"Stop hedging your bets"

"Stop hedging your bets." I have not been able to shake these words from my upperclassman mentor. Sitting in a J.P. Licks, he stands up and yells at me: "Think about the best of the best. The outliers. The Terence Taos and Sam Altmans. Do you think they prioritized finding backup plans for if plan A went wrong? No, they went all-in on something. Go all-in."

Obviously, it is not on my agenda to be an outlier; it feels counterproductive, incompetent without proper framing (have not dabbled in Malcom Gladwell yet so likely more ignorant than I should be to further comment), to divert attention from the current battles needed to be fought to the image of a desired result of war. It was not his reasoning but disheartened forecasting tone that got to me, like "you're hypocritical/untrue if you continue reasoning like this; imbalanced, your breadth and depth are."

The following came to mind in response: recruiting for quantitative trading summer roles was only on my agenda because my best friend from high school said I could with one month of prep, and the lucrative rabbit hole sounded decent, not because I wanted to. I thought, keeping this door open is financially smart, an option with favorable asymmetric risk (trading, specifically; not generalizable to all careers in finance). To that end, though, I was supposed to trade crypto derivatives at a shop this summer. But something felt off enough such that I took a step back to think not only about my passions and their alignment but also about the broader ethical implications of my actions with respect to this future and decided to renege on the internship.

I feel three years behind but am all the more motivated to dedicate myself to math research. Academia seems like the right space to find or create that which will enable.

One might be ignorant and underqualified, but when is anyone wise and qualified while seeking the "new"? This is a reminder to not be in the subset of ~20% of Harvard graduates who go into consulting every year, more out of fear of failure than any other reason or pseudo reason (After Harvard, Hannah J. Martinez, Harvard Crimson, 2023).

Stop hedging your bets.