Career Clarity

One Aspire Scholar’s professional trajectory is anything but straight … and that’s ok with him

By Erica Levi Zelinger

Junior Elias Gkouveris was walking with a friend after class, talking excitedly about a pre-law course he was taking.

“Wait, didn’t you just say you were going into computer science,” the friend replied. “Make up your mind.”

But Elias isn’t sure he has to.

“Ambition can’t wait … but maybe there should be an asterisk,” Elias, physics ’25, jokes. “I have ambition. The ambition is there, but I try to approach these things as if I was going to have a career in all of them. I’m not getting enough information if I don’t delve into each.”

When Elias was accepted into Pennoni’s Aspire Scholars Program as a sophomore, he had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted his future to look like: Get a bachelor’s degree in physics, go to grad school, get a PhD in theoretical physics, find a job as a professor, focus on his own research.

But he applied to the program because he’d become so rigid in his physics intentions, and had all these other passions. Then he started asking himself if physics was, in fact, what he wanted to do. Would he be fulfilled?

“Aspire was there for me to figure it out more,” he says. “If I’m asked what I want to do — in my mind, I understand. But it’s hard to express. I know what I want, but I couldn’t describe it. I wanted to be able to describe it.”

Elias’s path at Drexel has not been as clear cut as some of his classmates. He started off as a mechanical engineering major. He’d taken engineering in high school and had a strong desire for both theoretical and hands-on knowledge. But by spring of his first year, Elias switched to physics; he started to realize through club involvement that engineering is an application of physics and he actually gravitated toward the “why” of it all.

The 2021-22 Aspire Scholars program further allowed him the time to pause and reflect and then to develop and clarify his goals, working with a group of 14 peers to receive guidance and mentorship from staff and faculty.

“I had been coming at physics from the point of view of becoming a professor, working at a university,” he admits. “I started looking around while I was in my physics classes … putting myself in the shoes of the professor teaching and thinking, ‘Did I want to be doing what he is doing right now?’”

What was most comforting about Aspire is that no matter the major, he was surrounded by students who were looking for the same clarity.

“It was nice to know there were people going through the same thing,” he says. “You don’t realize how many students don’t actually have focused career goals.”

Aspire pushed Elias to have more intentional conversations with his peers, club members and family. Chats with students in the Society of Physics, Drexel Gaming Association, Audio Engineering Society — even Drexel’s Taekwondo Club — gave Elias a chance to make connections in and out of his field. An informational “interview” with his uncle, once an engineer and now a patent attorney, led him to see the benefits a physics background could bring to a career like law. So Elias joined the Biddle Law Society. He enrolled in a law class. He applied for law co-ops. He began thinking about patent law and how he could keep up to date with new inventions and theories in physics, but look at the field from a different vantage point.

But law, he acknowledges, might not be the final choice. Computer science, as his friend confusedly pointed out, is also a career contender.

“My plans for the future have significantly changed over my time as an Aspire Scholar,” Elias wrote in his final Aspire project. “There are many unknowns about it, and I’m a lot more open to changing things about my career now than I used to be.”