After enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania, Ternus earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics with a psychology minor in 1997. It’s worth taking a moment to consider that minor.

More than any consumer hardware company on the planet, Apple has always focused on this intersection. Engineers who study the human mind alongside machines tend to design differently. It’s possible that more of Apple’s product instincts were influenced by their coursework choices than anyone realized at the time.

On the Penn campus, his senior project has become something of a quiet legend. Ternus created a mechanical feeding arm that quadriplegics could operate with only head movements. Take a moment to consider that. Long before accessibility became a key component of corporate marketing, a 21-year-old undergraduate was creating an assistive technology with real human stakes.

There’s a feeling that in a Penn engineering lab, the mindset he would eventually bring to Apple products—the attention to detail, the willingness to sweat over little mechanical puzzles—was already developing.

And there’s the odd coincidence that keeps coming up in media reports. Elon Musk, who graduated from Wharton and Penn’s College in the same year, was in the same class as Ternus. Two of the most significant technology companies in the world are led by two men who were part of the same cohort in 1997. Musk became combative, boisterous, and public.

Ternus took a completely different route. He moved into engineering positions, remained silent, and let the work do the talking. It’s difficult not to wonder what it would have been like for each of them to walk across the same commencement stage given how differently these two have handled public life.

Ternus joined Virtual Research Systems, an early company developing virtual reality headsets in what was then a cutting-edge area of technology, after graduating. It was unglamorous, specialized, and most likely underpaid. However, it provided him with practical experience with head-mounted displays, which would become oddly relevant when Apple began working on Vision Pro decades later. Although careers rarely follow a straight path, the trajectory from 2026 almost seems deliberate.

In 2001, he became a member of the product design team at Apple, his second job after graduating from college. Ternus recalled that first day with disarming candor in his commencement speech at Penn Engineering in 2024. He claimed that it was both thrilling and daunting, that he wasn’t sure he belonged, and that everyone around him seemed so assured and knowledgeable.

He gave the graduating class that day an almost casual but oddly timeless piece of advice: always assume you’re as smart as everyone else in the room, but never assume you know as much as they do. It sounds like the words of a swim instructor. Perhaps he heard it for the first time there.

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