An Anecdote on Project Elara

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I have a shelf in a room at the corner of my house where I keep old items from my childhood including notebooks, binders, and packs of looseleaf paper. Somewhere on this shelf also situates small, short space-related books.

They aren’t rich in detail or much use nowadays—just one of the very few remnants from the last decade that I decided to keep when I was cleaning out my house.

They date back to when I, as a child, was interested in space and read through these books with my dad. From what I recall, I don’t remember expressing any of my liking for space to my parents at all. In fact, I don’t even know where or when I got these books. Perhaps they were from a scholastic fair, or maybe my parents had gone out to buy them for me. But while I didn’t know much about space, something kept pulling me towards it—I wasn’t sure exactly what.

I have a vague memory of flipping through one of these books with my dad one night and seeing the many photos, since it was a picture book for children, and looking at one particular planet.

It might’ve been Uranus, possibly Neptune. Maybe even Jupiter.

Or perhaps it was something entirely different, like a nebula. Space is vast, and there are so many possibilities.

I also recall being connected to other phenomena, like natural disasters or anything that could possibly happen in the sky, like when I felt waves of comfort from thunder crashing over our roof, or when I used to examine the moon in our sunroom through a fake telescope I got, sitting on the cold wooden planks and glaring out into the night sky.

Growing up, I slowly lost interest in space. It wasn’t like I had my life figured out anyway, and I shifted in and out of many different things. I leaned more into other subject matter, such as music and art, which carried me through all of high school and into today. Even the topic of space itself didn’t really catch up to me until after I had graduated and was settling into college.

On an unrelated note, I recently gave an art presentation at my high school as an alumni for an event. I couldn’t help but talk about the shift in my career goals, even though the typical trajectory of our presentations wasn’t supposed to circle around it. My audience was mostly sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and I wanted to make it clear that it was okay to experience career shifts and perhaps feel unsure of what they want to do in life at this particular age. I know how it feels to be lost and doomed for the future, and to be socially obscured and deleted from everyone’s memories because of that.

Let’s get back on track, though: before kindergarten, I was set on becoming a fashion designer. Before college, I was set on mechanical engineering. Between then and now, I had considered all the following: fashion designer, interior designer, piano instructor, psychologist, digital designer, doctor, (maybe) biologist, physician’s assistant, pediatric physician’s assistant, optometrist, dentist, orthodontist, physicist, mechanical engineer, astronomer, electrical engineer, mathematician, chemical engineer, and aerospace engineer (dentistry was already set for years, and I truly believed that it would stick).

And now, I’m set on the path of electrical engineering with a double in mathematics.

But, perhaps the space books that I kept from over a decade ago decided to come back to me. I’m glad to be where I am and I’m glad that I settled with engineering. The thing is—despite all of my career choices—I still wanted an outlet for anything related to space, something capable of channeling my feelings and replacing my inner burdens without having to make it the entirety of my career.

I had a conversation with a friend about switching my major from electrical engineering to aerospace engineering during my first two months at college. There wasn’t a single reason why I’d been wanting to do this, but one thing was that I kept getting caught up in the fear that electrical engineering wasn’t for me. This was also around the same time I considered switching back to mechanical engineering and later (if I recall correctly), considering a few other majors as well. Around this time was when he first mentioned Project Elara, as he’d developed a close bond with the Project Head.

After nearly 18 years of art, music, and my (questionable) interest in space, switching to electrical engineering and surrounding myself with everything engineering-coded felt more like a humble insult than anything else. It seemed too idealistic, and now that I think back to it, I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted.

Regardless, my friend kept mentioning Project Elara and that I was free to consider it anytime. The second time we spoke about it, I finally decided to take a look. I took his words from more of a comforting perspective. Generally speaking, I wasn’t necessarily “stuck” in the field of electrical engineering anyway, and because I truly wanted to stick with it, I said to myself, “I’m already here. I might as well keep what I have and use this project as an outlet where I can fulfill all that has been bothering me.”

And so, it continued. It was something light-weight, yet so successful in filling in this void—at the time, all I aimed for was something to work on, something that mitigated the intimidation of my major. I’ve come to realize that despite becoming a member of this project only recently (short, compared to its four-year long history), there have been so many instances where I felt important and needed, where I knew I was in good hands, and where all the ethical questions have already been answered for me.

I first unknowingly met Jacky at a meeting for RSPA (Rensselaer Society of Piano Arts), where we only spoke a little and continued on with the evening after that—but near the start of the meeting, I remember nearly recklessly falling off a table as I was trying to lean on it (apologies to said table), and Jacky immediately informing me that the tables in the room were particularly weak, and then went on to speak briefly about physics and how he majored in it.

It was extremely surface-level back then, but now, I truly grasp and understand the extent to which he dedicates his morality, time, and energy to something he is truly passionate about, rather than committing himself to his research for something tamer or performative.

As one of the most passionate and hard-working students I’ve met, Jacky parallels an inner part of me that I never exactly saw in anyone else to this extent—which is the ability to commit and strive for perfected work that is not done out of social praise and ego. While it is one thing to work hard and commit to college, it is another thing to truly put the extra mile and deeply grind into it. Speaking for the both of us, it is essential we search every nook and cranny for things that aren’t so blatantly obvious, not for the sake of impressing others but rather for our own comfort—because we will be left bothered if we know we could’ve done more.

He strives to help others and build his longing dreams not only for the reason of fulfilling himself, but also for the fact that he refuses to settle for less when it comes to helping others and improving the world.

And having such a model to look upon is part of a library of reasons on why I changed my mindset a little and strived more to become not only a particular student, but also to work towards something that might seem distant at the moment. To see life as a continuous chain that runs on and on throughout a lifetime.

And somewhere at the beginning of this chain beholds some type of “strong” start that must be established before anything else could.

And so, like the on-and-off relationship I have with space, my learning experiences have proven to me that things come and go. In this case, I’ve learned that eventually, things do work out and things can come back, whether it be my work habits, my interests and passions, or something trivial: the image of those space books I have sitting on my shelf at home.

Although I’ve started my journey for Project Elara only recently, it has provided a safe area for me after being so distant from myself for countless years, on top of adjusting to the college experience. It felt as if I was living on translucency, not knowing how I wanted to end up or where I wanted to be. That isn’t to say that everything I do is perfect in the sense where I have no regrets. I’m still in the process of figuring things out. But I’ve learned that despite uncertainty, the most I could do is channel my inner desires and fulfill all that I can at this given moment, committing to the things that my future self would look up upon.

I’ve come to realize that my genuine mission in this project is to not only do my job and fulfill tasks, but also to enjoy it, to use it efficiently. It’s not a victory story, and most definitely not even the entirety of my life. It is a small chapter that is only starting, and simply working in this project has fulfilled its own purpose—completing part of the inner me that once struggled to adapt and understand certain things about myself.

Those books on my shelf, “trivial objects” as I’ll now call them, lay untouched and cold. Childhood me wouldn’t have thought anything of being in a field surrounded by all things essential to engineering and space—and with that, I leave these “trivial objects” behind and begin the next four years of this chapter for something much larger and beyond me.

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Originally written by Emily Lin · edited by Jacky Song · January 25th, 2026