My thesis defense had been scheduled for months, long before any of this had detonated into headlines and boardrooms, and standing outside the review room forty minutes early, I understood that some part of me had been quietly, desperately looking forward to it — one hour where the only thing at stake was work I'd actually built myself, with no name attached to it but my own.
Professor Alvarez found me pacing the hallway and gave me the particular dry look she'd perfected over three years of advising me through increasingly ambitious housing proposals. "You look like you're about to defend a war crime, not a thesis on adaptive reuse in underserved housing markets. Whatever's been in the papers, Chen, leave it in the hallway. That committee doesn't care who you're dating. They care whether
