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I graduated high school at 17 as my class valedictorian. For four years I had run on almost no sleep, up until 2 AM studying for calculus exams, awake again at 6, doing extra problems on weekends just to stay ahead. It was an obsession. Grades mattered more than food, sleep, or my own sanity. I was trapped in a bubble where the only thing that counted was getting into the best school possible.

Then the acceptance letters came. I got into every UC I applied to. That high lasted about ten minutes, until I opened the financial aid packages.

I was a first-generation college student. Even with generous aid, the cost of living in a California college city made the numbers impossible without taking on serious debt, and I wasn't willing to start my life that way. Which left one option: my local community college, the same campus I had been taking classes at since 8th grade. I knew exactly what it looked like. That familiarity made it worse.

I told myself I was too good for it. I was wrong, and I was too self-absorbed to see what I was actually being handed.

The moment I walked onto that campus as a full-time student, something shifted. My classmates weren't slackers or fallbacks. They were parents juggling children and full-time jobs, adults going back to finish something they'd started years ago, people betting on themselves with a lot more on the line than I had ever risked. I had nothing on them.

I had spent four years believing that ambition looked like perfect grades and elite admissions. Walking those hallways, I realized I had confused ambition with ego. These people were more ambitious than I had ever been. They just didn't have the luxury of performing it.

Education is a blessing. I had been treating it like a competition.

Community college changed me in ways I didn't expect. I stopped chasing grades and started chasing experiences. Without the weight of external expectations, I had space to actually explore, to build things because I was curious, to read about problems that kept me up at night for reasons that had nothing to do with an exam. I taught myself how to code not for a class but because I wanted to understand how things worked. That curiosity pulled me toward biology, then toward the intersection of computation and science, and eventually toward questions about life itself: how proteins fold, how organisms adapt, how we might one day engineer solutions to problems that feel impossibly large. Community college didn't constrain that path. It created it. The version of me that went straight to a four-year university would have been too busy performing to ever start becoming.

There's a room you have to pass through before you can enter the manufacturing floor at Genentech. It's called a gowning room, and it does exactly what it sounds like. You put on a jumpsuit. Then a hair net. Then a mask. Then goggles over the mask. Then another layer if the room requires it. By the time you're done, you barely recognize yourself.

I remember standing there the first time, looking at my reflection in the small mirror on the wall, thinking: this is what it looks like to take medicine seriously.

Genentech was founded in 1976 in South San Francisco — the oldest biotech company in the world. By the time I arrived as an intern, it had become part of Roche, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies on earth. But walking those corridors, you didn't feel like you were inside a corporate giant. You felt like you were inside something alive.

Long narrow pipes ran overhead connecting heat sinks, water lines, and biochemical feeds. Bioreactors the size of small rooms churned continuously. The hum of machinery was constant. It reminded me of the Fairy Godmother's potion factory in Shrek: bubbling vials, assembly lines, an overwhelming sense that something intricate and almost magical was being produced at a scale that shouldn't be possible. Except here, the magic was biochemistry. And the potions were real.

Every room I passed held its own mystery. Behind one door, biochemists were coaxing proteins into folding correctly. Behind another, chemical engineers were optimizing yield. They were speaking different languages, one rooted in biology, one in thermodynamics, and somehow producing the same sentence.

That was the thing that struck me most. Not the scale. Not the prestige. The collaboration.

My project that summer involved automating drug manufacturing campaigns and assigning process engineers to each one. On paper, it sounds like scheduling software. In practice, it meant I was the connective tissue between two worlds that don't always speak to each other: the scientists who design the process and the engineers who run it.

If a bioreactor went down at 3am, the right engineer needed to be paged immediately. Not the wrong one. Not nobody. The right one. Because somewhere downstream, a patient with a rare disease was waiting on a drug that couldn't be delayed by a miscommunication in a handoff system.

I built the system that made sure that didn't happen.

There's a kind of beauty I didn't expect to find — two disciplines, usually siloed in academia and industry alike, moving in lockstep toward something neither could produce alone.

I came into that internship thinking of myself as an engineer who happened to be interested in science. I left thinking of myself as something in between. Someone who had seen what's possible when the boundary dissolves.

