By Delaney Yocom

Sarah is in the fourth grade. She comes home from school and eagerly shoves a perfect report card into her mother’s hands. Sarah is rewarded with a new Monster High doll for all of her hard work.

Katie just finished her last day of middle school with straight A’s. Katie likes to read, so her mom takes her to the bookstore and lets her pick out any book she wants, even if it’s a hardcover. 

Zoey has a 4.2 GPA. She’s going to graduate high school Summa cum laude. Zoey and her mom celebrate by going out to eat for dinner.

I am Sarah, Katie, and Zoey. I was rewarded for every stunning report card, every straight A, and every high mark I earned. My interpretation of academia is defined by a transactional relationship between achievement and reward. To my young mind, it didn’t feel like a ‘transaction,’ but rather a motivation to do well. If I succeeded in school, my mom would treat me to something special, a “thank you” for being a good student and an easy daughter. This is not to say that my mother was wrong to do this; I believe that her system positively influenced how I approach academic responsibility today, while also giving me that sweet feeling of not being grounded for bad grades.

What happens, then, when I inevitably fail at exceeding at some point in my academic career? That never happened in a substantial way until college, when I was suddenly surrounded by people who were just like me, who had similar—if not the same—relationships to school as I do. What happens when I get rejected from an opportunity for the first time in my life because I wasn’t good enough? 

Well, I spiral… of course. I failed; I disappointed myself, and when I call my mom to tell her about my failure, she will be disappointed in me too (though, in reality, she’ll just tell me something else will come along and ask how I’m doing on groceries). 

Still, I overthink. I imagine life after graduation and wonder if I won’t be able to find a job because my resume doesn’t have that one thing that I tried and failed at. The big corporate office recruiter will take one look at it, see that it doesn’t include a specific student-run club related to my major, stamp it with a cartoonishly large “REJECTED,” and dictate my value in less than five seconds. I can already hear the equally cartoonish echo of the stamp slamming down on the desk.

All this to say that I tried out for a student organization on campus and didn’t make the cut. The admin sent me an email highlighting all of my faults as a student and a person and told me not to bother leaving the house ever again because I’m such a loser.

Of course, in reality, what they actually said was, “We are unable to offer you a position at this time,” and that this decision “is not a reflection” of my worth or potential. 

This did not make me feel better.

In the midst of my spiral, I began questioning the culture of rejection and failure. Many students, myself included fear failure and lose themselves at rejection. Higher education, much like the workforce in our future, is competitive. To stand out, you have to be an overachiever. Good grades, internships (paid or unpaid一PLEASE PAY ME!), research, study abroad… anything that makes you more qualified and experienced than the person next to you. 

This experience of competition and failure is not just limited to college student organizations. Academics in all fields face resistance and denial of their work, which only perpetuates this culture of fear in scholarship. Fear is not so bad that risks should not be taken for the sake of progress, but perhaps it’s the aftermath of rejection that sparks my curiosity. Why is it shameful to fail? Why am I so embarrassed to admit that I was rejected from something I tried out for? At least I tried, right?

In academic manuscript publication (and rejection), it is suggested that this shame, or fear of being embarrassed, really stems from the social identity theory that to feel that sense of belonging in one’s social circle, one must fit the “in-group prototype” (Day, 2011). For scholars looking to publish their manuscripts, that prototype includes having peer-reviewed published work. To have your work rejected is one thing, but to have your work peer-rejected “packs a double-punch,” as Day describes.

Now, while I did not have a manuscript peer-reviewed and subsequently rejected, I was reviewed by my peers for a position in this student-run club. I did experience that feeling of being ‘out’ because I knew upon rejection that I would probably run into those people on campus. I wasn’t friends with any of them, but they knew my name and might remember their thought process of rejecting me. Every time they see me from now on, they might be reminded of what part of my application made them cringe and shake their head. 

They don’t think about me nearly as much as I think about them and their decision, which is equally embarrassing as the actual rejection.

Not to worry, though! Like most things in life, this experience is not unique. In a 2019 article for the Johns Hopkins University News-Letter, Keidai Lee wrote about club rejections, sharing the all too relatable feeling of inadequacy in academic spaces:

“Great, I got into Hopkins, and all I have to show for it is… Hopkins.”

Lee also shared how he navigated failure in this situation, which included attending workshops to improve his resume skills. The active effort of adapting to setbacks is something that I will personally try to adopt because overthinking my flaws isn’t going to work anymore. 

Others have coped with rejection with sarcasm, creating separate CVs that highlight all of their professional failures. Johannes Haushofer’s CV of Failures is well-known. However, the original idea was introduced in a 2010 article by Melanie Stefan. Her perspective was that if academics began sharing their lists of failed projects and attempts, it might “inspire” others to bounce back after rejection. Perhaps creating a detailed list of every let-down in one’s academic or professional career might help to compartmentalize them from one’s successes. What I mean is that if I can learn to separate my failures from my achievements, maybe my lifetime of academia wouldn’t feel so muddied after another rejection. 

While searching for solace during my post-rejection wallowing, I came across the practice of seeking out rejection to increase resilience. The idea is that if you face enough rejection, it won’t hurt as much in the future. In an article for NPR, Alix Spiegel wrote about one man who sought to get rejected by one person every day, to help him heal from his relationship ending. 

“Without knowing it, Jason had used a standard tool of psychotherapy called exposure therapy. You force yourself to be exposed to exactly the thing you fear, and eventually, you recognize that the thing you fear isn’t hurting you. You become desensitized” (Spiegel, 2013).

Relationship rejection is different from academic rejection, probably because it’s a lot more personal than your work itself being denied, but the ways we choose to cope with either could translate to any failure. I could apply to a writing contest every day and grow a thicker skin from all the rejection emails I’d receive. That’s a lot of work, but it’s an interesting idea. Who knows? If I applied to 365 contests in one year, maybe I’d get a single win and make my mother proud (she already is). 

So, this is for anyone who’s just been rejected. Whether someone told you that you’re not their type, or a proposal of yours got rejected for someone else’s, or a club on a college campus told you they had a lot of talented applicants this year:

Everyone else reading this has been rejected too. They have also failed at some point in their life. It’s normal, it’s expected. Life is hard, challenging, and competitive. There will be times that you feel like the biggest, most useless, underachieving loser that has ever existed. I might be projecting, but if you have felt like that, or maybe a watered-down version of that, you get my point. 

Getting rejected is pretty easy; it’s navigating the emotions and protecting your self-esteem that’s complicated. We all want to belong, and sometimes that means we must achieve a certain level of status—personal, academic, or otherwise—to feel “in,” as I recall from Day’s article. When we do not achieve, and no longer feel “in,” there are ways to cope and prepare ourselves for future failures. We can revise or improve our work, as Lee did. We can create resumes of our own rejections, like those of Haushofer or Stefan. We can even wake up every day with the goal of being rejected, as Spiegel wrote about.

The point is to become familiar with failure. I got used to achievement and success. I was even rewarded every time I brought home a good grade. After a while, I just started expecting greatness from myself. It wasn’t a pressure to do well, but an innate understanding, as natural as knowing the sun would rise in the morning. The day the sun stopped rising so easily was when I had to reframe how I thought about my own talents and skills. I had to work for the achievements I have now and heal from the newfound failures. 

Even though my failures wounded me (my ego, more than anything), my successes are now a lot more rewarding. My fourth-grade self would probably laugh if I told her success feels better as a product of hard work and resilience than getting a Monster High doll. She’ll learn soon enough.