When Success Encounters Failure

Last week, admissions letters separated prospective Harvard students into two neat piles: accepted and rejected (ignoring the fuzzy purgatory of the waitlist). For those who were accepted, Harvard’s response was further proof of their invincibility. But at a school teeming with unstoppable Type As, someone inevitably ends up with the short end of the stick. For many, the cycle of rejection begins with the Freshman Arts Program or freshman seminars. Then creative writing classes, art classes and a cappella groups take their toll. By senior year, the ruthless competition to gain a foothold in the dismal job market dispels myths that a Harvard acceptance is a ticket to acceptance. And this reality check leads some Harvard students to turn against the only obstacles within reach: each other.

When asked if he has encountered rejection, Hunter A. Maats ’04, a biochemical sciences concentrator in Mather House, responds, “What haven’t I been rejected from?” He then lightheartedly enumerates his failures at Harvard, among them an unsuccessful bid for the Undergraduate Council presidency, a failed Class Marshal election, a turned down Rockefeller grant application, zero job offers and rejection from numerous parties and women. Is that all? Not even close. The Din and Tonics denied him a spot five times, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals rejected him four times and last year the judges of the annual Miss Harvard pageant refused Maats the sparkling crown and velvet sash—for the second year in a row. “I have no qualms about being publicly humiliated,” he says. “I think that’s the nice thing about rejection. It’s a growing experience.” In fact, the combination of Maats’ very public rejections and his sense of humor have given him a rascally reputation, and he doesn’t seem to mind.

But his ease with rejection is somewhat of an anomaly. While rejection has had little effect on Maats’ self-esteem, for students like Peter—a senior chemistry concentrator who spoke with FM on the condition that his real name not be revealed—rejection has become a constant source of embarrassment and shame. Sitting in a booth at the Hong Kong Restaurant—his raised bowl of egg drop soup steaming up his glasses—he bitterly recounts his many failures: graduate school admissions, fellowships and consulting jobs.

In high school, Peter—class valedictorian, an Eagle Scout and a National Merit Scholar—always rose to the top. Now, without any plans for next year, his steady string of rejections has taken a visible toll. He slouches in the booth. He avoids eye contact. His speech is self-effacing and marked with anger directed toward his more successful peers. “Around all these ambitious people, you need to have a job or you’re considered worthless,” he says as he places his soup firmly back on the table. “I’ve gone to a great school but I haven’t benefited at all.” Without skipping a beat, he sums up his feelings about rejection at Harvard. “It’s hard to feel extraordinary when you’re surrounded by extraordinary people,” he says. “Especially people who always get the things you want.”

According to Professor of Psychology Ellen J. Langer, Peter’s trouble integrating failure into his life is normal. “If a history of success leads one mindlessly to expect success then it would not be surprising for that person to have difficulty coping with failure,” she writes in an e-mail message. “A more mindful approach would include a recognition that there will be many opportunities in the course of one’s life (at Harvard and elsewhere) to ‘prove’ oneself; to have learning and not just performance goals for oneself; to recognize that the ‘failure’ might be very informative and set the stage for a greater future success.”

Banking on Success

The corporate mating season begins in October. Nervous seniors perfect their resumes and sport their finest suits, hoping to attract job offers from sought-after firms: Goldman Sachs, Bain, McKinsey and the like. A select few applicants will secure a working relationship, but the majority will receive an e-mail beginning with the season’s most dreaded phrase: “We regret to inform you...” What factors land someone a position? According to Colleen M. Horan ’05, it takes brains, talent and a lot of “bullshitting.”

Horan, an economics concentrator in Leverett House, was accustomed to success before arriving on campus. She attended a competitive private school just outside of Boston where she achieved a near-perfect score on her SAT and maintained stellar grades, all the while balancing responsibilities as editor of the yearbook and captain of the ski team, leading admissions tours and running a community service organization. For Horan, success was found in a simple formula. As she explains, “I went to school. I did x, y and z. Then I repeated.”