The most important medicines in the world aren't discovered in a single eureka moment. They're manufactured, shift by shift, room by room, by people in layers of protective gear who never meet the patients they're keeping alive. There's something quietly profound about that. A kind of distributed heroism that doesn't photograph well but matters enormously.

I still don't have a clean answer for what I am — scientist or engineer. But I've stopped looking for one.

I had already made up my mind. I just hadn't pulled the trigger yet.

It was a Thursday morning in Bentonville, Arkansas — my last day at Walmart's Intelligent Retail Lab. I was burnt out, anxious, and quietly grieving a version of myself that had stopped caring about the work months ago. The late nights, the pressure, the constant performance reviews — it had all started bleeding into my sleep. I couldn't remember the last time I felt genuinely motivated.

I called an Uber to the office one final time.

Bentonville is a strange place. It's a city curated and controlled by the largest retailer in the world. It's also a manufactured environment where people from across the country are relocated and thrown together into a cultural melting pot that never really fuses. Growing infrastructure had brought a surge of new residents, each with their own story of why they ended up there. I had become a character in that story too, except I never stopped feeling like I didn't belong.

My driver that morning was a grandpa who had recently moved from Omaha, Nebraska. I asked him what brought him out here.

He told me the cost of living back home had made it difficult to afford his granddaughter's medication. She had been diagnosed with a severe form of muscular dystrophy: a condition that limited her movement and restricted her to crutches. He moved to Bentonville for work. Not because he wanted to. Because he had to.

Something about that hit differently than I expected.

I grew up with Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency, a rare genetic disease that altered the lifespan of my red blood cells and caused chronic hemolytic anemia. As a child, I spent more time in hospital beds than on playgrounds. I knew what it felt like to have a body that worked against you. And I knew, from watching my own parents, what it cost a family emotionally to watch a child struggle with something no one could fix.

I told him about my hospital visits. About growing up with a condition that made me feel physically inferior to everyone around me. About finding computer science not as a career path, but as an escape — a place where my limitations didn't follow me. And about how somewhere along the way, I had drifted from that origin. I had traded purpose for stability, and it was slowly hollowing me out.

The crossroads I had been circling for months suddenly felt very clear.

On one side: stay at Walmart. Keep the six-figure salary. Absorb the late nights and the anxiety and the growing sense that none of it meant anything. On the other: walk away. Move to Washington D.C. Take a pay cut. Join the National Institutes of Health as a research fellow and work at the intersection of computation and human biology, exactly where I had always wanted to be.

Less money. Higher expenses. No guarantee I'd even be good at it.

But when he pulled up to the office and put the car in park, he turned to look at me. He shook my hand and told me to take the risk no one else was willing to take.

I quit the next day. I never looked back.

I'm now at the NIH, working alongside some of the sharpest minds in the world and people who have dedicated their careers to understanding and treating the rarest diseases in existence. Every day I think about what it would have meant to have more research, more tools, more urgency around conditions like mine when I was a kid. That thought doesn't leave me.

I'm writing this because I know I'm not the only one who has sat at that crossroads. The one where comfort fights meaning, and neither side feels entirely safe. If you're there right now — uncertain, burnt out, quietly grieving a version of yourself you used to recognize — I hope this gives you something.

Sometimes the clearest answer comes from the most unexpected place.

For me, it came from a grandpa in an Uber who had his own reasons to keep going.

I take you on a day in my life and what it looks like to do productive research at one of the greatest scientific institutions in the world.

I remember the first time I looked at pond water under a microscope.

It was just a droplet suspended beneath a glass lens. But, within this tiny sphere was something I hadn't expected. An entire ecosystem alive with interactions invisible to the naked eye.

Unlike the stereotypical aliens you see on television, these were quieter forms of life: green shapes that rotated, collided, and slipped rapidly out of my field of view.

I was in bliss. My inner Charles Darwin surfaced, suddenly confronted with a collection of life I couldn't name fast enough. It was a natural instinct for me to classify and to make sense of the endless variation unfolding in front of me.

I remember adjusting the focus again and again, as if clarity would give me understanding. But even at its sharpest, it was still a mystery. I could see that something was happening. I just didn't know what it meant.

