Life is full of rejections — when trying out for teams, applying to schools, hunting for jobs and forming relationships. For high school seniors participating in the college application process, rejections can be plentiful and brutal.
What are your strategies for handling the inevitable rejection? Do you bounce back easily, or does the sting go deep? Do you take rejection personally, or do you see it as a normal part of life?
In “Sorry, You’ve Been Rejected. Now Let’s Party,” Danielle Braff writes about a school in Los Angeles that throws an annual rejection party each spring for high school seniors:
At Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles in mid-April, Lynda McGee, one of the school’s college counselors, checked her paper shredder. She needed to make sure it had the optimal effect: loud, obnoxious and finite.
Soon, her high school seniors would parade into the room clutching rejection letters from colleges across the nation, and those papers need to be masticated as dramatically as possible.
“You have to learn that you will survive and there is a rainbow at the other end,” said Ms. McGee, who started the school’s rejection party about a decade ago and has been fine-tuning the event ever since.
Today, about one-quarter of the senior class attends the party. The only ticket required is a rejection letter.
“You have to print it out, because there’s no satisfaction with deleting an email,” Ms. McGee said with a laugh. Each student takes a turn announcing the name of the college that scorned them before putting the letter into the shredder as the others cheer.
Then they receive an ice-cream sundae, and pledge to not be defined by the college they attend. “Ice cream heals all wounds,” Ms. McGee said with the confidence of a teacher who has done her research. The student with the highest number of rejections (this year, 17) receives a gift card to Barnes & Noble.
Students, read the entire article and then tell us:
What are your strategies for dealing with rejection? What advice would you give to other teenagers?
Would you want your school to give a party like the one at Downtown Magnets High School that celebrates rejection as an ordinary life event, something that everyone experiences and that doesn’t define who you are?
Are you a college senior who applied to colleges? Have you received any rejection letters, and if yes, how have you handled them?
What other kinds of rejection have you experienced? Which ones were the easiest to move past, and which ones hurt the most? Why?
In the article, Mark R. Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, explains how social media and societal norms often tell us that we should conceal rejections and any negative situations, leading to the false belief that there’s something wrong with you. Does that idea resonate with your experience? What messages do you think social media and society send about rejections?
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.
