Over the past year, I’ve received a number of rejections from roles I genuinely admired.
Not abrupt rejections. Thoughtful ones. The kind that acknowledges alignment, curiosity, and potential, before gently closing the door. Often with a familiar undertone: strong profile, solid technical foundation… but not quite the right fit.
For a long time, I treated each outcome as an isolated event. A single decision. A single datapoint. Something to fix, compensate for, or outwork.
Then, somewhere between writing about grid resilience, modeling EV charging infrastructure, and revisiting my own academic history, a different pattern emerged.
This wasn’t just a hiring challenge. It was a systems design problem.
Thinking in Layers
In engineering, we rarely evaluate a system from one dimension alone. Power grids, cities, and digital platforms all operate across layers that interact constantly. Optimizing one layer in isolation often creates fragility elsewhere.
Careers work the same way.
- Layer 1: Rules and Abstractions. Grades. Certificates. Thresholds. Automated filters. This layer is clean, binary, and scalable. It’s useful for narrowing scope but blunt by nature. It captures what is easy to measure, not always what is most predictive.
- Layer 2: Human Context. Adaptability. Judgment. Learning velocity. The ability to translate theory into practice and operate under ambiguity. This layer is harder to formalize. It lives in projects, conversations, failures, and recovery.
- Layer 3: System Purpose. The layer that determines long-term resilience. Does this component strengthen the system as a whole? Does it reduce friction between parts? Does it make future growth easier rather than harder?
What this year taught me is what happens when decisions privilege one layer while ignoring the others.
In grids, it leads to technically “optimal” designs that fail under real-world constraints. In cities, it leads to infrastructure that works on paper but excludes entire communities. In careers, it filters out people whose value doesn’t sit neatly inside a single box.
Cities, like careers, fail when designed in isolation. Resilience lives in the connections.
Where My Work Lives
My work has consistently lived at the interfaces.
Between power systems and software. Between simulation models and operational reality. Between technical rigor, regulatory constraints, and human behavior.
Whether I’m building grid simulations, automating studies with Python, or researching EV charging optimization, the pattern is the same: I’m not chasing isolated excellence in one domain. I’m focused on making systems coherent.
That means:
- translating mathematical models into tools operators can actually use,
