‘I expect to fail,’ Laura Brown told me while putting down her cup of coffee. We were sitting at the Grand Café in Oxford, the oldest coffee house in the UK, and I was there to discuss Laura’s career plans. A second-year student of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), Laura had recently read a newspaper article discussing the chances of a PPE student being elected to Parliament. Intrigued, she traced the original source, finding work by my organisation 80,000 Hours, and studied the calculations carefully. The research persuaded her to pursue a career in politics. ‘I’m most likely going
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