Years later, I find myself staring at something just as invisible, but in a completely different way.

There's no glass slide now. No droplet being scattered across with electrons. Instead of microbes, I study proteins. It's a different kind of world, one defined not by motion I can watch, but by interactions I have to imagine.

Structures fold in on themselves, shaped by forces I can't see directly. Small changes ripple outward, altering form, changing function. What once looked like movement under a microscope now exists as structure and possibility on a screen.

Irrespective of the scale, my love for the scientific process has always revolved around the same fundamental question: what am I really looking at?

I used to think that as I learned more biology, things would become clearer. But the opposite happened. The closer I got, the less I could rely on sight alone.

The world didn't become simpler. It became deeper.

And so my curiosity changed with it. Not to just observe, but to build abstractions, to trace patterns, to make sense of reactions I can't directly see.

I'm still asking the same questions.

I'm still adjusting the focus.

I was a Software Engineer at the Intelligent Retail Lab by Walmart, working on computer vision systems for self-checkout. My role focused on deploying models across edge devices and ensuring that performance in the real world matched what we saw in our simulations. I collaborated closely with machine learning engineers and data scientists to keep our object detection and tracking models reproducible and accurate.

But the disconnect I sometimes felt in my work mirrored what I experienced outside the office.

I lived in Bentonville, Arkansas: a town curated and controlled by the largest retailer in the world. It was a manufactured environment. People from across the country were relocated there, thrown into a cultural melting pot that never really fused. It felt disconnected. So did I.

The work was technical, challenging, and at times exciting. But eventually, something shifted. In a one-on-one, my manager asked me a simple question: "What's your 'why' for doing this work?"

I didn't have an answer.

Not a convincing one, at least. I wasn't building anything that felt meaningful to me anymore. The code worked. The models deployed. But I had no reason to care. I lost motivation, not because I couldn't do the work, but because the work didn't speak to anything I believed in.

The tech industry isn't what it used to be. Layoffs have become routine. Teams shrink, but the workload doesn't. The industry talks about efficiency, but really it's just trying to do more with fewer humans.

Junior engineers are being squeezed out, their roles replaced by offshoring or code assistants. There's this dangerous belief that AI can just replace early-career developers. But when you remove the backbone, you stunt the future of innovation. And let's be honest: a lot of these decisions are about cutting costs, not building better products, not helping people, and certainly not cultivating long-term talent.

I grew tired of pretending that this was normal. That this was okay. For a long time, I forgot why I even got into tech.

But the truth is, I've always been driven by science, health, and human impact. I was born with a rare genetic disease. Somewhere along the way, I knew I wanted to work on problems that mattered, problems that could help people like me.

So I made the hard choice: I walked away.

I'm returning to my roots in biotech and research, to work on systems that prioritize health, equity, and real-world impact over profits and quarterly OKRs. My background has always been grounded in using computation to solve biological problems, and I'm ready to be part of that mission again. I'm fortunate to be joining the National Institutes of Health as a postbac research fellow, where I'll be applying machine learning to study fold-switching proteins.

If you're feeling the same tension between what you do and why you do it. I hope this gives you permission to ask hard questions, too. Sometimes quitting isn't failure. Sometimes it's the first step toward building a life that actually makes sense.

If you're a science fiction enthusiast like myself, you've probably come across some of the genre's most iconic classics. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is one of them. As a programmer, I was captivated by its vision of the metaverse and the rebellious, hacker-driven spirit that thrived on breaking systems and bending rules. Snow Crash fundamentally reshaped how I saw the world. It's the reason I chose to pursue a career in computing. And oddly enough, it's also what inspired me to apply to the National Security Agency (NSA) a year before I graduated.

Applying to the NSA isn't your typical process. After submitting my application through the online portal, I was invited to complete a prerecorded video interview. The questions were fairly standard - mostly focused on cybersecurity concepts, teamwork scenarios, and my technical background. In October 2023, I received a conditional offer for the development program I had applied to. I was ecstatic, but naturally confused. What exactly is a conditional offer?

