Bringing EduVision-AI to Hwa Chong

At Hwa Chong I stood in front of students from across the region and opened EduVision-AI on the screen. I had rehearsed the English until I could almost say it in my sleep, but my hands still shook. I wasn't there to sell a finished product — it was a tool I had built for blind classmates back home, and I was honest about everything it still couldn't do. What surprised me was that the honesty was the part people leaned in for.

After the session, students came up not to congratulate me but to argue with me — kindly. One asked why I used cloud OCR instead of an on-device model; another had built something for deaf students and wanted to compare notes. For the first time I was in a room where nobody thought a high-schooler building AI was strange, because everyone was doing it. I felt small, and I loved feeling small, because it meant there was so much room to grow.

That trip changed what I want. I used to think of studying abroad as a line on a plan. After Hwa Chong it became a specific wish: to spend four years around people who push me the way those students did in a single afternoon. I started teaching myself the things I was missing, reading the papers they mentioned, and I stopped being shy about writing to people whose work I admire. Singapore stopped being a dot on a map and became a room I wanted to keep standing in.

I came home with no medal from that trip — only a notebook full of questions and a longer to-do list. But I think that's the most honest thing a trip like that can give you: not proof that you have arrived, but a clearer picture of how far you still want to go, and better company for the walk.