When I was a student, then in labs, and then in industry, I kept running into the same problem: notebooks were either too “cute” to be useful, too flimsy to survive a backpack, or too generic to work for traceability and lab documentation. So I made my own. Now there...

For a long time, I thought my life in STEM would look linear. There’s an unspoken blueprint we absorb early: pick a major, get a job, climb upward. A tidy graph with a clean slope. That isn’t how it went. My career has looked more like a series of experiments — some...