Dear Dissertation Coach,
I was not accepted to my top school’s graduate program. What is wrong with me that they didn’t want to accept me?
- Heart-broken graduate student
Dear Heart-Broken Graduate Student,
I worked at the University of Texas, Austin, for five years in a biochemistry lab and eleven years as a staff member in the Communications Studies Department. I saw a lot of graduate student applications and a lot of applicants for faculty positions. One of the conclusions I came to was that when an applicant is not accepted, it isn’t always about the applicant personally.
My experience as the graduate coordinator had me handling all the applications for the department’s graduate program. We had at least two hundred applications each year for a varying number of graduate student slots. The number of funded slots we needed was determined by how many teaching slots we had from the university, plus how many graduate students we’d funded the year before, as well as how many students had graduated the previous academic year. See the moving target there? The executive assistant/office manager would tell the faculty that they could fund, say, 15 students for the upcoming year. Then, the faculty would accept more students than we could take because not all students accepted our offer of funding. Shocking, I know. We did not keep a waitlist. It was just too difficult to keep track of something like that. The student saw only an acceptance or a denial. They had no idea that perhaps they were on the cusp of being accepted, but that year, we could accept very few students. If they had applied in a different year, they might have been accepted. See, it wasn’t you.
Sometimes, a student is not accepted because Professor Amazing Researcher is going on a two-year sabbatical, changing jobs, or cutting their student load because they are planning to retire in three years. The student sees on the website that Professor Amazing Researcher does the exact thing the student would like to learn. The student does not know about Professor Amazing Researcher’s plans, and all the student sees is the non-admission decision. The student assumes it must be their own fault that they were not admitted. Nope, not the case. Professor Amazing Researcher would have loved to have had the applicant were it not for their professional plans in motion. See, it wasn’t you.
How about job applications? The student sees that a department has a position open that fits their own research interests perfectly. I know this is hard to believe, but sometimes faculty members in departments advertise for one kind of research but are secretly hoping to hire someone with a different kind of research. What? Yeah, don’t ask, it’s departmental/campus politics. I read an essay from a faculty member about a hiring decision in which they hired no one. The position had previously been filled by a beloved faculty member who had died suddenly. The remaining faculty had interviewed people for the position, but in the end, could not emotionally handle filling the position that year. They didn’t explain this to the applicants they did not hire, so all each applicant saw was that they had not been hired. They didn’t know the reason. See, it wasn’t you.
The takeaway here, dear applicant, is that much of the time, it is not about you personally that you were not admitted to a grad school or offered the job that you applied for. Often, there are reasons within the department of which you have no idea. Continue to apply to other programs and continue to know your worth.
Warmly,
Your Dissertation Coach
