He arrived in Singapore in kindergarten with two parents who didn't speak a word of English. They had given up everything to be here. The loans they'd taken left nothing over for navigating Singapore's education system, let alone guiding a young boy through it. So he figured it out himself.
He walked to the public library, sat down, and read. When he didn't understand a word — and in the beginning, he didn't understand most of them — he reached for his paperback dictionary, found it, wrote it down, and kept reading. Day after day. Page after page. Word after word.
Nobody guided him toward direct school admission. He had never heard of early admission exercises. Nobody explained what IP schools were, or why subject combinations in Secondary Three would echo through the rest of his life. He had no portfolio strategy, no interview coach, no one mapping the invisible architecture of Singapore's meritocracy on his behalf.
He topped his secondary school. He topped his Junior College. He topped NUS. He served as Student Director of Performing Arts, Captain of his sports team, and Academic Director of his faculty club — three distinct domains, each earned on merit. He became the youngest speaker invited to present at an international academic conference, and the youngest invited by a political party to rally supporters during a livestreamed general election.
And yet — he knows it should have been more. Not out of greed. But because he understands, precisely, what he left on the table. The applications he never made — not because he wasn't qualified, but because nobody told him they existed. The competitions, the scholarships, the leadership pipelines he never knew to seek out. He was exceptional. He still left an extraordinary amount of potential unrealised — not for lack of ability, but for lack of direction.
He built Catch25 for the boy he used to be: sitting alone in a library with a paperback dictionary, carrying a dream too large for the vocabulary he had at the time. He built it so that talent would never again have to be enough on its own.