Loikaw. A small town in the hills of Myanmar. This is where I grew up. Everything that follows starts here.
Yangon
I moved to Yangon for school. Every report card came back A+. Maths was the subject I waited for. I had never seen a line of code.
Then 2020. COVID closed the schools. The coup closed the country. My home state was one of the first places the fighting reached. School stopped.
2020–2022
On paper there is a gap from 2020 to 2022. Two years without a school.
I kept a notebook anyway.
When the fighting came closer we were told to leave.
So we left.
2022
Two years after my last lesson I walked back into a classroom. ALSA International School in Yangon. A school that no longer exists. I chose Computer Science as my way into AI. The school had no teacher for it so I taught myself from a digital textbook. The power was off for up to sixteen hours a day and the internet came and went. I printed my notes and learned them by heart. Maths I solved rather than memorised.
I left with grade 9s in Mathematics B and Further Pure Mathematics. The only 9s in my year.
Acumen
The start of 2024. Acumen International College. I took the full NCUK International Foundation Year and finished it in under five months while still learning to speak English.
A*A*AA. 93% in Mathematics for Engineering.
London 2024
September 2024. London. I arrived alone at seventeen with English I had owned for less than a year.
Kingston University. Nine modules so far and every one a first. I lead the university’s first AWS Student Builder Group and I put Kingston on the ICPC map for the first time. Now I am starting a competitive programming club so next year’s students have a team.
Then a friend showed me quantitative finance. A whole field built on a question I had been asking for years. My final-year project starts there. A portfolio optimiser trusts its covariance estimate as if it were exact. I am testing whether better estimators keep that risk down.
Next comes a job or a master’s. I have started from zero before and it worked. It will work again.
The cities are drawn by code written for this site. The idea of a dithered world you can turn in your hand comes from Chris Tate’s Next.js Conf 2024 scene.
