Philosophy

My approach

This is the principle I return to every time I begin something new. It sounds simple — but it's more demanding in practice than it appears. It means you don't start things you're not ready to finish. And once you start, you find a way through regardless of the difficulty. Follow-through isn't a personality trait you either have or don't — it's a decision you make at the beginning and keep making until the work is done.

I genuinely believe most people are capable of far more than they think. The gap between what someone can do and what they actually do is almost never about raw ability. It's about whether they kept going when the problem got harder. That belief makes me feel confident starting difficult things — not because I think I'll get it right immediately, but because I've committed to staying with it until I do.

I chase perfection not because I think I'll reach it, but because the chase is what produces better work.

In practice, this looks like chasing excellence through persistence and iteration rather than expecting the first attempt to be the final one. Nothing in engineering — or anywhere else — comes out perfect in a single go. Good work is a cycle: an idea, a prototype, a test, an honest look at what's wrong, and a better version. Every time I sit down to refine something, whether it's a MATLAB script, a CAD model, a thermal analysis, or a paragraph of technical writing, I'm trying to close the gap between what I made and what it should be. That relentless refinement is what I mean when I say I chase perfection. I know I won't reach it — the point is what happens in the pursuit.

My projects are the clearest proof of this. I didn't arrive at NC State already knowing how to design a liquid rocket engine or write a CFD solver from scratch. I learned by starting, getting it wrong, understanding why, and doing it again. The design-build-test loop I went through in nearly every project isn't just a methodology — it's the same philosophy applied to engineering work. You commit to the problem, you push past the simulation, you see what reality says about your predictions, and you use that information to get better. That's the only process I've found that reliably produces work I'm proud of.

And looking back, my whole story follows the same pattern. A 6th-grader staring out of an airplane window asking how something so heavy can fly doesn't become an aerospace engineer by talent alone — he becomes one by deciding to follow through on that question for the next decade, one hard thing at a time.