Parents preparing for holistic admissions still ask, all the time, "when should we start writing the self-introduction essay?" The short answer: there is no self-introduction essay in Korean college admissions anymore. It was fully abolished a few years back, and the gap it left is now split between heavier weight on the student record itself and the interview. The catch is that losing the essay actually raised the bar somewhere else — students now have to be able to explain their own student record out loud, unaided.

The self-introduction essay is already gone — there are only two exceptions

The self-introduction essay has been fully eliminated from general college admission tracks. The exceptions still standing are narrow: an international-student track and a special admissions track for working adults and vocational-high-school graduates — neither applies to the general holistic or grade-based tracks that most applicants use. As a result, evaluation built purely on the student record plus an interview has already been the norm for several admissions cycles.

More than half of holistic-admission seats are filled by paper review alone

No essay doesn't mean every university runs an interview. In fact, a substantial share of holistic-admission seats are filled through document review alone, with no interview at all. Korea University, Sogang, Sungkyunkwan, Ewha, Hanyang, Chung-Ang, and Hongik are among the major universities running this format, and combined, these tracks account for more than 5,000 seats. In that format, evaluators judge an applicant purely on what's written in the record — subject-level teacher notes and extracurricular activity logs. There's no essay left to fill in the gaps, which makes the polish of the student record itself that much more decisive.

What universities that do interview are actually checking for

Universities that do run interviews are using that time to do what the essay used to do: confirm the context and authenticity behind what's written in the student record. There's no longer a written channel to explain "why I did this activity" — that explanation now has to happen out loud, in the room. What an evaluator wants to know isn't a flashy list of activities; it's how well the student can understand and explain, in their own words, the handful of lines the record compresses each activity into.

What interviews actually ask — "why," and "what came next"

Interview formats vary by school, but the question types that keep showing up are similar. An interviewer picks a specific activity out of the student record and asks, in order, "why did you choose this topic," "what was difficult about it," and "what did this experience lead to afterward". In the essay era, a student could write this context out in advance and submit it. Now, that explanation has to happen live, out loud, in the room. That's exactly why it helps to prepare a handful of key activities around a simple flow — why it started, what was learned, how it fed into what came next — instead of trying to list everything.

Preparing for an interview without an essay — organizing your own student record

Knowing what holistic admissions actually evaluates makes it much easier to know where to focus. The most basic form of preparation is printing out your own student record and going through every line of the subject-level teacher notes asking, "what situation did this sentence actually come out of?" Think of it as moving the old essay-drafting process into practice answering out loud instead. Activities tied to elective subjects that expanded under the high school credit system especially need an explanation of why that subject was chosen in the first place. Rather than listing activities chronologically, organizing each grade level into three lines — what triggered it, what you didn't know that you came to understand, how it led into the next activity — means you can answer almost any question from within that same structure. If there's no one around to run a mock interview, even just handing a parent or friend a copy of the record and asking them to point at any line and demand an explanation is realistic practice.

Paper-only schools and interview schools call for different strategies

The fact that universities evaluate the same student record differently also changes application strategy. At a school that admits on documents alone, the polish of the record's actual sentences — specifically, how concretely a teacher's notes capture a student's ability — is essentially the only evidence an evaluator has. At a school that interviews, even a fairly ordinary-looking record leaves room to turn the impression around by explaining the context behind an activity out loud. In other words, applying with the identical student record to different schools shifts the balance between "what's already been said in writing" and "what can still be filled in by speaking." Marking which schools on your list interview and which don't makes it much easier to prioritize what to prepare for in the time that's left.

What to check alongside the early-admission application calendar

If you're applying to a track that interviews, first confirm how and when early-admission applications are submitted, and then check the cutoff date for the student record itself. The record submitted for early admission stops being updated at a fixed point, so anything done after that date can be mentioned out loud in an interview but will never appear in the paperwork. If you want to bring up a recent activity in an interview, answer it in a way that makes clear it isn't in the official record, so there's no confusion with the evaluator.

The short version

The self-introduction essay is gone, and its role has been split between heavier document review and the interview. First, check whether the holistic-admission track you're applying to interviews at all. If it does, the most practical preparation, starting now, is practicing how to talk through your own record's activities using a "why — what I learned — what came next" structure. If you're applying to a document-only track, it may be more useful to spend the remaining time talking to your homeroom teacher about whether the record's existing sentences can still be refined, rather than prepping for an interview that won't happen. Exact admission formats and whether a school interviews can change year to year, so the rule is to always check the university's current admissions guide directly.