From English Literature to Computer Science
I studied English at Pathein University, then taught myself to code. Now I am doing a BSCS while shipping Solana and AI projects as Sithu Nyein.
For a long time I thought I would teach literature.
I grew up in Shwe Thaung Yan, in Pathein Township, reading more than I talked. By the time I started a B.A. in English at Pathein University, I believed a clean sentence was the most precise tool a person could learn.
I was almost right. Code is just the more exact dialect. It took me until my early twenties to admit that.
What the long degree actually meant
My English degree took six years instead of four. COVID closed campuses. The 2021 coup made the calendar even less predictable. Classes stopped and restarted on timelines nobody could trust.
I am not rewriting that as a heroic montage. It was boring, scary, and slow. With less structure, I noticed what I actually wanted to do with free hours. Some of it was reading. Some of it was writing. A growing part of it was opening a terminal and trying to make a machine do one small thing correctly.
The first useful program
Before software, I worked in digital marketing. The Google and Meta certificates on my site are from that period. I could make a living promoting other people's systems. I did not want that to be the whole story.
The first program that felt real was a short Python script that printed a random quote. It was not impressive. It was progress I could measure without waiting for a committee.
After that I moved faster. IBM's Python and Flask course. Small chatbots. Late nights reading Solana docs I only half understood, then reading them again until they made sense. I finished the English degree in 2026. By then the serious part of my attention had already moved to code.
Why University of the People
When I decided to formalize computer science, I needed a program that was affordable, asynchronous, and credible enough that a future MSCS or PhD committee would not dismiss it on sight.
University of the People fit those constraints. I started the BSCS in January 2026. The diploma is not the whole argument. The public GitHub work has to carry most of the weight first.
Two languages, one habit
What surprised me is how much the English training still helps.
A good sentence and a good function both put the right pieces in the right order. Naming matters. Clarity matters. A README that a stranger can follow is not decoration. It is part of the product.
I still care about comments, docs, and explanations. That is not a separate hobby from engineering. It is the same habit in another syntax.
Where this is going
I keep writing, and I keep shipping. If you are a humanities student in a place without an obvious tech ladder, the path is real. Your reading brain is not wasted. Open the terminal, publish the work, and let the repos accumulate.
I am Sithu Nyein. I am still early. The honest proof is on GitHub and on this site.
Sithu Nyein, Yangon