36 · Two Thousand Pounds of Nerve

This is the dichotomy I'm in right now. I have to pay and enrol for the A-levels within the next 24 hours. I got A and B for maths and further maths last year, but my maths is good enough — I got a 9.0 TMUA. I just need to polish it, but there are only five weeks to prepare for the A-levels again. This time it isn't from scratch — but physics literally is. I also need to prepare for an EFDS interview I don't even know I'll get, with no application updates from Imperial, LSE or UCL. So do I put down the £2k application fee as a private candidate and risk it all, or give up and go back to Canada? You know the answer. Risk the £2k. Worth burning the bridges.

My teacher at Bloomsbury Education, who is letting me take the tests in the first place, says I can't take GCE physics, so I'd be studying IAL courses alone. The problem: twelve tests in two months across maths, further maths and physics, back to back, which is cumbersome for a normal person. But I'm also doing a quant bootcamp covering ten university degrees' worth of content, prepping for the IMC and the physics competitions, STEP, Putnam — so this is nothing. This volatility is absolutely nothing. Don't make decisions predicated on other people's convictions, asserted from their experiences. And keep in mind the Korean Presidential Scholarship, the Korean scholarship, student loans, and the stipends.

And even with me, there is someone out there living a billion times my volatility and risk tolerance. Think Ken Griffin. You win and lose a billion or two a day. He recruits, reads, researches, trades — all of it. The reason this is manageable for me is that I know, in time, I'll be able to make the entire student loan times ten in a day, so it's a small cost to bear. When your life operates at scales most people can't fathom, that negates risk — and suddenly a student loan from the Korean government isn't even cumbersome. Working as a barista or in a pub in central London pays the rent, and the residue channels elsewhere.

The feeling of having one month left, no offers, not knowing how to solve the problems, not knowing how to prepare for the interview — why should a physics exam feel like essay writing, as if it's English literature? I don't hate this feeling of sheer pain and stress. But the growth acceleration being negative — that I hate. Why are we doing this? Why can't I just go back to Canada, fool around in Manitoba, and study mathematics with a job at some local firm? Because everybody in the middle eventually gets crushed, and unless life gets painful enough, nothing galvanises escape from the middle. It's far better for your life to be at stake than comfortable and mediocre — comfort is a drug that slowly kills dreams. Having a lot on the line is a blessing; it galvanises you to get things done.

People will have no idea what it feels like to genuinely feel close to dying from work, because the pressure is unfathomable and so is the volume: read three hundred quant books, five thousand hours of backtesting, the entire A-levels in six days. What if this is the final test God puts you through before God gives you everything you dreamt of and more? Move on. Live the now. Win the now. God is testing the now. It's supposed to be hard — nobody does this. There are maybe ten people a year in a country who get into Cambridge like this; you are a living legend for attempting it alone. Let God work.