FOLLOW YOUR CURIOSITY · 15 POSTS
Structures, resilience, and the systems that give a life room to grow.
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↗At the Mer de Glace, the ice cave’s apparent permanence gives way to a different reality: a moving glacier requires a newly carved entrance each season. Machinery and protective coverings become part of the story.
↗Borrowing the engineer’s idea of a safety factor, Kefei examines the margin between life’s demands and the capacity to absorb them. He reflects on cash, systems, and identity as three kinds of personal buffer.
↗Egypt and the Met’s Divine Egypt exhibition lead to a question about what allows human work to endure. Beyond a monument’s scale are the roles, practices, and recurring acts that carry meaning through time.
↗Between individual habits and civilization-scale ambition lies the world people actually inhabit. Kefei brings the series back to that middle scale through the engineering idea of simulation.
↗The Kardashev scale opens a conversation about energy, civilization, and personal capacity. Kefei uses it as an analogy for directing attention and building a more integrated inner life.
↗The opening Engineering Greatness essay starts with attention: a walk, a cup of coffee, a detail usually overlooked. Meaning grows through small practices that can be repeated and adjusted.
↗A performance of The Great Gatsby prompts a return to the foundations of a meaningful life. Kefei traces a path from structural engineering through cloud systems toward the work of reflection.
↗Before a flight to his fortieth university reunion, Kefei reconnects with Peter, a former engineering colleague. Their conversation moves from professional foundations to faith, family, and reflection.
↗Approaching a fortieth university reunion, Kefei returns to the language of his offshore engineering education. The ocean, structures, and uncertain forces become ways of reflecting on a life.
↗An old notebook returns Kefei to an August 2020 engineering sprint, when platform upgrades, unexpected problems, and team coordination converged. Remembering colleagues through changed names, he pays attention to the trust and often invisible work that kept complex systems running.
↗A visit to the Suez Canal Museum prompts Kefei to examine who receives credit for an ambitious undertaking. The missing statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps and a curator's passionate account bring labor, national identity, and competing historical narratives into view.
↗Standing before the Great Pyramid, Kefei reads its geometry through both engineering and mortality. The monument becomes a way to consider why people devote finite lives to work they hope will outlast them.
↗Returning to SOM's New York office as a visitor, Kefei encounters a living reminder of his earlier work on San Francisco's airport terminal. The visit revives the question of what his career might have become had he remained in structural engineering.
↗Kefei draws on his seismic engineering background to think about resilience in everyday life. Remembering research on structures under stress, he uses flexibility and energy absorption as metaphors for responding to career pressure, burnout, and unexpected change.
↗Kefei looks back on engineering education as preparation for work that may extend far beyond a chosen major. He highlights analytical thinking, problem solving, organization, and collaboration as abilities developed through difficult courses and projects.
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