Is it better to master one thing, or to try your hand at everything? It’s a question most people wrestle with at some point, usually during one of life’s biggest transitions: stepping into college, navigating a career shift, or standing at the edge of graduation wondering what comes next. Some commit to a single lane and never look back. Others can’t help but reach for the next thing before they’ve fully let go of the last. Neither is wrong, and the line between the two is blurrier than most people think.
Pryne Melton H. Arteche calls himself a jack of all trades who likes trying to master everything he touches. It’s a trait most visible in the games he plays, where he’s climbed to near-peak tiers across nearly every game he’s picked up, a quiet testament to how seriously he takes the things he gets into. But his world doesn’t begin and end with games and code. Interactive, nerdy, and confident, Pryne has carved his own path as a Computer Science student and External Relations Officer for CATCH2t24 at De La Salle University, someone whose drive to engage and compete shows up in every room he walks into.
That drive, however, wasn’t built on years of early coding or a head start most CS students seem to have. He started coding in his fourth year of high school, later than most, and worked his way through Python, Java, C, and C++ from there. What he lacked in head start, he made up for in how he approached learning: YouTube, hands-on practice, and a preference for figuring things out by actually building them rather than reading about them in theory.
And build he did. He wrote a script that scraped winning Beyblade combo data from a website over time, categorized the parts, and analyzed the meta to surface which combinations consistently won. What started as a personal curiosity turned into something surprisingly systematic. That gap between “I wonder” and “let me build something to find out” is where Pryne tends to operate, and it’s a gap he’s been closing ever since.
At Springboard, that same instinct carried into real work. Pryne developed the Synctalents International website, a B2B platform connecting local Filipino professionals with businesses across industries through cost-effective staffing solutions, complete with a job portal that simplifies the application process for anyone looking to join the network. He also worked on Rusteeazy, an AI-powered assistant that helps users quickly locate readily available stock for automotive parts across multiple stores. Instead of manually checking different suppliers, users can search for the part they need and instantly see which stores have it in stock, cutting down the time and friction that usually comes with sourcing parts.
But for all the momentum, not everything has come easily. Machine learning has been the concept that’s given him the most pause, the kind of subject that makes him feel the full weight of what his course demands. When something doesn’t click, he doesn’t wait it out. He traces back to what caused the gap and works on closing it. The lesson he keeps coming back to lately: balance everything. It sounds simple, but it’s the kind of thing that only really lands once you’ve learned it the hard way.
With all of that behind him and more still ahead, Pryne sees himself in the next three to five years either going deep in his career or building something entirely his own. His dream role doesn’t belong to any particular company. It’s his. What he ultimately wants to build is something people actually enjoy using, technology that quietly takes the tedious parts of everyday life off their plate.
Whether you go wide or go deep, what Pryne’s story points to is this: the path matters less than the intention behind it. It’s whichever one you’re willing to show up for, day after day, and actually put the work into. His advice to anyone considering a similar direction is straightforward: it’s not easy, and if the interest isn’t genuine, don’t jump straight into it. Finding what genuinely excites you is worth the patience, because once you do, the work stops feeling like work.
Want to know more about Pryne? Find more of his work on Instagram, LinkedIn, and GitHub.
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