As I look back through my life, I can chart a rich and vibrant history of rejection.
When I was 6, I tried to join the Boy Scouts, but was refused admission because of that pesky religion clause. When I was 15, a girl told me she didn’t want to go out with me because she was “really just a free spirit.” When I was 18, I anticipated my almost-certain rejection from Stanford University and opted not to fill out its long application and instead just go to the state school that had already accepted me. I’m thankful for rejection – I don’t know where I’d be without it.
Such is not the case for soon-to-be-graduates at Harvard University – yeah, you know, the school that rejected you. According to the Boston Globe, Harvard’s Office of Career Services has begun offering a seminar on handling rejection for students who will soon be entering the bleeding and near-comatose workforce. Participants in the seminar are reassured that rejection and failure happen to everyone and are not the end of the world. Funny; I’ve been hearing those same things from my mother for about 20 years (along with pleas to drive carefully and reasons why any girl would want to go to prom with me).
How is it possible to make it through two or more decades’ worth of life and still be completely unprepared for rejection?
I’ll tell you a story: Between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, I applied for a lot of part-time jobs in the Salem area and got turned down or passed over for every single one of them. Fred Meyer did not trust me to go around the parking lot collecting unattended shopping carts, Roth’s felt I was unqualified to put groceries into a bag, and Hollywood Video didn’t want to let me in on the ground floor of its rapidly dying industry.
Finally, through the good graces of a friend’s father, I was able to “score” a job pressure-washing bird shit off of SUVs at a car dealership, which required me to get up at 7 a.m. every day, all summer, and go to work with three guys who made fun of me because I was going to go to college. So in a sense, even my seeming success was really just a larger failure in disguise. I learned a lot about rejection that summer, and it didn’t cost me a damn thing.
Getting rejected isn’t a measure of self worth; it’s simply a statistical certainty. As the Rolling Stones taught us, you can’t always get what you want, because in many cases multiple people want the same thing. I’m baffled as to how it could take some people so long to figure this out.
I understand there’s bound to be some serious anxiety involved when students are looking to land a job that can help them pay off $135,000 in student loans, but is the situation really so bleak that the best and brightest students our country has to offer have to be taught how to fail? I’m a journalism major, for God’s sake – I don’t even know if my industry is going to exist by the time I graduate, let alone if I’ll be able to find a job in what’s left of it. That’s because I know how to deal with rejection: Keep getting rejected until you don’t get rejected anymore, then quit trying.
What kind of school is Harvard running if its students nearing graduation still don’t know how to deal with rejection? Rejection and failure are what college is all about – that’s what bad grades, caps on class sizes and the opposite sex are for. If Harvard’s students haven’t figured out how to bounce back from a setback yet, either they’ve got a problem with learning or Harvard’s got a problem with providing a worthwhile college experience.
Ironic, somehow, that a school that accepted 7.1 percent of its applicants this year is offering rejection counseling to the people who actually got in. On the other hand, maybe simply getting turned down from the top school in the country is a good enough lesson on rejection.
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