When I was ten years old, I walked alone through the humid streets of Bangkok towards a local department store with five hundred baht clutched in my pocket. It was roughly twenty US dollars, a small fortune for a young boy saved coin by coin, and I spent every last cent on a single object: a 0.1 millimetre Rotring drafting pen, the finest line that engineering could produce at the time.

I did not want the pen to make pretty pictures. I wanted it because drawing was the only place in the world where I felt entirely in control.

Born in Australia to a Thai Chinese father and an Australian mother, I grew up navigating two distinct worlds while never quite feeling at home in either. Growing up in Bangkok, being a mixed child with western features was an immediate curiosity. After being singled out and teased in a local Thai kindergarten, my parents moved me to English speaking international schools. But the quiet damage was done; I retreated inward, becoming shy and watchful. In an era long before personal computers, when western television was virtually nonexistent and entertainment was sparse, blank paper became my country. On it, I drafted battlefields, engineered paper machines with glue and tape, and built universes where I made the rules.

When my father hired a full time architect for his developing business, my fate was sealed. I was seven. Mesmerised by the drafting boards, scale rulers, and balsa wood models, I badgered the draftsmen with endless questions until they literally locked their studio doors so they could get their work done without the boss’s introverted son hovering over their elbows.

There was only one problem: to become an architect, the world demanded that you first survive school.

The Nemesis

My mind was built for three dimensional space, narrative, and ink, which made traditional academia an uphill battle. I lacked the discipline for subjects that failed to engage my imagination, but my true nemesis, the monster that would stalk me from childhood well into my twenties, was algebra. While equations and letters marched across the blackboard, I was invariably daydreaming or drafting floor plans in the margins.

By thirteen, my school reports were a chorus of warnings. Recognising that I was slipping through the cracks, my parents packed my bags and sent me across the sea to the United World College in Singapore.

At first, boarding school felt like a sentence handed down for academic failure. UWC was demanding, progressive, and deeply international. It took a full year of homesickness and fear before the fog cleared, but when it did, I found my fortress: a subject called Craft, Design, and Technology, or CDT.

While algebra remained an impenetrable foreign language that I dragged behind me like an iron chain, CDT was pure instinct. I poured every ounce of my energy into that drafting room, producing perspective drawings in permanent ink, complex hand built models, and early conceptual designs. My teachers knew I was a middling B student in the standard syllabus, but inside the design lab, I worked with a fierce, quiet obsession. That portfolio became the anchor of my youth.

Yet the road to Melbourne, the city of my birth where my grandparents lived and where I had dreamed of studying architecture, refused to run straight.

The Cold Detour and the American Hallways

Following the advice of a school counsellor, I left Singapore early to finish high school at Peninsula Grammar, an all boys boarding school in Mount Eliza, south of Melbourne. On glossy paper, it looked like the ultimate springboard to an Australian university.

In reality, the culture shock was brutal. I arrived mid year, skipping my summer break entirely to jump into the middle of Year Eleven. After the bustling, cosmopolitan streets of Singapore and Bangkok, Mount Eliza felt biting, grey, and bitterly isolated. The rigid all boys structure grated against everything in my creative nature. I tried to push through with sheer willpower, but exhaustion and depression finally broke me. One freezing winter morning, I simply could not get out of bed. For the first time in my life, I had hit a wall.

Leaving Peninsula meant my spot back at UWC had lapsed. With nowhere else to go, I flew back to Bangkok and enrolled at the International School of Bangkok.

Stepping into ISB was like walking directly onto the set of a classic eighties high school film. It was loud, vibrant, and alive with American optimism. Most importantly, it offered something I had never experienced: the freedom to learn on my own terms.

Because of my tangled transcripts, administrators initially insisted on holding me back a year. I refused. I sat down with the counsellors and negotiated a gruelling schedule, forfeiting free study periods to take nine subjects a semester while the average student took six. I mixed Advanced Placement Art with International Baccalaureate courses, deliberately mapping a tightrope walk around advanced mathematics.

I became the resident “Art Man,” designing school posters, illustrating publications, and sketching late into the evenings. When I ran out of official art classes to take, I persuaded teachers to let me design an independent study course in technical drafting.

My relationship with traditional testing remained delightfully strained. During senior year, having no one to supervise my schedule, I managed to misread the date of my final IB physics exam and missed the first paper entirely. Optimistic to a fault, I showed up for the second half, figuring if I scored one hundred percent on the remaining portion, I could still scrape a passing grade. The exam coordinator was furious, deregistering me on the spot and shouting that an exam was not a buffet where I could pick and choose what to attend.

Rather than arguing, I simply smiled, wished the rest of the class good luck, and walked out into the Bangkok sunshine. Naturally, that walkout earned me an official “U” for Unclassified on my final IB results. Physics had far too much algebra anyway.

The Snail Mail Gamble

Graduating with an unorthodox hybrid of American diplomas, AP credits, and partial IB certificates created a logistical nightmare for Australian admissions. In an era without email or internet, applications were handled through airmail envelopes, expensive overseas phone calls, and certified paper copies. My parents were not academics, and my international school had no idea how the Victorian university system functioned. I was flying blind.

Melbourne University was my absolute dream; RMIT was my backup. Because the Australian admissions process seemed completely impenetrable for an applicant with my odd patchwork background, I also submitted applications to the United States as a safety measure.

