During my senior year of high school, I applied to eight or nine different colleges — and got rejected from every single one. This was not at all what I had expected. I’m a National Merit Scholar and was in the top 5% of my graduating class of more than 700 students. I thought that even in the worst-case scenario, I would get into at least a few of them. I was wrong.
According to a UCLA survey of college freshmen, around 31.5% of students get rejected from their first-choice schools, so my experience was relatively standard. Initially, I took this rejection extremely hard. Mentally, I interpreted it as a signal that the rest of my life would be mediocre at best because I had failed in such a massive way early on. While I don’t know that I would recommend experiencing something like this, coming to terms with it led me to a few realizations that I think many people could benefit from hearing.
The first thing I learned is that rejection does not actually mean you failed.
At first, I believed all of my rejections had one simple meaning: I wasn’t good enough. But rejection has very little to do with inadequacy. Even setting aside the fact that my application could have been the last one the admissions committee read before lunch, colleges are looking for very specific qualities. Sometimes, you’re just unlucky. Perhaps the University of Michigan was already full of new English majors when they reviewed my application. Maybe not. There are countless reasons outcomes turn out the way they do, and none of them are worth tying your self-esteem to. The admissions process is full of thousands of moving parts and competing desires, and you shouldn’t get too invested in a system that is chaotic.
Once I got over that mental hurdle, I still had to deal with another issue: it felt like almost every door to my future had slammed shut. To put it simply, you decide where you go in life, not your college or anyone else.
There are opportunities that might have been easier to access if I hadn’t been rejected from Yale twice, which is honestly impressive if you think about it. But those opportunities still exist if I’m willing to work for them. Even if some paths are closed to me forever, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other paths that lead to the same, or possibly an even better, destination.
This leads to the final, and most important lesson I learned. Don’t let not getting into a specific college, internship or research program stop you from being present where you actually end up. If you spend all your time thinking about what could have been, you will prevent yourself from taking advantage of what is. Don’t sacrifice the life you are living for a hypothetical version of yourself.
If you’re unhappy, don’t dwell on the past and imagine how things could have gone differently. Look forward and ask how you can improve your life right now, with what you have and who you are. If I had spent this past semester only thinking about New Haven, I would have missed the incredible connections I’ve made here at UTD — including the job I now have at The Mercury, writing articles like this one. No rejection letter can stop you from living your fullest life. Only you can do that.
If you’re still feeling discouraged after all that, you can always do what I plan to do: apply there for graduate school and go through the whole process all over again. But this time, if you get rejected, you won’t let it define you.