When it came time to turn in her first college paper for English 151, Horan was confident. After all, she had attended every lecture, she had completed all the reading and she had even written multiple drafts of the essay three days in advance of the due date. When her TF returned the paper, Horan began questioning her old formula. For the first time in her life, x, y and z had only earned her a B.

For most of our interview, Horan is poised. Her eye contact is dead-on, her sentences follow a measured rhythm and her hands are crossed in her lap—she acts like she is at a job interview rather than sitting on an old futon. It is not until she discusses her first rejection at Harvard—in this case, not achieving her desired grade—that she stumbles over her words. “It was so frustrating,” she says. “In high school it was never a question of understanding the material or knowing what needed to be done. It was a question of putting in the time.”

The grade—and the course at large—left Horan feeling like a “complete moron,” reflecting what Langer feels is a shortsighted and common appraisal of the situation. “If we asked students here how often they expect to be successful, I doubt anyone would answer, ‘100% of the time,’” Langer writes. “More likely, I think, would be a response like ‘90% of the time.’ Yet rarely do people respond to their first disappointing grade thinking that it is just part of their ‘expected’ 10% miss.” The true failure, she contends, is not taking a longer-term view of personal performance.

Horan’s unpleasant experience in English class helped narrow her interests, eventually leading her to the economics concentration. Last December she decided to apply for summer internships through spring recruiting. Landing a spot is seen as a direct ticket to a permanent job and the envy of less fortunate applicants. With the January 15 deadline approaching, Horan spent Christmas break reading guides to recruiting and revising her application. By the end of vacation, she had mastered the lingo of self-promotion, citing her “strong quantitative abilities” and “passion for numbers” in the all-important cover letter. Horan submitted her application—which highlighted her role as Vice President of Harvard’s Women in Business organization and organizer of Junior Parents weekend—to 30 companies. Only six offered her a first round interview.

“I knew it would be competitive, but I had no idea just how competitive it was,” she says. “Everyone says ‘If you want the job just go for it. You go to Harvard.’ The problem is that you’re competing against a lot of Harvard people.”

Rather than focusing on her 24 rejections, Horan prepared for her six interviews. She stayed au courant by reading The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal and participated in a mock interview at the Office of Career Services. What she couldn’t prepare for were the awkward interactions with her uber-competitive peers.

In the waiting room on the day of her first interview, Horan huddled around a small table along with a bevy of generic applicants—each wearing a black suit, holding a black portfolio and feigning a toothy smile. She remembers that the other applicants were discussing that day’s federal funds rate. “There was a certain sense of camaraderie, but in a very Harvard way,” she says. “It was a game of ‘I’ll tell you the rate, but only if I make you feel like I know a lot more than you.’”

After completing her six first-round interviews, only Morgan Stanley invited her to a second round interview. At that interview, Horan competed against 19 other Harvard students for three positions at the firm. One of her interviewers was an “obnoxious” graduate of Harvard College who pressed her on her course selection. One week later, she received an e-mail announcing her final rejection of recruiting season. She immediately removed it from her inbox.

At the end of our interview, Horan confesses the obvious: rejection hasn’t been easy. “I know this sounds cocky,” she says, “but whenever I had poured myself into something before I had good results. I thought I had done my best and that made failing even harder.” Although her fall from grace was bothersome, it hasn’t been enough to curb Horan’s plans. I ask her if she will participate in recruiting next fall and she responds à la Arnold: “I’ll be back.”

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

Peter identifies with Horan: after applying to 20 companies during fall recruiting, he didn’t receive a single job offer. What makes Peter’s situation different (and arguably worse) is that he transferred to Harvard during his junior year from another Ivy League school to stave off future rejection. Now, with the fear of having to move back to Michigan to live with his family, he regrets the transfer. “I thought coming here would give me additional opportunities,” he says, “but ironically I feel like I have less opportunity because I look less desirable relative to the other students.”

