiet.
I grabbed my LEET prep book again and settled at the circulation desk, planning to squeeze in another thirty minutes of study time.
I was halfway through a logic games section when my phone buzzed. Text from the convenience store manager.
Manager Kim: Can you come in early? We're short-staffed.
I checked the time. 4:17 PM. My shift wasn't supposed to start until 6:00.
Me: How early?
Manager Kim: 5:30? Even just 30 minutes would help.
I did the math. My library shift ended at 5:00. That gave me thirty minutes to get food, get to the store, and start working. Doable, but it meant no real break between jobs.
Me: Okay. I'll be there at 5:30.
Manager Kim: You're the best. Thank you.
I wasn't the best. I was just broke and needed the money.
I went back to my logic games, but my concentration was shot. The exhaustion was creeping in—that bone-deep tiredness that came from running at 6 AM, being grilled in class at 8:30, working all afternoon, and facing another four-hour shift tonight.
And tomorrow I had two classes. And another library shift. And another convenience store shift.
This was my life.
I closed my LEET prep book and just sat there for a moment, letting myself feel it. The weight of it all. The constant hustle, the constant worry, the sense that I was always one bad day away from everything falling apart.
But then I thought about Professor Kwon's business card. About the possibility of good LEET prep without the crushing cost. About the fact that I was still here, still fighting, still in the top 1%.
I hadn't given up yet.
And I wasn't going to start now.
At 5:00 PM, I clocked out, said goodbye to Ji-Won, and headed out of the library into the early evening air.
Campus was in that transitional phase—day students heading home, night students arriving, the energy shifting from academic grind to social life. Groups of friends heading to dinner, couples walking hand-in-hand, the kind of normal college experiences I barely remembered having.
I stopped at the GS25 near the main gate and grabbed dinner with ruthless efficiency: another triangle kimbap, a protein bar, a yogurt drink. 4,200 won. I ate while walking, shoving food into my mouth between bites, barely tasting it.
The convenience store was a ten-minute walk from campus, tucked into a neighborhood that was half students, half working families. It was a franchise—GS25, same as half the stores in Seoul—but our location had personality, which was code for "a bunch of stuff is broken and corporate won't fix it."
The broken freezer door. The cash register that jammed if you weren't careful. The bathroom lock that required a specific technique to open. The flickering fluorescent light in aisle three that I'd reported six times and had started to think of as a feature rather than a bug.
But Manager Kim was decent, the other part-timers were tolerable, and it was close enough to campus that I didn't waste time commuting.
I could see the store's bright lights as I turned the corner, the familiar logo glowing against the dimming sky. A few customers inside, Manager Kim at the register.
I checked my phone. 5:28 PM.
Right on time.
I pushed open the door, the electronic chime announcing my arrival, and stepped into the fluorescent brightness of my evening shift.
"Ji-Mang!" Manager Kim looked genuinely relieved. "Thank you so much for coming early. Soo-Jin called in sick and we've been slammed."
"No problem," I said, dropping my bag in the back room and grabbing my work vest. "What do you need me to do?"
"Stock the drinks first—we got a delivery this morning and I haven't had time. Then just general register and customer service."
"Got it."
I tied my hair back, put on my name tag, and got to work.
Just another shift. Just another day.
Just keep moving forward.