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,
- aligning optimization objectives with physical and social constraints,
- and questioning whether a “best” solution is truly best once it meets reality.
This is not the fastest path. It’s not always the most visible one either. But it’s where fragile systems become resilient.
The work happens at the interface: where models meet operations, and code meet the grid.
Reframing the Past
This year also forced me to revisit parts of my academic history I once tried to minimize.
Instead of treating them as liabilities to hide, I began to see them as early signals of a nonlinear trajectory. Understanding power systems deeply did not come to me all at once. It was built over time, through reconstruction, practice, and application.
What I understand now, I understand thoroughly. Not because it was always easy, but because it was earned.
That process shaped how I think, how I learn, and how I approach complex problems. It also shaped how I respond to rejection: not as a verdict, but as feedback about system fit, not personal worth.
2026: Building for Integration
As we move into 2026, my focus is clear.
I am not optimizing for perfect layers. I am building at the interfaces.
I am interested in roles where:
- code must speak to engineers, not just machines,
- models must survive contact with operations,
- and success is defined by system behavior over time, not isolated metrics.
I no longer define myself narrowly by title. Electrical engineer, researcher, developer—these are components. The value is in how they connect.
Integration is the work.
A Closing Thought
The systems we are trying to build today—energy systems, digital infrastructure, organizations—are too complex to be designed by people who excel in only one layer.
They need integrators. People comfortable in the gaps. People shaped by synthesis, not linear paths.
Open question: In your field, where have you seen the greatest cost of designing in isolation? And who are the integrators quietly holding the system together?
That’s where the future is being built.