A few months later, two heavy envelopes arrived from America: acceptances from Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Having two of the most celebrated architecture programmes in the world validate my portfolio provided a tremendous boost of confidence. It was proof that my drawings spoke a universal language. Yet, inspecting their course structures, I saw years of heavy theoretical physics and calculus awaiting me. More than that, my heart was stubbornly set on Australia. I politely put the Ivy League acceptances aside and kept waiting by the mailbox for Melbourne.

Then came the embassy exam. RMIT offered an entrance test at the Australian Embassy in Bangkok. Ecstatic, I walked into the room ready to pour everything I had onto the drafting board. But my obsession betrayed me. In my sheer eagerness to impress, I overworked every single design, cramming microscopic detail and heavy lines into exercises meant to test quick, abstract thinking. When the rejection letter arrived from RMIT weeks later, it was a stinging irony: good enough for MIT, but not good enough for Melbourne’s technical institute.

All that remained was the University of Melbourne.

December turned into January. January turned into February. Orientation week was days away, and the admissions office had sent absolute silence.

Most people would have taken the silence as a no. Instead, I packed my bags, booked a flight to Melbourne, and decided to sort things out on the ground. I refused to let the lack of official paperwork stand in the way.

The Ninety Third Spot

Stepping into the central administration building at the University of Melbourne in late February, I was met by a weary clerk staring at a computer screen.

“There is no record of your application,” she said flatly. “And even if there were, every seat in the Faculty of Architecture is full. I am sorry, but there is nothing we can do.”

I stood on the linoleum floor, halfway across the planet from home, with my life packed into a couple of bags.

“Well, I am here now, moved all the way from Thailand,” I told her. “I am here to fulfil my dream.”

She gave me a completely ridiculous look, as though wondering what alien had just wandered into her office. Nobody spoke like that in a university admin queue. Shaking her head, mostly just wanting to get rid of me, she pointed vaguely across the campus towards the architecture building.

“Try your luck over there,” she said, “though there is probably no one around.”

The faculty corridors were completely deserted. It was orientation week, so classes had not yet begun and the professors were away. I walked the quiet hallways alone, knocking on closed doors until a lone secretary poked her head out of an office. I explained my story and how desperate I was to be enrolled. Something in my persistence resonated with her. The next afternoon, she arranged an interview with Jeff Turnbull, the head of first year architecture, and his associate, Martin Fowle.

I prepared thoroughly for that meeting, walking in with the CDT portfolio I had completed back at UWC Singapore nearly two years earlier. When they asked why they should consider an unlisted applicant at the eleventh hour, I looked them in the eye and said something that sounds cheesy now, but felt completely true at the time:

“I was born to be an architect.”

I opened the folder and simply started walking them through my projects, explaining the concepts, the functional logic, and the structural thinking behind each design decision. Even though they quickly understood that my design logic was miles ahead of many third year students, what impressed them most of all was the standard of the drawings. The precision, linework, and craft on those pages spoke louder than any words I could have spoken.

Behind closed doors, Turnbull and Fowle went to work finding a way through the system. To make it happen, they had to break two unbending traditions at once.

First, the architecture cohort had an absolute quota of ninety two students, strictly funded and approved by the university board, but that number was also governed by literal physical constraints. Space was at a total premium. The professors warned me that if every single student showed up to a lecture, there would simply not be enough seats and I might have to stand at the back, though they quietly knew there were always a few students who skipped class or were off sick. Studio spaces presented another roadblock because each student was officially allocated their own drawing desk. I told them immediately that I did not need a designated desk; I was more than happy to work out of the library or draft my projects from home.

Second, unlike RMIT which regularly evaluated artistic portfolios and creative entry tests, the University of Melbourne had never once accepted a student based purely on design work. Entry was determined entirely by high school academic marks, which at that time were cut throat and sat almost on par with Medicine.

By setting aside the academic calculations and trusting the work in my hands, they made two historic exceptions in a single afternoon. To my immense relief, the faculty did not even look at my high school grades. The long war with algebra, that unclassified “U” grade in IB physics, and years of uneven academic reports were suddenly irrelevant. I had outrun the equations.

Out the Window

The ultimate punchline to the whole saga arrived months later.

During my first semester break, having thrown myself into the coursework and earned top marks, I flew back to Bangkok to visit my family. Waiting for me in my childhood home was an unopened piece of mail stamped with the University of Melbourne seal.

I opened the envelope. It was a formal, bureaucratic letter from the central administration, stating that my application had been reviewed, rejected, and that I had not been accepted.

I stood there in my parents’ kitchen, already a star student in their very own architecture faculty, holding the exact piece of paper that was supposed to dictate my future.

I burst out laughing and tossed the letter straight out the window.

The administration had said no, the standard testing had failed me, and the paperwork had gone missing. Yet sitting in that lecture hall a few weeks later, I realised that what got me through that door was something far deeper than just stubborn persistence.

It was positive determination and manifestation against every imaginable odd. That singular focus on becoming an architect, held quietly in my heart since the age of seven, had set off a ripple. Looking back now as someone who believes deeply in the law of attraction, I can see clearly how it worked: when you hold a vision with absolute clarity and put in the work to match it, the universe has very little choice but to bend and align itself with your expectation. And perhaps, looking down on a boy clutching an ink pen in the humid heat of Bangkok, there was also a little divine intervention from the Grand Architect of the Universe.

My first year as an architecture student look