When you first arrive on campus, the sheer volume of opportunities is overwhelming. For many students, the default instinct is to maximize everything. Every unit, every event, every cross-registered class at Harvard. I understand the impulse. Even knowing what I was there for, the harder challenge was choosing between things I actually wanted. I competed for a spot on the climbing team, made the roster, and never attended a practice. Not because climbing didn’t interest me, but because other things had come to matter more.
My cognitive science background taught me that the brain doesn’t just filter out noise. It actively commits to a single signal. The harder skill is choosing which one.
This wasn’t a strategy I developed at MIT. A year into my supply chain career, I had an offer in tech—better pay, better title, better benefits. I turned it down. I was only beginning to pick things up, and leaving would have meant starting over just as the momentum was building. I didn’t have a plan. I just knew I wasn’t done yet.
The program hands you a menu with everything on it. Some of your cohort will want to order it all, and for them, that’s exactly right. What matters is knowing your own appetite.
The technical skills you don’t pick up here, you’ll find on the job or online. The relationships and experiences you build with this specific group of people, in this window of time, you won’t. I ran 5Ks along the Charles, learned to swim, and figured out how to enjoy group projects. Those moments shaped me as much as anything on a transcript did.
You don’t need to do everything. You just need to own your choices.
Won Suh Kim is a recent graduate of the MIT SCM Class of 2026. With seven years in life sciences supply chain spanning planning, procurement, and end-to-end strategy, he is now focused on AI-enabled planning solutions that create system-wide impact rather than incremental change.