As a boy, Poom spent countless hours immersed in the American dream via TV shows like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and Sex and the City. The allure of New York’s glitz and glamour sparked something within him—a desire to live in a big city, to be someone. (Okay, maybe not a full-blown star, but you get the idea.)

Driven by this dream, he set his sights on Triam Udom Suksa School, widely considered the best high school in Thailand at the time. Now, math wasn’t his strong suit (hence the choice of a language track over STEM), but he was surprisingly adept at statistics—and, let’s just say, he knew how to gamble on the right odds. He applied for the English & German Program, strategically the least competitive, and made the cut. Barely. Ranked 58th out of 60 accepted applicants. A stroke of luck? Perhaps. But hey, fortune favored him this time.