I pressed my forehead against the cold car window and watched Borneo slide past: rows of oil palms, then mining sites, then more oil palms. I'd just spent two weeks in my grandma's village, Kandui, outside Muara Teweh. Electricity there came from one communal diesel generator. It ran a few hours a night. When it stopped, the village went dark.

On paper, Central Kalimantan is rich in energy. Coal reserves. An estimated 40,000 tonnes of palm-oil biomass every day. People call it a future renewable hub for Southeast Asia. So why was Kandui on a generator schedule?

Indonesia already generates more power than it uses. 3,264 villages are still unconnected because the transmission lines don't reach them. Hills, peat forest and swamp make the grid brutal to build, and there aren't enough engineers to build it anyway.

I left Kandui with that thought. It hasn't left me.

Since elementary school I'd been obsessed with winning. Olympiad problems, first place, another trophy on another stage. I was valedictorian of my elementary school and my junior high. People in town called me the pride of Muara Teweh.

Then I got to SMA Pradita Dirgantara on a full scholarship, picked from more than 4,000 applicants across Indonesia. In computer science class my peers talked through system fundamentals with terminology I barely recognized. For the first few weeks, I said nothing. The person I'd been at home didn't exist here.

One quiet night I had to answer a question honestly: did I love learning, or did I only love winning? I found out under a yellow desk lamp, long after my roommates' lights were off. Past papers I'd never seen before. Textbooks in bed, read line by line while half asleep.

A former roommate still remembers me staying up until midnight, every single day. By the end of the semester my GPA was up more than thirty percent and above the class average. In Kandui, the generator decided when the house went dark. In that dorm, I got to decide when my light went off.

At the National Science and Invention Fair, our hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle almost failed on us. The voltage kept going unstable. I got the circuit stable in time, and we took home a silver medal.

What bothered me afterwards was that I'd only treated the symptom. I'd been trained to solve problems fast. I hadn't asked why the instability showed up in the first place.

So I went looking. I worked through Gene F. Franklin's Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems and learned that instability usually comes from feedback behavior inside the circuit itself. It was there in the design before the competition began.

I led our Samsung Innovation Campus team building an AI-based IoT monitoring system in Python. It pulled in real-time sensor data and ran anomaly detection on it. The simulations looked great. Testing didn't.

Accuracy plateaued and failures kept appearing. One teammate sat slumped in front of screens that had been running for nineteen hours straight. Instead of accepting the ceiling, I went back through the output from a different angle and found misclassified patterns that kept repeating. Everyone had scrolled right past them.

That pulled the team back in. We traced the errors through the pipeline, redesigned the data handling with buffering, and added adaptive filtering. The final system ran above 97% uptime.

The habit carried into IB physics. I measured resistance across seven pencil grades to see how graphite concentration affects conductivity, and found a nonlinear relationship. Something as plain as a pencil was hiding complicated electrical behavior. I learned to question my assumptions before trusting a result.

In my free time I worked through MIT OpenCourseWare, from Single Variable Calculus up to Electric Power Systems. At the American Mathematics Olympiad I won gold and ranked in the top 35 worldwide. That medal felt different. By then I'd stopped measuring myself by results, so what mattered was whether the thinking behind it was honest.

In 2025 I was one of ten Indonesian delegates in the Australia–Indonesia BRIDGE program, on exchange at Braemar College in Victoria. My VCE physics teacher, Mr. Daniel Horvat, told our class that physics is about the patterns connecting everything, and about asking why those patterns exist at all. It unsettled me more than any exam had. I left with more questions than I arrived with.

Watching locals sort discarded paper in New Gisborne shaped Lasteen, the paper-waste project I co-founded during that exchange. Back home at Pradita we grew it: hundreds of kilograms of donated paper, a partnership that produced Lasteen-edition recycled notebooks, and support from the Australian Consul-General, Mr. Glen Askew.

When I went back to Central Kalimantan, the generator still ran daily life in Kandui. More than 250 villages in the province, and 30 million people across Indonesia, still have no reliable grid electricity. The government plans to electrify 5,758 villages and 1.2 million households by 2029, and PLN has said the most remote ones will need modular off-grid systems.

Those systems don't last. Remote microgrids in Indonesia average about 4.3 years before voltage surges and thermal loads push conventional silicon modules past their limits.

That's the work I want to do: the digital layer that makes decentralized power smart enough to survive without constant human intervention. Sensing, monitoring and fault detection, built on wide-bandgap GaN and SiC power devices that can take tropical conditions.

HKU puts me next to Shenzhen's semiconductor ecosystem and Hong Kong's push into third-generation power semiconductors. Its power electronics and energy systems track runs from device physics up to grid-level control, which is exactly the range this problem needs.

The first piece is already on my desk. In my first semester I joined a research project under Dr. Edwin Chung-Hin Dung, building the vision system for a sensor that runs off a solar harvesting board and a LiFePO4 battery. It counts people, logs occupancy, and has to do it all on the energy it collects itself.