Completion of Course After 12 Years

After 12 years I completed the year 1 course of International Chess School today. Having tasted the difficulty of strategy training exercises on Month 9, I took a long detour by finishing the year 2 and year 3 course first to become a “hardened player” who can “play almost any position on the chess board”. I also completed my White repertoire and read a lot of endgame books during this decade.
Lastly I mustered enough courage to finish the Month 12 and Month 13 Position Exercises during the past two months. With minimum of 10 minutes of solving time, I frequently got the correct evaluation of positions. Yet, very often I got quarter to none of the exercises correct. As our teacher promised, the puzzles are designed to for training up to masters. I usually fail to get the correct answer even though the position is similar to those came from my opening. Low success rate did not disappoint me as the explanation of answers never fails to impress me. This shows the beauty of chess and the resourcefulness of our teachers.
I would like to thank ICS for providing the starting point of researching Catalan where I further studied from Avrukh, Bologan and many more. This is the only opening which I never switch after I took it up.
"You cannot be good enough at strategy!" said our teacher. I am going to practice more with Test Your Chess puzzles and Aagaard's books. Thanks for our teachers who provided me a complete middlegame theory as a foundation of a wonderful journey in chess!
I am a Chemistry graduate from Hong Kong who registered for ICS on 2 May 2011. I got a painful draw when I was up two pawn but missed a perpetual attack on my knight by opponent's king on the 8th rated game. Thus I withdrawn from the tournament just before the last game where I would become a rated player and stopped playing rated event to erase the rating progress. I am still unrated today and desire to find tournaments to gain FIDE Master with minimum number of tournaments.

Congratulations on finishing the course. That in itself is an accomplishment.

It is really difficult to advance without OTB play. I have never been in a position to travel enough to gain meaningful experience OTB so I went to correspondence and did OK, but it really didn't help with OTB play. That said, I get great enjoyment following the eletes online and have a pretty good basis to know what is going on...

I had the opportunity to see our US Woman's Champion when she was a youth at a tournament when I was just starting the ICS Course. We played in the same section although we were never paired. This year's playoff was fascinating with the playoffs' actually a comedy of errors that highlights the non-chess aspects of playing. Even the winner was shocked at the conclusion. https://www.chess.com/news/view/yu-wins-2022-us-championship-playoff

Thanks for your kind reply. I am going to Taiwan for my first rating but the highest possible rating after five rated games seems to be less than 2000, if I do not win the GM.
Today I finished the 21th puzzle of Calculation by Aaagard. I usually finish zero or one daily as spending minimum of 10 minutes on positions without obvious answers is tiring. Hopefully I could do more in the future.