This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Anand Ramanathan, who works at Meta and lives in New Jersey. The following has been edited for length and clarity. When I was choosing my undergraduate degree in the early 2000s, people told me to pick computer science, the hot field of the time. Instead, I studied physics, all the way to getting my Ph.D in 2011, because I really enjoyed it. In 2012, after working at NASA for roughly a year, I was thinking about what was next, and I looked