Whereas Horan accepts that she isn’t good at “networking” and “self-promotion”—skills essential to landing a job—Peter more pointedly blames the “petty” and “competitive” student body whose talents make him less marketable. He feels that many of his supposed friends have buttressed their self-esteem through his failure, relishing schadenfreude (SHAHD-n-froy-duh\, noun: a malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others). As Peter recounts his senior year—or, as he puts it, “the year of rejection”—it becomes evident that each of his failures has been informed by the success of his peers.

During fall recruiting, Peter claims to have dealt with one particularly unsupportive friend who made the entire process more stressful. “He told me, ‘You better not interview in my group because I will totally make you look bad,’” Peter remembers. “He thought that by discrediting me he would be less likely to be rejected.” Peter recalls that friend “slyly” bring up recruiting to brag about his own success in an effort at self-aggrandizement.

Zach, the student Peter deems “insensitive” and arrogant,” was hesitant to speak with FM. “I got lucky in the recruiting process and was hoping my friends would be happy for me,” he says. “Some of them weren’t, and that might simply be due to resentment.” He also reports that far from discouraging Peter, he actually helped Peter with his resumes and cover letters—acts of kindness he says were overlooked and underappreciated.

Is Peter’s cynical take on his friend misguided? Perhaps. The stiff competition at Harvard amplifies the stress associated with the zero-sum competitions students face every day. This stress can cloud the judgments students make, particularly when distinguishing between their feelings of jealousy, anger and disappointment. Whether it be admission to a seminar, a spot in an a cappella group, or a prestigious fellowship, every student’s success comes at the expense of another.

Jennifer, a senior in Eliot House, admits that her successful application to a New York City internship was made sweeter by her friend’s rejection. The friend—who FM was unable to contact—agreed to look over Jennifer’s application. The friend withheld the fact that she too was applying for the same internship, leading Jennifer to believe that her application was used as a springboard for ideas. “She is one of my best friends,” Jennifer says with a slight smirk. “I was happy she didn’t get it.”

Although Jennifer’s satisfaction stems from a sense of justice, it is foolish to deny that ego influences our feelings about the success of close friends.

My Service Don’t Cost a Thing

Michael S. Goonan ’05, a chemistry concentrator in Pforzheimer House, doubts that schadenfreude is as pervasive as Peter wants us to believe. Over the past five semesters, Goonan has regularly notified students that they have not earned a spot in The Opportunes—a task he dreads. Each fall, 90-110 students apply for roughly four openings in the group. During the first three nights of auditions, lists of students advancing to the next round are posted on the Internet, minimizing personal contact and making the process “pretty painless” for Goonan. But once the field has been significantly narrowed, phone calls must be made and hopes have to be shattered. “I mostly try to let them down easy,” he says. “Once they make it to the final auditions they’re obviously good, but they just don’t go with our group sound.”

Goonan touches on an important point: rejection is not strictly based on merit. It is also based on fit. For Peter and others, years of accumulated success have led them to mindlessly judge themselves based on measures respected within the academy—admissions, job offers and grades. But rejection at Harvard often extends beyond these matters and into areas where assessing merit is more difficult.

Particularly damaging are rejections that cannot be attributed to lack of self-promotion or connections; in the world of Visual and Environmental Studies and Creative Writing classes, most of which are highly selective, rejected students wonder if their talent has been turned away—or if they don’t have any.

Recently, the English Department changed its policy about Creative Writing classes. The introductory meeting used to be held in the always-overflowing Emerson 105, where would-be F. Scott Fitzgeralds stared each other down en masse, trembling in anticipation of the lists that would be posted in a few days on the glass walls of the English Department. Now applicants are spared at least that: guidelines for applying are found on the Internet.

According to Patricia Powell, former Director of Creative Writing, more than 400 applications are received each semester for roughly 156 spots divided among 12 classes. The day of the announcement, it doesn’t take long to read whether another student has been denied a place. Rejectees scan the lists two or three times, hoping they might have missed their name by accident.

