An Autoethnography about a Career Educator’ Experience of her Child’s College Entrance Exam Preparation Process

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the experience of a career educator mother in the process of preparing her child for college entrance examination, the conflicts in the process, and how they accept and manage them through autoethnography. The data collected for the study include memory recollections, diaries, social media records, KakaoTalk conversations, teacher counseling and text conversations, personal school record and biographies, admission listings, and in-depth interviews with her child. The collected data were organized in chronological order and categorized by coding them into themes. The results of the study are as follows. First, this resulted in the child ignoring the child’s lowered self-efficacy and career aspirations in a non-academic setting while saying that the child’s will was respected. Second, the goal and value as a career educator could not be realized in the entrance examination process where it is difficult to change the career goal during high school. Third, She experienced conflicts between strategy and meaning in order to make personal school record where quantity is more important than the quality of inquiry. Fourth, I sympathized with the suboptimal choice of dropping my major and going to a prestigious university. Fifth, for a child who wanted to try again in a private school, the career educator had little choice and supported. The significance of this study is that it reflects on the social context in which this entrance examination is placed so that the process of preparing for the college entrance examination is not easily treated as a rite of passage or the experiences of the examinees are not considered only as individual growing pains. It also includes suggestions as a career educator in the hope that the experience of being a mother of an examinee will resonate with mothers who are preparing for the entrance examination under more difficult circumstances.