I used to be a rocket scientist. Now I am poor. I used to run failure-mode analysis on aircraft. Now I reuse my tea bags.
The transition took about six months, one acceptance letter, and a white coat that cost more than my old work laptop. I currently attend the nation’s first engineering-based medical school, which sounded like an elegant continuation of my career right up until I did the math on tuition.
Hamna Khalid
At 21, I made almost six figures. I had a badge that let me into a building full of very expensive things that flew or were designed to fly, assuming everyone did their job correctly. I had a 401(k) match. I had health insurance that didn’t require me to diagnose myself first. I felt, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, completely empty inside.
Now I check my bank account the way you check a wound to see if it’s healing. It is not healing. I am not sure which emptiness was worse. The one with dental coverage, or the one I have now, which comes with a stethoscope and a recurring balance I try not to look at directly.
Aerospace engineering teaches you to respect margins. Every system gets a safety factor, because reality always demands more than your model predicted. Structures crack under loads nobody accounted for. Transportation of a highly flammable battery takes longer than the spreadsheet says it will, once hazmat certification and the paperwork nobody budgets time for get involved. You build in room to be wrong because you will be wrong, and the alternative is a very bad day for everyone involved.
I did not so much apply this lesson to my own life as watch it apply itself—mostly against my will—in the form of a student loan balance that keeps a much better safety margin than I do. I stare at that number on my screen sometimes and quietly tell myself I’ll have it paid off within a year of graduating, the same way Thomas the Tank Engine convinces himself he can make it up the hill.
I think I can. I think I can. I cannot, actually, but the chanting helps.
There was a version of me that ran the numbers before making this leap the way I would have sized a fuel tank for a launch. I would have calculated worst-case burn rate, margin for delay, a plan for what happens if the mission runs long. Medical school ran long. It is, in fact, designed to run long. No amount of pre-launch math fully prepares you for years of tuition compounding against a stipend that was never meant to cover both rent and food in the same month, let alone the same week.
So, you adapt. You find, if not a fuel-efficient trajectory, at least a survivable one. I have carried a 40-pound suitcase 1.3 miles rather than pay for a $15 rideshare, running a real-time cost-benefit analysis on whether my shoulder or my bank account would give out first. My shoulder lost. I switched from Nespresso pods to plain caffeine pills, because three pods a day is expensive and a pill bottle does not care how tired you are. I reuse the same tea bag until it stops pretending to be tea, on the theory that flavor, like fuel, is a resource to be rationed.
None of this is glamorous. All of it is math, which, as an engineer, I should be better at. The system, such as it is, comes down to three unglamorous rules underneath the theatrics: cook at home, live with roommates, and spend as close to nothing as your body will tolerate. I have tried, at various points, to engineer a smarter solution, a side hustle here, a “just this once” there, and the numbers always land in the same place. This is not a clever hack. It is the only thing that has ever actually worked, and every time I’ve tried to shortcut it, I’ve ended up right back here, staring at the same number, chanting the same chant.
Some of it is less dignified. At a conference, when a hotel room cost more than my weekly grocery budget and a red-eye flight cost less than a decent dinner, I discovered that O’Hare Airport has a cozy yoga room—and that the couches next to it are serviceable, if unglamorous, real estate. It is also cold. If you ever find yourself doing the same calculus, debating cash on hand vs. hours until your connecting flight, bring a jacket. You will be sleeping there, funnily enough rarely alone, and it is better to be cold and prepared than cold and surprised.
Even though I’m only 25, my hip wakes up the next morning feeling like it’s ready for a full replacement, and my running joke is that I’m holding out hope the ortho bro in my class will do the honors himself. He’ll need a standardized patient for his OSCE eventually anyway, and those pay $50 an hour. At this point, that’s basically a signing bonus.
I tell that story at parties now, mostly because it gets a laugh and partly because I still don’t know what else to do with it. It’s hard to explain to people why anyone would trade a six-figure salary and a normal sleep schedule for a shared apartment, a meal plan built around whatever’s on sale, and a floor in a Midwestern airport. The honest answer is that the first version of my life was stable in a way that made it very easy to feel nothing at all, and this version is unstable in a way that has, against my expectations, made me feel almost everything.
I don’t think poverty is character-building, exactly. I’ve read enough to know that stress is stress, and a negative bank balance is not a personality trait, however much certain motivational posters would like it to be. But there is something to be said for a life you chose on purpose and run on numbers you did yourself, even when those numbers don’t fully add up yet. Rocket science and medicine have this much in common. You never get to see the whole trajectory when you commit to the launch. You just do the math you can do, build in the margin you can afford, and go anyway.
I used to be a rocket scientist. Now I’m broke, tired, and still steeping the same tea bag for a third round. Somehow, I’m still fairly confident this is the best trajectory I’ve ever calculated, even if I have to sleep on an airport floor to stay on course.