Oh, the Pain of Rejection

It’s rejection season. Common casting, Crimson column, performance group and Harvard fellowship rejections all went out on Monday. I am one of the many to weather a major disappointment: I was not chosen as a Crimson columnist for the fall semester.

The saving grace is that there are many other wonderfully talented students currently in the exact same boat. They too all really wanted their own personal forums in The Harvard Crimson and are now stuck voicing their opinions to bored roommates and family members. Even more comforting is the thought of the hundreds of students across campus wallowing in bitter Rejection Land. They too have seen their short term plans take a nosedive, felt their pride take a kick in the stomach.

It’s funny how rejection works. Application and tryout-based opportunities seem extremely pivotal to your life only when you find out that you can’t have them. There are lots of Harvard students who have been completely happy without a Marshall Scholarship, and who will continue to be so. There are even more students who have never played a lead role in a production, never will, and will still lead successful lives. And yet that rationality is just not there when you receive the rejection letter.

In my case, it suddenly doesn’t matter to me that I’ve survived 20 column-less years in perfect contentment. It doesn’t matter that the time I’ll save not writing columns will probably be quite helpful with my heavy course load. Never mind that I enjoy my current position as Goddess of the Editor’s Notebook, and apparently will continue to do so. I’m sure that in 10 years I won’t remember The Crimson, let alone this little blip in my writing career. But right now this failure seems to be the major catastrophe of my existence on earth. As far as I’m concerned, my life is in shambles.

This scenario of partial failure is typical at Harvard because of the high quality applicant pool. Everyone is over-qualified for all positions, so good people get turned down. I can rest assured that when the column editors said that "deliberations were exceptionally difficult,” they weren’t lying. Picking superior Harvard students is extremely difficult, since clear standouts usually don’t exist.

This past summer I worked on a Harvard Student Agencies book project and was partially in charge of hiring four writer-researchers out of a pool of 45. After reading through all the applications, we cut 30 and interviewed the most promising 15. From there, we whittled down to eight highly qualified applicants, all of whom could have easily done an amazing job on the book.

The discussion of the final eight largely surrounded writing styles—which four writers would fit together the best, a distinction that has much more to do with luck than with ability. In the end, our final cut of the last four highly qualified applicants had nothing to do with talent (because they were all talented), and everything to do with writing styles. Surface characteristics suddenly mattered a lot. I should add that we depended heavily on gut instincts, since predicting future writing ability based on a few paragraphs and a 15-minute chat isn’t an exact science. These gut instincts changed right up to the last second. Still, there was always the safety of knowing that whoever we hired would be good.

In this way, Harvard becomes the reverse of a meritocracy, because when everyone’s competent, superficial details become the deciding factors. First-years and sophomores, for example, regardless of how talented, are always at a huge disadvantage to the upperclass students who are “running out of time,” and therefore more “deserving” of a position. Friendships carry more weight with hirers, as do small meaningless details, such as e-mail grammar. Ability is no longer the determining characteristic where everyone’s able. The Rhodes Scholar applicants who didn’t receive Harvard’s support on Monday, and the writers who applied for columns and were rejected, and the singers who were refused membership to prestigious groups, and anyone else who has ever been rejected from anything at Harvard, all heard this message loud and clear. It’s hard to win at a genius school where everyone is not only competent, but exceptional.

At least competent people won. (My mother brought up this point by reminding me that at least I’m not Al Gore.) Too much competency will always be better than not enough.

And there are always opportunities outside of Harvard.