Why this page exists
This is a companion to Dealing with randomness.
Most personal websites are highlight reels. This one mostly is too. This page is a small correction.
It lists a few things that didn’t work out — closed loops from ~6–8+ years ago — to document that trajectories are noisy and outcomes are not monotonic.
This is mainly for:
- juniors who might be over-indexing on a single exam / competition / workplace / outcome
- people trying to infer ability from one data point
Treat these as counterexamples.
Why only older failures?
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Signal vs noise: Recent failures are still entangled with current ability. Older ones read more clearly as variance.
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Adverse selection: Making recent misses highly visible can be net-negative in the short term.
This is a retrospective slice, not a real-time log.
Selected entries
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2017 — JEE Mains (~50k rank)
Didn’t prepare seriously.
Outcome: went to NUS instead
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2019 — Jane Street Dev Internship (No Return Offer)
Didn’t convert.
Outcome: moved on DRW → Citadel → current role
Closing note
None of these felt small at the time.
They mattered, just not as much as they felt.