Test
What to do When You Screw Up
(This essay was originally published in the electronic Newsletter for the Honors Program for the
College of Letters and Science at UC Santa Barbara in Winter 2009.)
Many people mistake me for a successful person, so I try to keep a record of all my failures, and for reasons that will become clear later in this essay. True failure and rejection didn’t begin for me until late adolescence: when I applied for college, I got just one rejection letter, but it felt like getting kicked swiftly in the head. My first paper in college was in a Rhetoric class—this one felt like a ton of bricks, and so I saved that below-average paper, which still has that C- in the awful, stark handwriting of my TA. In my sophomore year, the girl I fell in love with dumped me by phone, and it was too bad that she hadn’t sent me a “Dear John” letter because I would have kept that, too. It would have been a short letter, as her conversation with me lasted about two minutes. But things weren’t always so bad in college: I did pretty well, so well that the
Deans nominated me for the Truman Scholarship, the Marshall Scholarship, and the Rhodes
Scholarship. I didn’t get any of them, though, but the rejections came on super nice letterhead that still hasn’t yellowed. Standardized tests weren’t typically a problem, but the first time I took the LSAT, I threw up right before the exam, and so I scored somewhere in the neighborhood of a gifted fifth grader. Oh, I took more exams and I went to graduate school, but once I was there, I had to re-write my dissertation, twice. When I applied for jobs as a young assistant professor, I had graduate degrees from Berkeley and Harvard, and so I wasn’t prepared, really, to be rejected thirty eight times. I only have 34 of these letters, because four of the Universities I’d applied to didn’t bother to tell me no until I called to check up on my application. It’s a sad thing when youhave to call to learn you’d been
(This essay was originally published in the electronic Newsletter for the Honors Program for the
College of Letters and Science at UC Santa Barbara in Winter 2009.)
Many people mistake me for a successful person, so I try to keep a record of all my failures, and for reasons that will become clear later in this essay. True failure and rejection didn’t begin for me until late adolescence: when I applied for college, I got just one rejection letter, but it felt like getting kicked swiftly in the head. My first paper in college was in a Rhetoric class—this one felt like a ton of bricks, and so I saved that below-average paper, which still has that C- in the awful, stark handwriting of my TA. In my sophomore year, the girl I fell in love with dumped me by phone, and it was too bad that she hadn’t sent me a “Dear John” letter because I would have kept that, too. It would have been a short letter, as her conversation with me lasted about two minutes. But things weren’t always so bad in college: I did pretty well, so well that the
Deans nominated me for the Truman Scholarship, the Marshall Scholarship, and the Rhodes
Scholarship. I didn’t get any of them, though, but the rejections came on super nice letterhead that still hasn’t yellowed. Standardized tests weren’t typically a problem, but the first time I took the LSAT, I threw up right before the exam, and so I scored somewhere in the neighborhood of a gifted fifth grader. Oh, I took more exams and I went to graduate school, but once I was there, I had to re-write my dissertation, twice. When I applied for jobs as a young assistant professor, I had graduate degrees from Berkeley and Harvard, and so I wasn’t prepared, really, to be rejected thirty eight times. I only have 34 of these letters, because four of the Universities I’d applied to didn’t bother to tell me no until I called to check up on my application. It’s a sad thing when youhave to call to learn you’d been