Joseph P. Flood ’04, an English concentrator in Mather House and a Crimson editor, recognizes that the openness of the process, even amended, makes rejection more difficult. “If you don’t get into [a creative writing class], you just hope your friend doesn’t either,” he says. “If you know somebody on that list it may hit home a little harder.” Even do-gooders are subject to the sting of rejection. This past February, nearly 50 students applied to spend Spring Break rolling up their shirtsleeves rather than pulling out their bikinis. Instead of jetting off to exotic locales, applicants to the Alternative Spring Break (ASB) service trips hoped to spend their break performing meaningful community service. Although the mission statement of PBHA—the umbrella organization supervising ASB—includes a clause on promoting “social awareness and community involvement at Harvard and beyond,” multiple students were rejected from the program. The ASB trip to New York City—which involved students preparing and delivering meals for individuals living with HIV/AIDS—turned away over 25 students who ranked it as their top choice. Another 15 students who ranked the trip were also denied a spot.

One of these students was Carrie, a junior in Winthrop House. Carrie felt the application—which asked vague questions such as “Why do you want to participate on an ASB trip?” and “Do you have experience with tools?”—was “fairly random.” The 10-minute interviews trip leaders conducted with applicants, moreover, left Carrie asking her own questions. “How do you determine from an application who is better at doing community service,” she writes in an e-mail, “or who would work better in a particular group after talking with someone for such a short period of time?”

The most striking aspect of the situation may be that Carrie wasn’t surprised that an application was required. Applications have become part of Harvard protocol, like registering for classes and entering the housing lottery. Carrie worries that applications might limit students’ desire to pursue volunteerism. “So many [organizations at Harvard] require some sort of application, which can be frustrating, especially when you’re just trying to do community service.”

Peter—who attempted to volunteer in a science program during his junior year—suggests that rejection from volunteer projects is more potent than academic or professional rejection. As he explains, “It’s unnerving when you say you will work for nothing and they still reject you.”

Christine M. Murray ’04, coordinator of the New York service trip, acknowledges that the application process is imperfect. Even so, she contends that the brief interview serves as a useful, albeit incomplete, indicator. “It does say something about how committed, enthusiastic and flexible [an applicant] is,” she says. “I hope that the limited number of spots motivates others to propose and lead ASB trips of their own.”

What Is To Be Done?

Last week the Office of Admissions mailed out 17,721 letters of rejection to high school seniors across the country. For the approximately 1,600 who plan to enroll, their primary introduction to Harvard has been based on undergoing assessment and surviving rejection. In five months, each of these bright-eyed first-years will arrive on campus ready to continue their ascent to the top of the intellectual and social food chain.

But during their first weeks—nay, during their four years—there will be ample opportunity for the invincible to experience rejection, many for the first time. Will this rejection become a springboard for success? Or will ego depletion leave these bright-eyed first-years wishing they had gone to State U?

For the majority of students FM spoke with, rejection has been useful in steering them down other productive avenues. Horan is now considering smaller firms in addition to the larger ones Harvard students gravitate toward. Carrie’s rejection from ASB allowed her to participate in another service trip. And Jennifer—who was rejected from the Undergraduate Council and The Crimson Key Society—now runs a student group concerned with diversity. “All that rejection helped streamline my attitudes and goals,” she says.

As for Maats, his ability to take himself less seriously has limited the negative impact of rejection. “If I’d won Miss Harvard, I’m not sure I could have dealt with the tremendous responsibilities of that position,” he says of the mock beauty pageant. “She’s always an ambassador.” Where his voice is concerned, Hunter respects the notion of different strokes for different folks. “There’s no such thing as a bad singer, just bad for that genre,” he says of his five rejections from the Din and Tonics. “Just because my voice is scratchy and out of tune doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just means I’m singing for the wrong audience.”

And what of Peter, the jaded transfer student? Facing rejection at every corner, he has coped by applying for as many jobs as possible. Two weeks ago, on the night of our interview, he was waiting to hear if he had received a job as a researcher-writer for Let’s Go. He doubted he would get the call that his friends had been receiving all week. In response to the suggestion that he might be an alternate, he doesn’t mince words. “Being an alternate is de facto rejection.” The next morning, he received an e-mail from Let’s Go. As he predicted, he had been rejected.

Peter does not plan on telling his friends.