A Toast to All the Rejects
The gathering held last June at a park in Irvine, California, was not a standard toga party. Instead of undergraduates downing beer from Solo cups, the attendees were graduate students drinking champagne from plastic jeweled goblets. Crowned with laurel wreaths, wearing togas and Roman-emperor costumes, they honored something that rarely gets commemorated: rejection. More than 100 rejections. Grants, journal articles, fellowships—you name it, they’d been denied it.
This party was one component of a larger project devised by the cognitive-science professor Barbara Sarnecka and two of her graduate students to change their experience of professional rejection. Like many people, these academics often felt bruised by rejections and hid them from others. The approach they came up with—to track, share, and celebrate their rejections—flips our instincts upside down. Instead of shying away from rejection, they’re asking us to run straight toward it—and to do so together.
If you’ve ever searched for a job, repeatedly launching your résumé into the internet’s maw, you might have faced the question: How do you motivate yourself to keep applying for things you’re probably not going to get? In some professions, even getting a job doesn’t put an end to the applications. In, grants to get, talks to deliver, awards to earn, and “you don’t get most of the things that you apply for,” Sarnecka, a professor at UC Irvine, told me.
