When I stepped foot onto the campus of Rice University as a matriculating freshman in the fall of 2014, I was dead set on becoming a civil engineer. As an adolescent I nurtured an obsession with infrastructure and cities, with much of my formative years spent observing the rapid pace of development in Houston (including the mammoth reconstruction of the Katy Freeway), playing SimCity 4, and reading about urban planning. The complexity of urban transportation—and the neverending quest to improve it—has always scratched an itch in my brain.