Not all career changes involve huge debts, but they are no less of a challenge (*) to those undertaking them.

Robert Lang kept folding while earning a master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford and a Ph.D. in applied physics at Caltech. As he worked on his dissertation —— "Semiconductor Lasers: New Geometries and Spectral Properties" —— he designed an origami hermit crab, a mouse in a mousetrap, an ant, a skunk, and more than fifty other pieces. They were dense and crisp and precise but also full of character: his mouse conveys something fundamentally mouse-ish, his ant has an essential ant-ness. His insects were especially beautiful. While in Germany for postdoctoral work, he and Diane were taken with Black Forest cuckoo clocks; the carved casings, pinecone-shaped weights, pendulums, and pop-out birds wouldn’t seem to be a natural for origami, but Lang thought otherwise. He started a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, in 1988, shortly after he had finished folding a life-sized cuckoo clock. It had taken him three months to design, and six hours to fold, and it made Lang a sensation in the origami world.

See also this slide show:

Here Orlean talks about Lang and the wonders of computer-aided origami.

You can download his TreeMaker software and fold your own.

(*) So how do you achieve success?

Why a physicist dropped everything for paper folding | The New Yorker