“[As a kid, I wanted to be] An architect. I loved engineering, drafting floor plans, designing fantasy houses. I figured out how to convert my uncle’s house to solar power (at least in my head). My high school had an engineering and architecture program, and I took everything in it, went to the state fair, all that stuff. I was lucky to have a college counselor who said, ‘It’s hard to know what you really want to do when you’re 16. Instead of going right to architecture school, you should go to a liberal arts college. You can take design classes there, but you’ll also be able to explore other things.’ So instead of going to the great architecture school at UC San Luis Obispo, I ended up at Harvard. I started on design, but along the way, I discovered international relations and national security…”
