Part 0: The Last Five Minutes

Before the fifteen-day camp, there were three years of exams, three near-misses, and one question I was asked more than any other: why didn't I just quit?

I looked up at the clock, then had to look again.

A moment ago I'd thought I had about ten minutes left. The problem in front of me was almost cracked, just a little longer. But that "little longer" had eaten half my time. The clock said five minutes.

The exam had sixty to seventy questions. I had solved nearly all of them. But on the answer sheet, I had filled in only about thirty bubbles.

I shaded as fast as my hand could move. As if my life depended on it.

"Time's up. Pens down, please."

"I only have the bubbles left to fill. Could I finish them?"

"No, I'm sorry."

That was it. Nobody scolded me. But it felt as if my whole world had cracked open right there. If I had made it in time, I would at least have had a chance. Instead I didn't even have a chance to hope.

That was my second attempt at the POSN Computer Olympiad (สอวน.), Thailand's national Olympiad training programme. A year later I walked back into the same kind of exam room, at the very moment my classmates were cramming for university entrance exams.

A lot of people asked me why.

A frog who had just seen the edge of the well

I grew up in a temple school. My classroom had six or seven students. In lower secondary I loved electronics and embedded systems, and I turned them into real projects. My GPA was 3.97. I felt I was on the right track.

Then one day I started using social media seriously, and found out that high schools are ranked. The school I had thought was big was really just a small well, and I was the frog seeing its rim for the first time.

In my feed I saw Triam Udom Suksa, the elite Bangkok school. That year, nearly ten thousand students applied. But I had a provincial quota, which meant competing only against students from my own province, and not many of them were taking the exam. I was very confident.

I didn't get in.

Plan B

I felt terrible about the result. Around then I watched a video by Aimmuno, who said that even if you fail the Triam Udom entrance exam, you can still end up in a similar environment through a different arena: the POSN Olympiad.

I'm a person who plans ahead. I had a plan stretching about twenty years: what to do in Grade 10, Grade 11, which university, what kind of work. The first plan had collapsed, but I didn't throw out the whole thing. I just changed the route, toward the POSN Computer Olympiad.

Magic you can type

I chose computing because it was what I was best at, and because I had loved it long before anyone told me it was an "exam".

As a kid I played Minecraft and loved writing commands and making add-ons. I was coding before I even knew what it was called. Type a few lines and the world in the game would change the way I told it to. I've always felt that software is a kind of magic, and that feeling has never gone away.

Grade 10: a 4.0 that told me nothing

I took prep courses and prepared as hard as I could. I thought this was the exam that matched me best. I was confident in coding, and in maths I'd had a 4.0 my whole life.

I didn't get in.

I could hold my own in the coding part, but POSN maths was not the maths I knew. I had no idea how high the ceiling was, and a 4.0 at school meant nothing in this arena. I was crushed for quite a while, and poured all my energy into my projects instead.

The next year was the year I ran out of time on the answer sheet.

Grade 12: a chance I got for free

In Grade 11 I believed that was my last chance. But later the rules changed and Grade 12 students were allowed to sit the exam again. I treated it as a gift I hadn't asked for.

I didn't expect much that year. I already had project work from national and international competitions behind me. If I got in, great. If not, fine. I was just going to chase the dream I'd left unfinished since Grade 10.

But I changed my strategy. The exam is split half and half between computing and maths. I took every point I could from the computing half, and then as much as I could from the maths half, roughly half of that section.

The evening the results came out

I was in an online workshop on psychology and managing your daily energy. The results were scheduled for 7:30 p.m., but the website crashed, and I couldn't get in until about 8.

Second place.

I cried, and then I called my mom.

"You made it, sweetheart. After so many tries," she said, and laughed.

Then I posted it on my Instagram story.

I didn't go because I was sure I'd pass. I went because something had been left unfinished in me for three years, and from that evening I had only a little time before I would find out what that thing really looked like.

Fifteen days. They begin here.