Shots In The Dark: Is It Worth It?, Cont'd.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Is It Worth It?, Cont'd.

In San Francisco (natch), one high school psychology class has found a way to deal with its students' avalanche of college rejection letters—"rejection letter therapy."

According to the San Francisco Examiner,

Students bring their rejection letters to class. The most rejected student gets a prize, but the real competition is for the “worst letter” colleges. Harvard is running head and shoulders above the rest in the “most obsequious while maintaining utter insincerity” category. Harvard lets students know how “very sorry” they are to reject them. They then bestow three wishes, none of which they grant. First, Harvard wishes that they were writing with a different decision. Second, they wish that it was possible to admit the rejectee. Finally, they hope the student they deny will accept their best wishes.

Other awards include the "least number of words before you know you are rejected" category, and the "most emphatic rejection" category....

Is this the beginning of a backlash against admissions insanity?

¶ 8:07 AM

Comments:

"Is this the beginning of a backlash?"

No.

It is however a nice story about some good schoolteaching work.

Standing Eagle

# posted by Anonymous : April 10, 2007 8:43 AM

This doesn't sound like such a new phenomenon to me: 15 years ago, when I was getting my college letters, we posted them on the school walls for all to see. Others would highlight, circle, underline the most painful or ridiculous parts of these letters. (The real benefit was that you didn't have to tell your friends one by one that you'd received a rejection; they'd know from the board.) This kind of group sympathy also marks "job wikis," where PhDs similarly share their rejections (in response to one University that sends a rejection postcard: "at least the mailman can commiserate!" "My mailman knows too!") What's difficult about this sort of sharing is the sad truth, I suspect, that you do hope against hope that the "obsequiousness" in letters like the ones that Harvard apparently writes might just somehow actually be a sign that you barely missed the cut. But how that hope fades when you see everyone else got the same letter . . .

# posted by Anonymous : April 10, 2007 8:10 PM

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