Son of a Master Carpenter
"I grew up watching a man turn raw timber into beauty — and understood, long before any textbook told me, that engineering is an act of love."
My father is a master carpenter. I spent my childhood in Dhamar, Yemen, tracing the grain of wood with small fingers while he measured and carved — not just furniture, but shelter, dignity, livelihood for our neighbors. His workshop was my first classroom in spatial thinking, in the relationship between material and purpose.
From him I inherited an obsession with precision and a reverence for craftsmanship. Every joint must bear weight. Every beam must sing under load. Every room must breathe. These are not engineering principles I learned from a lecture — they are truths absorbed through sawdust and sweat.
When I dissected a bovine eye in our school laboratory and mapped its structural layers, or when I constructed a galvanic cell and measured the voltage flowing between anode and cathode — I felt the same satisfaction my father must feel when a perfect mortise meets its tenon. Structure, chemistry, electricity, anatomy: these are all the same conversation about how things hold together.
Architectural Engineering is my calling — not because I chose it, but because everything in my life pointed inevitably toward it. I am ready to carry my father's precision into the academy, and to carry the academy's rigor back to cities that need rebuilding.