Wall of shame, how to handle rejection letters

Badge of honor or scarlet letter? It’s all in how you take rejection letters.

It is our generation’s Vietnam Wall.

A long stretch of names and memories, the documentation of departed dreams and wrenching loss. We come to it alone or in groups, drawn by a sense of emptiness, a need to commiserate. We stand before it, adding our own mementos of pain, reaching out to touch the names that were once our hope.

Occasionally, the respectful silence is broken by a soul that can no longer contain its grief.

“God, man, Salomon Brothers rejected me, too!”

Our monument isn’t in Washington, D.C. Two years ago, it stood on the fourteenth floor of John Jay Hall on the Columbia University campus. It was called the Wall of Shame, and it was covered with polite denials from some of the best corporations, fellowships and graduate schools in the country.

Even today, our wall is a concrete sign that getting rejected is no longer some secret shame. It’s a symbol of our generation. Look around, if you don’t have a Friends haircut, a homepage, and a couple of rejection letters, how do you know who you are?

Of course, this isn’t how it was supposed to be. Newsweek told us that we were the overclass , smart, cynical, well-educated and well-off.

Unfortunately, they only got three out of four right.

Before you start tearing up, let’s admit that we’ve made this whole job-success anxiety thing work for us. If I can make another reference to the F-word, our new female icon, Jennifer Anniston, obtained her celebrity playing a college graduate who schleps coffee and is perfectly happy and — more importantly — attractive doing it.

Failure, insecurity and rejection letters have gone the way of alcoholism and childhood trauma. “Survivors” wear their pain as a badge of identity. Say it loud and say it proud: “I’m an underemployed child of downsized parents.” Make a sitcom out of it, write a song about it, or go on Ricki Lake, but don’t take it personally. It’s not any more your fault than your Sesame Street attention span or your pre-teen love of Rick Springfield. There are economic and social forces at work that are way beyond your control.

In this new era of freedom from humiliation, I feel safe saying that I know a thing or two about rejection letters. This is the time of year for them, and I can’t be the only one who has developed an irrational fear of my mailbox.

For three years, this stupid box has offered me nothing but bank statements and phone bills, and suddenly its exploding with these thin, legal-size envelopes.

I sit in class contemplating the postal system, awed by the volume of negative mail headed my way from all around the country. Do they know me at the post office? Do they feel sorry for me?

I’ve gotten this rejection thing down to a science, and I have a few suggestions for improvement. First, a quick overview: No matter where you are getting declined — med school, law school or a publishing job — the letter will adhere to the standard three part, two paragraph format.

The first sentence will tell you of their ultra-competitive applicant pool, something like, “There were over one million, heavily qualified applicants to the Acme Markets’ cashier training program this year, making it one of our most competitive seasons ever.”

The next sentence breaks it to you gently. For example, “Upon review of your resume, we have found that this Acme program is not a suitable match for your skills.”

The final sentence, a new idea and therefore a new paragraph, is a more a bald face lie than the other two. It says something along the lines of “We wish you great success in your future endeavors.”

Yeah, right. The rest of that sentence should read, “because with your qualifications you’rer going to need all the wishes in the world to avoid moving in with your parents after graduation.”

Generally these letters are phrased pretty sensitively, but there are exceptions, notably my friend James. Last year, when he was applying to film schools, he won the prize for getting the most offensive rejection letter.

It opened like this, “The University of Texas had many fine applicants to its graduate film program. Unfortunately, you were not one of them.” As if that wasn’t enough of a slam, right beneath the director’s signature, in case James hadn’t gotten the point, were the bolded words “Rejection Letter.”

Here are my suggestions for improvement for the people that come up with these letters. First of all, let’s all acknowledge that no one reads past the first line. If you got in, the letter begins “Congratulations!”

If it begins with anything else, you didn’t make the cut, and the rest of the letter is condescending and a waste of time. So let me suggest that you consider moving to one of two superior formats.

No. 1. Rid yourself of the expensive, letter-headed stationary. Just send postcards, and don’t write the annoying letter. Instead, print either “YES” or “NO” in a 60-point font, and be done with it. The message is the same, and with the saved money, you could hire a couple more of us.

-or-

No. 2. Be real with us. Tell us exactly why you didn’t hire or accept us. Just write, look, you had mustard on your tie through the whole interview, and it really grossed me out, and that’s why you were rejected.

Okay, then, it’s painful, but it’s a learning experience. A recent Columbia grad who works for a competitive Wall Street firm coordinated this year’s interview fair, and she was allowed to read the interviewer’s notes about the applicants. Apparently they were really … candid. One actually said, “I’ve never wanted to punch someone more in my life. What an arrogant fool.”

Now, why should gems like that never see the light of day? That arrogant fool could really benefit from knowing how he or she came off.

My friend Noah’s dad was rejected from Georgetown Law School, but he didn’t believe them. He called, he wrote and finally, they broke down and admitted him.

I suppose that I should find this story uplifting and have the desire to make several phone calls, but I don’t.

That was 20 years ago, after all. America was full of opportunity and sketchy stories like this one. This is the nineties, and displaying your rejection letter — or hitting yourself in the head with a mallet — is probably a lot more fun than law school anyway.

Dear visitor, if you enjoyed reading this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!