As Commencement approaches, meet Class of 2026 graduate Shaun Pexton! When he was a kid, Shaun Pexton would pore through popular science magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American to find the latest advances in astrophysics or biology. There was something about the vibrant layouts on glossy pages that evoked mystery. But by the time he was 12 or 13, one particular topic really started to fire his imagination: quantum mechanics. He wasn’t quite sure how it might be relevant to his life at the time, but there was something exciting about the complexities of this field — the idea of quantum “entanglement,” for instance, a phenomenon so critical to the emerging field of quantum computing — that seemed almost too impossible to grasp. “I would always try to find the page that had the word ‘quantum,’” remembers Pexton, a Yale senior from Silliman College. “The magazine would have these articles with almost magical diagrams that showed these cool processes. To me it really was...