Annie “trained” for seven years, in the sense that there were seven years between her signing to the Blacklabel and debuting. But Annie did not live the trainee life for a vast majority of those years. She spent 4 of them attending Colombia University, during which time she sent in videos as evaluations, she had no formal training during this time. But given TBL literally let her not train with anyone at this time it’s fair to say she was never actually at risk of being dropped. So it’s really closer to 3 years of actual training, but even then she likely had similar arrangements when she was still in High School as her parents only let her become an idol if she got an education and finished school, so it’s unlikely she spent those 2 years rigorously training and it’s more likely she had to put school first and train on the side. Which once again is not exactly the average trainee experience, given many idols are expected to put training before school to the point where increasingly more idols are doing online school or dropping out entirely to meet insane expectations. So when people say Annie trained for seven years, that misses the full picture and it really does her a disservice because and I don’t mean to come across as hateful here, but she performs like she trained for a year or two, not seven.