From Vocational High School to My First Job

I'm writing this a few days before my internship begins.

I chose a vocational high school with employment in mind from the start, so in a way this was a three-year job hunt. I wanted to put those years down in writing at least once. The fact that regrets come to mind before achievements tells me this is the right time to write it.

Three Years of Learning by Building

COVID hit right as I entered school, so most of my freshman year passed in remote classes — school life really began in the second semester. When in-person classes resumed, I joined CODE D.C., the school's developer club, and looking back, that single choice set the direction for the next three years. I was in charge of checking late students at school, so I built a C program to manage it — effectively my first project. It was nothing special in hindsight, but it gave me my first taste of solving my own problems with code.

From December 2020, I studied web development under a club senior's mentorship. The format was self-directed study with him only setting the direction, and that's when I first heard the words "frontend" and "backend." After deciding on frontend, I felt lost for a long while. I often wondered how things would've been with a friend who coded. Now I think about it differently. Because I started alone, I built the habit of studying alone — and that habit carries me to this day. When there's no one to ask, you have no choice but to verify things yourself. It was slow, but what I learned that way stuck.

After months of grinding, I entered Hansethon, a school hackathon, with friends. We got knocked out early. But that failure changed my direction, because the reason we lost wasn't coding skill. I learned with my own body that shipping a product takes design, planning, and marketing all interlocking — not just development. So I cut back on theory and moved my time toward building and operating real things. Going for Korea Code Fair, my personal project HMM, the CODE D.C. homepage. Building, deploying, and hearing back from real users taught me far more than the desk ever did.

Two years added up to four or five projects and three certifications (Linux Master, Network Administrator, Engineer Information Processing). I organized it all neatly in Notion and applied to the two companies I wanted.

Two Interviews

I passed both. Part of me wanted to experience more interviews, but I figured the longer I held a spot, the fewer chances would reach my classmates. So I decided to go straight to a company I judged good enough, and applied to only two.

Lookko ran a résumé → technical interview → culture-fit process. They operate a service called Acloset. The interview went exactly as prepared. Frontend fundamentals like HTML, CSS, JS, and React came up, but networking and OS questions led the conversation — all within the range I had studied from interview write-ups. What stayed with me was how the interviewer kept softening the mood, perhaps knowing it was a high schooler's first interview. The culture-fit round was waived and I got the offer straight away. It was the first offer at my school that year, and I remember my friends celebrating.

AB-Z (INPOCK) was the exact opposite. I had applied and interviewed there before Lookko, but the result came so late I honestly assumed I'd failed. The office was a co-working space with great facilities and the interviewers were kind, but the interview itself was nothing like what I had prepared for. It wasn't a pressure interview — it's just that almost none of the tech knowledge I'd studied came up, and instead the questions bore into the projects I had built, all the way to the end. How did you build this part. How would you improve it if you did it again. These were my own projects, yet looking back, many of my answers fell short.

The moment I remember most: being asked to draw the server-client response flow of my personal project HMM on a whiteboard. I managed to draw something, but to this day I don't know if it was right. What I did know, walking out, was this. An interview that checks what you memorized and an interview that checks the depth of what you actually did are different things. I wanted to work at a company that did the latter.

The Choice

AB-Z's offer also came through without a culture-fit round, and the school asked me to pick between the two.

After much thought, I chose AB-Z. It wasn't a decision made by comparing conditions. I judged that the interview that dug into me the deepest would be the environment that grows me the most.

I'm busier now than I ever was job hunting, so none of it feels real yet. From that first C program to sweating in front of a whiteboard, there were more choices that happened to work out than choices I got right. But one thing stayed consistent. When I got stuck, I built something, and what I built opened the next door.

I want to get through these months of internship and carry on as a real frontend developer. To everyone walking the same road: I'm rooting for you.