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From
JoongAng Daily in Korea:
ULSAN, Korea - When Hyun-ah was a hundred days old, she stared into space even as she listened to the gentle sound of the chimes that her mother shook in front of her eyes. Anxious, Hyun-ah’s mom took the baby to a university hospital where she was diagnosed with retinal pigment degeneration.
“She can’t see,” a doctor told Hyun-ah’s mom. The mother then promised that she would be her daughter’s eyes.
Twenty-four years later, Kim Hyun-ah (pictured) has won admission to the University of Minnesota Law School.
At the moment of she found out, Hyun-ah told her mother in a trembling voice, “I got admitted. All this happened because of you.” And Hyun-ah’s mother, 49, hugged her daughter tightly.
Her story is one of determination winning against seemingly insurmountable odds. And it is a story of a girl’s undying faith in herself.
Hyun-ah is the first visually impaired Korean to win admission to study at one of America’s top law schools, the Korean-American Educational Commission said Thursday.
For a blind person, preparing for the Law School Admission Test was a massive challenge. The only study prep material she could rely on was in Braille, and reading it was labor intensive. In fact, when Hyun-ah decided to go to law school in February 2008, her mother was against it.
“She can’t see. How could she handle the difficult studying?” Hyun-ah’s mom said. “If something happens to my daughter, she will be in the U.S. and I can’t get there quickly.”
But despite her mother’s concerns, Hyun-ah’s determination to enter a U.S. law school was strong. Knowing that Hyun-ah wouldn’t give up, her mother scanned an 800-page English dictionary for legal terms and used a electronic Braille reader that converted the scanned pages into 1,600 pages of Braille.
Scanning the thick pages of the dictionary wasn’t easy. There were some errors when she tried to convert it into electronic Braille, and she had to proofread all the work five times to ensure everything was transcribed correctly. Hyun-ah’s father also helped with the book after work.
Hyun-ah’s mother has helped make books for her daughter to read for over a decade. When Hyun-ah was in her third year of high school and preparing for university exams, Hyun-ah’s mom prepared test-prep materials in Braille. She also read textbooks and test-prep materials aloud for her, because Hyun-ah went to a school for the visually impaired that provided mostly courses in massage therapy and acupuncture - traditional vocations for the blind in Korea.
After Hyun-ah was successfully admitted to Kongju National University in South Chungcheong in 2005, her first unexpected challenge was eating lunch. Unlike the high school that offered lunches of rice, side dishes and soup on a meal plate, the Kongju National had a buffet-style cafeteria.
It was hard for her to put side dishes on her plate, but the university quickly recruited university students willing to help.
Because there were very few textbooks available in Braille, she called and requested publishing companies create them. All refused, citing copyright issues.
“I saw hope when I prepared to study abroad,” Hyun-ah said.
When she took the LSAT, the U.S. Law School Admission Council sent exam sheets in Braille to Korea for its single blind exam-taker. The LSAT consists of five 35-minute sections of multiple-choice questions. Unlike other test-takers, Hyun-ah was given double the normal testing time. Usually the LSAT requires a Toefl score, but Hyun-ah was unable to take the Toefl because it would have taken over three months for the test to be sent to her in Braille. Then, an admissions officer noted that Hyun-ah got straight As when she was studying at Columbia University as an exchange student. That was enough.
“Living physically challenged in Korea is getting easier,” Hyun-ah said.
Still, it’s not perfect.
“The reality is that it’s still hard for a physically-challenged person to live independently without devoted parents,” Hyun-ah said.
From JoongAng Daily in Korea:
