Happy to pitch in with a few stories of rejection!
2010: I applied for MIT and Princeton for undergraduate studies and wasnāt accepted to either. Not trying harder to get into those schools was a major regret of mine for about 5 years (I barely studied for the SATs, in part because I was the only person I knew who took themā¦ itās uncommon for Canadians to attend university in the states). I later ended up working on teams with people who had gone to fancy US schools, such that I no longer believe this had a clearly negative impact on my trajectory.
2018: Rejected for LTFF funding for the biosecurity conference that eventually became Catalyst. We re-applied in a subsequent round and were funded.
2018: I applied to be a Research Analyst at Open Phil in their big 2018 recruitment round, and got through two rounds of work tests before ultimately being rejected after an interview. The interview really didnāt go well; I felt like a total idiot, and didnāt get the job. This was maybe the most rough rejection; I felt like I wasted basically all of my non-work time for a month on work tests, at a time when I was feeling pretty bad about how effectively I was spending my time.
2018: rejected from the SynBioBeta conference fellowship run by Johns Hopkins, which at the time felt like it could have been an entry point into a biosecurity career transition. Definitely had some angst about whether it was even possible to make such a transition.
2019: I was rejected from a really cool engineering role at Culture Biosciences after a phone screen interview. I got so distressed after this (āIām not technical enough for a real hardware-y engineering job any more! augh!!ā) that I did some electronics projects that I really didnāt have time for, largely out of angst. They later reached out to me again when they had a role closer to my (more software-specialzied) skillset, and I completed a full round of interviews and received an offer, though I ultimately decided not to leave my job in order to have more time to focus on my part-time biosecurity projects.
These were all pretty painful for me at the timeā¦ and Iām realizing Iāve since come up with stories where the rejections were okay, or part of a fine trajectory. I guess one message here is ājust because you were rejected once doesnāt mean you will be if you apply againā?
Happy to pitch in with a few stories of rejection!
2010: I applied for MIT and Princeton for undergraduate studies and wasnāt accepted to either. Not trying harder to get into those schools was a major regret of mine for about 5 years (I barely studied for the SATs, in part because I was the only person I knew who took themā¦ itās uncommon for Canadians to attend university in the states). I later ended up working on teams with people who had gone to fancy US schools, such that I no longer believe this had a clearly negative impact on my trajectory.
2018: Rejected for LTFF funding for the biosecurity conference that eventually became Catalyst. We re-applied in a subsequent round and were funded.
2018: I applied to be a Research Analyst at Open Phil in their big 2018 recruitment round, and got through two rounds of work tests before ultimately being rejected after an interview. The interview really didnāt go well; I felt like a total idiot, and didnāt get the job. This was maybe the most rough rejection; I felt like I wasted basically all of my non-work time for a month on work tests, at a time when I was feeling pretty bad about how effectively I was spending my time.
2018: rejected from the SynBioBeta conference fellowship run by Johns Hopkins, which at the time felt like it could have been an entry point into a biosecurity career transition. Definitely had some angst about whether it was even possible to make such a transition.
2019: I was rejected from a really cool engineering role at Culture Biosciences after a phone screen interview. I got so distressed after this (āIām not technical enough for a real hardware-y engineering job any more! augh!!ā) that I did some electronics projects that I really didnāt have time for, largely out of angst. They later reached out to me again when they had a role closer to my (more software-specialzied) skillset, and I completed a full round of interviews and received an offer, though I ultimately decided not to leave my job in order to have more time to focus on my part-time biosecurity projects.
These were all pretty painful for me at the timeā¦ and Iām realizing Iāve since come up with stories where the rejections were okay, or part of a fine trajectory. I guess one message here is ājust because you were rejected once doesnāt mean you will be if you apply againā?