It means they're interested, but you're not in yet. It's like being offered a seat at a table that's still behind several locked doors. Before you're granted access, you have to pass one of the most thorough background investigations in the country. I was required to submit extensive documentation covering the past 10 years of my life: international travel, personal and professional contacts, financial history, and any past drug use. Once my forms were accepted, I was told my background check would begin - officially placing me under the microscope of a federal clearance process. However, all I received was silence.

The next 12 months consisted of me periodically emailing my recruiter with updates, only to receive responses that sounded like they were written by an automated fax machine. I was told that I was still processing and the team would reach out if they required anything else from me. However, in the span of that year, I had officially graduated and moved to Bentonville, Arkansas for my new job as a software engineer at the Intelligent Retail Lab by Walmart (a story for another time).

Still, the NSA stayed in the back of my mind. I told myself I'd put in the work at Walmart and, eventually, I'd get the call. But the timeline was grueling. As I ramped up in my new job, I couldn't help but feel conflicted. As much as people warn against making work your identity, I wanted to contribute to something I truly believed in. So when I finally received an email in October 2024, it felt surreal. The NSA wanted to schedule my polygraph and psychological evaluations. I was to fly to Baltimore, Maryland, and spend an entire day inside a secure federal facility.

Fast forward past the early morning flight and long travel day to December 17th - the day of my "appointment" with the NSA. I was staying at a Marriott with other government candidates, tucked into one of the rougher neighborhoods of Baltimore. The area was lined with boarded-up houses and dimly lit streets, and my Uber driver warned me not to step outside after dark. Despite the strange accommodations, I didn't have much time to dwell on it. Thanks to the time zone difference, I didn't fall asleep until 2 AM and had to wake up just three hours later. After barely touching a quick hotel breakfast, I was herded onto a bus and promptly driven to a security checkpoint at 5:45 AM. The drive felt surreal. We followed a winding road, flanked by dense trees that obscured any sense of where we were headed. Not that it mattered. I was nodding in and out of sleep, exhausted, and questioning whether this was all even worth it.

I finally made it to the security checkpoint, where I was badged and fingerprinted into the system. Beyond the gate was what looked like a secure compound. No phones or electronic devices were allowed past that point. Inside the perimeter was a sprawling campus, and I was led to a waiting room filled with other candidates. This room served as the base for shuttling people to different testing areas. It was quiet - almost eerily so. With no phones, no magazines, and nothing to distract us, most of us just stared blankly at the walls or each other, silently caught in our own nerves.

I was scheduled for an 8:00 AM psychological exam, administered on a computer. The test consisted of multiple-choice questions designed to probe my mental health, past behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and how I perceived relationships with those close to me. After completing the exam, I returned to the waiting room, where we all sat in limbo, waiting for the front desk to call out our names for the next step. About thirty minutes later, mine was called. An older woman entered the room and signaled for me to follow her. We navigated a series of badge-locked doors and sterile hallways until we reached a dimly lit, gray office. This was where the real questioning began. She asked me about my past drug use. The type of pornography I watched. Whether I had ever sent nude photos of myself. If I had ever cheated on my girlfriend. Each question more jarring than the last.

In hindsight, I barely registered how intrusive or absurd the questions were. I was too exhausted to feel discomfort. After days of anticipation, a sleepless night, and hours of silence broken only by the occasional clipboard shuffle, I was just trying to stay upright. Once the psychologist seemed satisfied with my answers, I was dismissed and sent back to the holding room.

In true NSA fashion, what followed was more waiting - this time, for over two hours. I sat slumped in the same stiff chair, surrounded by scattered murmurs and nervous glances. From the snippets of conversation I overheard, it became clear that passing the polygraph wasn't guaranteed. Some candidates were on their second, even third attempt. Apparently, if you were too nervous - or didn't answer in the way they expected - you were flagged as withholding information. Each time someone was called, a suited examiner emerged from behind the front doors. My name was finally called. But instead of walking off with an agent, I was informed my examiner was running late. So I waited. Again.

As I sat there, I thought about all the nights I'd spent visualizing this exact moment- the culmination of months of silence, self-doubt, and wondering if I'd even make it this far. In preparation, I did what felt natural: I read 1984. Ignorance is strength. I couldn't help but think of Winston Smith in Room 101, being reeducated—his mind reshaped until he accepted a version of the truth that had never existed. Would I be pushed the same way? Not tortured, maybe - but cornered into admitting secrets I never had?

