Month one had a rhythm that month two broke.
Month one was orientation in disguise. The assessments were real but the consequences were mild, the faculty still calibrating the cohort, the students still figuring out where the edges of the program actually were versus where they appeared to be. There was tension in it, but the tension had a provisional quality, the feeling of something being set up rather than something already running.
Month two was where it started running.
Yeon Daesik shifted the theory curriculum from classification and identification into applied material physics, which was a different category of difficulty. Classification required memory and pattern recognition. Applied physics required the ability to hold multiple interacting variables simultaneously and reason across them in real time. The students who had scored well in month one on pure memory work started hitting walls. The students who had strong analytical foundations started climbing.
