Thoughts on Rejection and Resilience

In this essay, I’d like to highlight the power that status, wealth, and nepotism play in competitive access to education and professional opportunities. The fact that legacy student admissions is still not illegal in the U.S. speaks volumes about the dominating mechanisms underlying admission to elite institutions and other coveted opportunities.

Perhaps more importantly, I want to demonstrate the adverse downstream effects of status and connection-based systems. I want to highlight that advocating and looking out for your own also means advocating to push away other potentially more qualified individuals. When highly qualified individuals face consistent rejection, they are incentivised to abandon ambitious aspirations and goals. With large segments of a population abandoning or being excluded from opportunities to contribute, infinite potential for progress and good gets lost.

In a way, it makes sense that, for example, PhD clinical psychologists are very content with gatekeeping the doctorate in clinical psychology degree. It keeps them in high demand and maintains their prestige. Meanwhile, there are scores of youth trying to enter the field to help better understand and treat mental illness. They are told that there aren’t enough psychologists to help train them, and are given other excuses about funding. In the end, the field lags, and the ill continue to suffer and take their own lives.

There seems to be a great deal of talk from elites about providing equal opportunities and access. The problem is that push comes to shove, while people in power are eager to feel good about lifting the lower class, they are not willing to do so at the expense of their own. In most cases, this means interviewing a wide range of people to show that they tried to give everyone a chance, and then going with the candidate with a family connection to whom they owe a favor.

Of course, now and then, there is an additional slot available for an outsider. The outsider is welcome, celebrated, and most importantly, helps the folks at the top clear their conscience and sit well with all of the other nepotism-based admissions or hires they were involved in. But all in all, the equation remains extremely skewed. If each person of high socioeconomic status has two to three kids they are looking out for, and quality academic and professional opportunities are trending downward, how many slots are actually available to outsiders?

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In the past few months, I have dealt with several forms of rejection. Most notably, my applications for grad school (which I have been actively working toward for eight years - since I started my GED) have been rejected. There is also a specific instance of rejection from earlier this week that is on my mind. Upon reflection, I wonder if rejection is sometimes more damaging than just not trying and staying in your comfort zone. Rejection is painful and demoralizing. It can make you feel dejected not only about the current rejection, but about your prospects overall.

I believe we are currently in a climate where access to high quality education and careers is especially competitive. We’re governed by a system that is also quite unfair, often favoring those with higher socioeconomic status over those who are most qualified. Hence, youth serious about breaking out of generational poverty and being accomplished are in for a hell of a ride (slight emphasis on “hell”).

So what should you do if you’re a young, hardworking person facing significant barriers and frequent rejection? Settle for an okay job or degree? Just keep pushing and chasing potentially unattainable goals?

When confronted with the unfair academic and career opportunity landscape, I sometimes ask myself (a question that I believe occurs to many aspiring youth facing significant obsticals to growth): why bother fighting to better your circumstances when you can simply fall back on options like unemployment, disability, or government subsidies and benefits - all the familiar “blessings” of those stuck in the lower class. (In some cases, this might be - why not stay in my mom’s basement…) Why bother with an uphill battle in a system that prioritizes status over merit?

Along these lines, the logic follows:

You were never meant to succeed anyway. No one will blame you. How could they? They too took the familiar and (more or less) convenient path paved for them by their predecessors...

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The fighter in me argues:

When it comes down to it, it’s just you. If you fight for it, you may succeed. If you don’t, you won’t. It’s up to you.

You should allow yourself to fail and fall time and again. Gain experience in the department of rejection and loss. At least you will have felt something real. You will have “faced the music” of your time and place, with humility and integrity. You may even somehow cut through the noise and get that professional breakthrough you were after.

Hopefully, you will remember the rejection and loss when the next generation comes along. You will reward merit and look after those who truly, undeniably earned their way. Those who live and breathe “by the sweat of thy brow you shall earn your bread…”

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But the skeptic in me wants to know:

Are you fooling yourself into a commitment to something whose only guaranteed fruits are low-wage work and false promises of eventual breakthroughs?

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The fighter in me usually wins. I guess time will tell…