The whole thing felt almost comedic in its irony. I'm actually a very open person - sometimes to a fault. So I walked in with zero fear. When I was finally called, my examiner looked surprisingly young, barely older than me. I followed him through a maze of badge-locked doors and sterile corridors, deeper into the facility. Eventually, we reached a plain, unmarked door. Inside was a sparse room with security cameras pointed at the chair I was instructed to sit in. He offered me water and told me to take all the time I needed. I didn't hesitate - I dove right in.

I won't go into the exact questions (I'd prefer not to have ICE knocking on my door), but the themes were consistent: counterterrorism, hacking, and anything remotely conflicting with the U.S. government's interests. No clocks. No windows. No phones. Just a room built to warp your sense of time and perception. By the time the examiner left to "review my results," I realized I had been sitting in that chair for nearly two and a half hours. When he finally returned, he looked at me and said, "You passed." I was ecstatic - mostly at the thought that I wouldn't have to fly back for another polygraph.

Over the following months (early 2025), investigators were dispatched to Arkansas to ask follow-up questions about my credit history and collect names of people who could speak to my character. They built an extensive profile on me, pulling threads I didn't even remember existed. In California, they tracked down friends I hadn't spoken to in years. They met my best friend's fiancée in a random parking lot to conduct an interview. One investigator even showed up at my girlfriend's apartment, asking about my relationship with her, my parents, how I was in school. It was a circus, to say the least. But oddly enough, I was feeling more confident. Each hurdle cleared felt like another stamp of approval, like I was inching closer to a life I'd visualized for years.

And then the Trump administration reentered the picture.

Sweeping budget cuts and widespread downsizing across the federal government abruptly froze hiring. My offer was voided. Just like that, the process I had spent two years investing in was dead in the water.

The timing couldn't have been worse. Between the suffocating corporate culture of my day job and the sudden collapse of the one path I saw as my escape, I spiraled. I had a full-blown mental breakdown - the worst I'd ever experienced. I was consumed by anxiety, overwhelmed, and more emotionally fragile than I'd ever allowed myself to be.

But as hard as it was, the experience forced a shift in how I viewed my life.

I leaned heavily on the people around me - my family, my girlfriend, and my closest friends. Their support grounded me. And over time, I began to rewire the way I thought about success, identity, and what I was really working toward. Goals evolve. Paths shift. And sometimes, the destination you had in mind isn't where you're meant to end up. If there's one thing this experience taught me, it's that life isn't about rigid plans - it's about adaptability.

So, I leave with this wisdom: chase purpose, not perfection. Let setbacks shape you, not define you. And above all, be willing to pivot - because sometimes, the detour is the real path forward.

I always dreamed big. I grew up watching planes fly over San Francisco International Airport, glued to the terminal windows overlooking the runways. I felt a rush when those behemoth mechanical structures took off. For the longest time, I knew I wanted to be a pilot.

My obsession led to countless hours doodling in sketchbooks—designs of a personal aircraft I'd eventually build on my own. I pulled my blueprints from paper and used Legos as my constructive medium. I captured payloads that would eject from the hatch of my spacecraft while I simulated orbit with my hands. I thought, how cool would it be to live and work in space?

NASA was my goal. But boy, was it difficult.

I went to a community college in a rural farming town in Northern California, where I studied Computer Science. I applied to NASA for two straight years via the OSTEM program. I was rejected every time. To say I felt frustrated would be an understatement. Every night, I'd step into my backyard and stare into the dark sky above. The Moon illuminated the corner of my eye, while the stars slowly peeked out as my vision adjusted. Those stars felt so distant, but a comfortable warmth enveloped me when I stared back. Even though my heart ached with each rejection, it felt as if the universe was telling me to keep going.

I worked hard in school. Attending college during the pandemic gave me a lot of time to build personal projects and beef up my resume. I fell in love with science fiction and imagined how I could program computers to see the world around me. I taught myself computer vision and built goofy projects to test my programming skills. Eventually, I received offers as a Regents Scholar at UC Davis and admission into EECS at UC Berkeley. But that was only the beginning of my journey.

