I was born in Kuala Lumpur but spent my early years growing up in Kerteh, Terengganu. My primary school days began at SK Rantau Petronas (2008-2010), where one of my proudest moments was being part of the team that won the national action song competition in 2010. Life then took me to Kuantan, Pahang, where I attended SK Air Putih (2011-2012), before moving once more to SK Indera Mahkota Utama to complete my UPSR in 2013. After that, I enrolled at the boarding school Kolej Yayasan Saad in Melaka from 2014 to 2018, where I sat for my SPM exams. My academic path then led me to Taylor's College in Petaling Jaya, where I completed my A Levels in 2021.
Growing up, I was set on becoming a doctor, until I realised I couldn't even look at blood without flinching. That dream was short-lived. I then flirted with the idea of computer science and engineering, but back then, coding intimidated me enough to rule out the former, and the latter lost its charm when I realised I was more curious about the “why” than the “how”. I was the kind of person who got distracted by the math behind a physics formula rather than the actual physical phenomenon it described — ironic, I know. Then came COVID, and with it, lockdowns, uncertainty, and a lot of time to think. Somewhere between YouTube rabbit holes and late-night internet surfings, I stumbled across the world of theoretical physics — and to be honest, The Big Bang Theory sitcom may have had a hand in it too. Something just clicked, and I've been hooked ever since.
So in 2021, I landed in Edinburgh — alone (well that's a lie, of course I knew some people from back home), a bit clueless, mildly homesick, but fuelled by a weird mix of excitement and sheer stubbornness. Compared to the physics wizards on the internet who started solving PDEs in diapers, I was pretty late to the game. No Olympiads. No science fairs. No high school research experience. I didn't even know what theoretical physics really meant (I still don't). But I did know that I loved doing the math, and that particle theory — whatever that was — sounded like a good place to park my curiosity. So I told myself: if I'm starting behind, I'll just work twice as hard. Easy, no?
I began my degree in pure physics, but immediately fell into the mathematical physics track and never looked back. It was like physics, but with all the juicy math bits cranked up to eleven. Think more ε-δ, more Cauchy's Residue Theorem, and yes — more paper, because that one Gaussian integral demands that you complete the square thrice, with 17 different parameters all in the wrong places, before you're finally allowed to quote the standard result. Somewhere in third year, I got my first real taste of research: studying point vortices on a sphere. It was chaotic and fun — like trying to force a bunch of spinning tops to sit nicely on a curved surface. I learned more coding in those few months than I had in years, wrangled JAX into doing what I needed, and even dabbled in machine learning for optimisation. It was tough, technical, and wildly rewarding — and for the first time, I felt like I might actually belong in this whole theoretical physics thing.
In all seriousness, studying at the University of Edinburgh has been an incredible ride — filled with late nights wrestling with complex equations, debugging numerical solvers that insisted on doing everything except what they were supposed to, and slowly learning how to bridge the abstract world of theory with the concrete logic of computation. I've come to realise that physics isn't just about solving equations or running simulations — it's about refusing to quit and the humility to sit with uncertainty. Some problems don't have neat answers. Some code refuses to converge. But somewhere between the pages of a path integral and a terminal window blinking back at me, I found a strange kind of joy — and a quiet confidence that I'm doing exactly what I'm meant to be doing.
This space will grow as I do — maybe I'll add more once life throws me into new cities or unexpected adventures. For now, though, this is where I'm at. Just someone trying to make sense of the universe with a bit of maths, a bit of code, and a lot of stubborn curiosity.