As I approached my high-school graduation, I had no idea what I wanted to do as a career. My grandfather and father were both physicians, and my brother had just been accepted into medical school. Even though my family did not put any pressure on me or set specific expectations, there was an unspoken assumption that I would follow the family template. Perhaps I thought medical school would require too many years to complete, or that I couldn’t handle the emotional stress of being a doctor. Whatever the reason, I decided to charter my own path. I knew I was good at math, so engineering was an obvious choice even though I didn’t understand exactly what it entailed. Some close friends of my parents were structural engineers. Designing ...
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