I transferred to UC Davis in September 2021 and almost immediately took a leave of absence that December.

School wasn't my cup of tea. While I knew I had to finish eventually, this was the first time in my life I had the freedom to pursue my dream of working at NASA. Except... I didn't.

I applied to the OSTEM program once more and received an offer to join NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center as a Computer Vision intern that summer. However, when life gives you one opportunity, it often gives you more. I had already accepted multiple offers to work at my other dream company—Genentech. It's weird how life works sometimes. I spent nine months working in Genentech's famous gRED and MSAT groups virtually from South San Francisco (a post for another time). While those were some of the most amazing experiences of my life, I still had one goal: get into NASA (again).

I applied to OSTEM again for the Fall 2022 term. I woke up at 7:40 AM on a random Thursday morning in August with an inkling and an email: "Welcome to NASA!" I jumped out of bed with excitement and ran to the living room, where my dad was doing his morning yoga. I yelled that I had gotten into NASA. Unlike the first time, this one felt real. I finally had the realization that I could live my dream. I pushed school off for another quarter and joined NASA's Kennedy Space Center, working as a Space Systems Engineering intern on the ISRU Pilot Excavator—a rover designed to mine minerals from the Moon's surface. It was a full-circle moment: all those nights spent staring at the stars led to me being part of the Artemis era.

So, what's the answer? How can you get a NASA internship? A lot of grit and luck—but calculated luck. I didn't interview for my role at NASA. My resume was selected from a pool of over 200 candidates. That's a 0.5% chance. I eventually asked my mentor why he chose me over everyone else. He said he loved the projects and experiences on my resume. I had never done Systems Engineering before, but the way I communicated my interests showed I was curious, committed, and ready to learn.

My advice? Regardless of how many rejections you receive, stay committed. Build projects that light you up. Document your work online. Reach out to mentors. Make your passion impossible to ignore. The path to NASA isn't linear—and it's rarely easy—but if you keep pushing, your stars will align.

I was born with Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency (PKD), a rare genetic disease which alters the life-span of my red blood cells and is a byproduct of hemolytic anemia. As a child, I experienced routine visits to the hospital on a monthly basis. I received transfusions, while restrained to a bed by wires that protruded from my emaciated body. I lacked in physical activities and had limitations placed on my health. My body was frail, and a small amount of pressure could easily debilitate it. I always wondered, why me?

It wasn't until my sophomore year of high school when I found a distraction from the chaos of life. I decided to remove P.E. from my schedule, since no one benefits from having to watch me complete an 18-minute mile. My athleticism was incompatible with my competitive attitude, and my self-esteem was low. I didn't understand how to cope with my weak physical abilities and envisioned myself as inferior.

Instead of P.E., I took "Introduction to Computer Science," where I quickly became frustrated when I was unable to implement the same functions and identify the same patterns that my classmates could. I had the strong assumption that Computer Science was a subject I couldn't master. However, my initial anger transformed into curiosity, as I refused to surrender when it came to intellectual challenges. Over the summer, I studied the Python programming language through online documentation and videos. I discovered that programming allowed me to cope with the stress of my physical disabilities. Through code, I could create a figure that was immune to restrictions. Regardless of the anxiety-inducing setbacks that creating successful code involved, computer science became my new track - one in which I could run forever.

I am guided by the belief that science fiction can become reality. In my quest to solve abstract scientific problems, I have connected with people who share my passions and whose diverse perspectives have shaped my own. I had the honor as a guest co-host on the podcast Just Listen: Voices of PK Deficiency by Agios Pharmaceuticals, where I detailed patient support and my experience of living with PKD since childhood. Growing up, I didn't have access to FDA-approved drugs for my condition, and living with the disease has strengthened my desire to help patients who have struggled to find proper treatment. I want to delve into pharmaceutical R&D to improve how we develop drugs and address the bottlenecks that prevent timely access to life-saving therapies. I also aim to be the voice for students in the broader community who can benefit from our shared experiences and the idea that diversity and inclusivity in the scientific community are not only achievable but also essential for innovation and progress.