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Not everything needs to be groundbreaking<br>Jun 17, 2026

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There’s a version of ambition that’s entirely legible to other people, and Harvard knows it well. The internship. The offer. The headline. Everyone around you is fluent in that language and defaults to it immediately. When you’re someone who genuinely wants to learn and explore, that pressure is disorienting. I can’t be mad, it’s just the water everyone swims in.<br>I love Harvard. I love that I get to spend my summer at SpaceX. People ask me about the IPO a lot, and I get why. It’s a fair question, maybe the most interesting thing happening at the company from the outside, but it’s not why this summer has mattered to me.<br>What actually got me was sitting next to people who were excited to talk about thermal protection systems at 9pm. The same kind of excited I feel every time I learn something new. Not something new to the world, just new to me.<br>Somewhere along the way, we decided that joy only counts if it’s attached to something revolutionary. We’ve just been trained to think learning, on its own, isn’t what matters. Sometimes the two line up. I’m lucky I wanted to be in space tech right as it was getting so much press, but it wasn’t only that.<br>I remember the first thing I ever made a computer do: a few lines of code that made the screen print “hi” back to me. Nobody saw it, and nobody cared. It will never appear on a resume. I have never forgotten how good that felt, and I felt it again, just as strongly, the first time something clicked in a high school physics class.<br>Now AI can write that line of code in half a millisecond second, better than I ever could. So when I make the screen say hi today, part of me asks: so what? It’s already been done. Why does this still feel like it should matter?<br>I’m a freshman, which means I’m at the exact age this is supposed to resolve into a plan. Pick a major. Build a resume pointed at something revolutionary, because anything less doesn’t seem to count. Nobody says this directly. It’s implied every time someone asks why I’m studying physics.<br>But the people who go on to do revolutionary things were rarely chasing revolution when they started. I think we have to start with wanting the screen to say hi back, or wanting a thermal system to finally making sense at 10pm. The small, illegible joy of figuring something out for its own sake. The revolution, if it comes, is usually a side effect.<br>I’m not trying to stop being ambitious, or pretend I don’t care what people think when I tell them where I’m spending my summer. I do care. But I’d like to get back to being excited about learning random little things, even if lots of people and machines could learn them or use them faster than me. Especially now. If joy only counts when something is new to the world, my generation will spend our whole lives waiting to get back to that.

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