I wrote about getting rejected from jobs at GiveWell and Open Phil in this post.
Other rejections that shaped my career:
Soon before graduating, I was rejected from Bridgewater, my dream job at that point, after full-day interview at their office. I got a bit of feedback here, along the lines of “you had trouble connecting the ground and the clouds” (however confusing that sounds, it’s how confused I felt at the time).
I was rejected by The Onion for a writing position, and by the New York Times when I submitted a review to their newsletter for student writers. I wrote in detail about bothrejections, including the content I submitted. (I still kind of like the sample Onion articles I wrote, but most of the headlines are total garbage.)
More relevantly, I was rejected by Vox when they hired their first set of Future Perfect writers. I figured it was because I had no professional experience, but then they hired Kelsey Piper, who had no professional experience and turned out to be incredible. A memorable case of “huh, I did not realize how outclassed I was here”.
When I was in college, I tried many times to get work published in non-student publications and succeeded only twice (for something like a 5% hit rate). The two articles I pitched successfully took dozens of hours in total (one of them involved a multi-day trip) and earned me $100 in total, so maybe the other rejections were a blessing?
Despite many applications, I never secured a “real” summer internship in college — some combination of “bad interviewer” and “mediocre GPA”, I think. Particularly painful was a rejection from Ideas42, a behavioral-science think tank, since I’d been reading several shelves’ worth of relevant books in the year leading up to that. (At the time, I conflated “knowing a lot of things” with “good at doing work”.)
I was also rejected by McKinsey, BCG, and various other “normal” consulting firms that seemed to be hiring hundreds of my fellow students.
Looking back through my journal, I’m reminded that part of this might have been the fact that I sent out ten or so resumes with the wrong link — instead of my homepage, I was sending recruiters to a random, somewhat ominous image hosted on my blog. Shudder.
I wrote about getting rejected from jobs at GiveWell and Open Phil in this post.
Other rejections that shaped my career:
Soon before graduating, I was rejected from Bridgewater, my dream job at that point, after full-day interview at their office. I got a bit of feedback here, along the lines of “you had trouble connecting the ground and the clouds” (however confusing that sounds, it’s how confused I felt at the time).
I was rejected by The Onion for a writing position, and by the New York Times when I submitted a review to their newsletter for student writers. I wrote in detail about both rejections, including the content I submitted. (I still kind of like the sample Onion articles I wrote, but most of the headlines are total garbage.)
More relevantly, I was rejected by Vox when they hired their first set of Future Perfect writers. I figured it was because I had no professional experience, but then they hired Kelsey Piper, who had no professional experience and turned out to be incredible. A memorable case of “huh, I did not realize how outclassed I was here”.
When I was in college, I tried many times to get work published in non-student publications and succeeded only twice (for something like a 5% hit rate). The two articles I pitched successfully took dozens of hours in total (one of them involved a multi-day trip) and earned me $100 in total, so maybe the other rejections were a blessing?
Despite many applications, I never secured a “real” summer internship in college — some combination of “bad interviewer” and “mediocre GPA”, I think. Particularly painful was a rejection from Ideas42, a behavioral-science think tank, since I’d been reading several shelves’ worth of relevant books in the year leading up to that. (At the time, I conflated “knowing a lot of things” with “good at doing work”.)
I was also rejected by McKinsey, BCG, and various other “normal” consulting firms that seemed to be hiring hundreds of my fellow students.
Looking back through my journal, I’m reminded that part of this might have been the fact that I sent out ten or so resumes with the wrong link — instead of my homepage, I was sending recruiters to a random, somewhat ominous image hosted on my blog. Shudder.