u/Plague_Doc7

Just speaking from an impassive perspective. I've been learning a lot about the British Empire and now I actually can't tell if it was actually a positive for Britain.

For one, the whole thing about creating settler colonies just looked like a massive waste? The government had to subsidise them hugely and expend enormous amounts of time, money, and resources to deliver ship people from like Scotland all the way to the other side of the world to a distant colony like Australia or New Zealand and also defend them with ships/forts. And when the settlers do come, they get an even worse deal than if the government had just traded with the natives. Native tribes are willing to pay handsomely for just a few muskets and get ripped off whereas in an anglicised settler colony Britain just earns a tiny bit of extra money from its mercantilist policies. Wouldn't a model similar to the Portuguese and the Congo king have been better economically? It really seems like building those colonies was a lot more expensive than just trading.

I guess one argument would be that it would increase the number of Britons in the world and more population would help in a war. But in that case, wouldn't the opportunity cost of losing the people exported to other colonies be the same as what they're gaining? The same person shipped off to Canada might've also bred within mainland Britain and increased the population regardless? At least in my view, the British isles having like 60 million people in 1914 would be much more useful than having 80 million Britons dispersed all across the world.

Another argument I could think of is that perhaps colonisation was done to prevent other rival powers from accessing certain resources and thus increasing their relative power. But to me that would just be rent seeking - if the returns are modest, one isn't actually shifting the power balance.

The British East India Company was infamous for being a massive financial burden. And with all the money spent on maintaining the colony and paying the army/civil service to maintain it, most of them just ended up....buying up real estate back home in England anyways. It was all circular.

Today I had lunch with a myriad of top university admits/their families who all had much better results than me and I'm feeling a bit inferior. These people had been prepping for top-tier university admissions since they were 13-14, many had literally been studying hard since they were 7. I think one person was in my country's national Chemistry Olympiad team and flew to Tsinghua University in China to get tutoring from like the 54th International Chemistry Olympiad winner every year. They were quite literally all Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford admits, not one lesser result. In a room of around 8 people and around 3 in my year group, I got into literally the worst university of them all.

While I maintained ok grades throughout high school, academics was never my first priority. I only locked in at the start of my final school year and got into UCL. It's a good university by all means, but I seem to have an internal sour feeling that if I had gained consciousness earlier and had worked towards getting into a top university since I was below 10 years of age I'd also end up at an Oxbridge HYPSM university. Or it could be cope. I don't really know. Are there any ways I can catch up to them in the future? Or am I kinda just destined to be stuck behind them for the rest of my life for being a loser in the university admissions game?

Today I had lunch with a myriad of top university admits/their families who all had much better results than me and I'm feeling a bit inferior. These people had been prepping for top-tier university admissions since they were 13-14, many had literally been studying hard since they were 7. I think one person was in my country's national Chemistry Olympiad team and flew to Tsinghua University in China to get tutoring from like the 54th International Chemistry Olympiad winner every year. They were quite literally all Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford admits, not one lesser result. In a room of around 8 people and around 3 in my year group, I got into literally the worst university of them all.

While I maintained ok grades throughout high school, academics was never my first priority. I only locked in at the start of my final school year and got into UCL. It's a good university by all means, but I seem to have an internal sour feeling that if I had gained consciousness earlier and had worked towards getting into a top university since I was below 10 years of age I'd also end up at an Oxbridge HYPSM university. Or it could be cope. I don't really know. Are there any ways I can catch up to them in the future? Or am I kinda just destined to be stuck behind them for the rest of my life for being a loser in the university admissions game?

So I will be studying history at UCL in September and I enjoy studying the subject, but I'm also thinking of doing some other options right now because the jobs directly linked with history are....a bit financially repulsive at the moment. I've heard that accounting is subject agnostic and that it doesn't matter what I studied as long as the uni and degree class is good. Can a history degree from UCL get me an accounting job at the Big 4? Will I be disadvantaged in any way compared to accounting grads?

I'll be going to UCL for history in September. Now, I do quite enjoy history as a subject but I also don't want to be unemployed after I graduate. So far I've been looking at potential jobs such as Big 4 accounting, London corporate law, consulting, and investment banking. Apparently these are all subject agnostic and will depend largely on my uni and degree classification. I've considered going down the academia route but it looks...financially repulsive and I don't want to be living hand to mouth. The pay for museum work looks...not great either. Even though I don't want to revolve my life around money, I want to at least earn enough to live comfortably and own my own house someday. My question is, are there any other decent-paying jobs in London that I can get as a history grad? What are the higher paying jobs that history grads most commonly are funneled into?

Personally when I got rejected I started shitting bricks because my mom would go hopping mad and whoop my a*s if I told her. But then I go online and see so many posts and videos of people with perfectly supportive parents still crying and distraught when rejected.

I'm a bit confused; rejection for the very top universities is just market expectation. Unless you're a prestigious essay comp winner, a musical prodigy, or placed in international Olympiad competitions the odds are always more against you than in favour of. If my mom had told me 'you have plenty of other great options' instead of giving a lecture about the xyz flaw in my application I would've been relieved, and yet there are Asian girls crying in their parents' arms after finding out they got rejected from Harvard. And then there are the long emotional wants of people here about how they were spiraling x and y and z despite the fact that their parents are willing to drop 200k to still send them to a top 50 university or state flagship. Huh?????? I don't understand, rejection makes your heart sink for 5 seconds but is it really that earth-shattering that you got rejected from Yale?