I woke up to a rejection mail from the Harvard Academy Scholars Program a few days ago. I began to reflect on how academics and entrepreneurs are beginning to get used to being "served breakfast". In Nigeria, being served breakfast in street parlance means getting a rejection or a heartbreak and it is usually followed with another joke in Yoruba "gbogbo wa lama je breakfast" which literarily means we will all face disappointments at one time or the other."😁
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As I reflected on the time and energy I put into writing essays and getting mentors to write recommendations, I saw the need to be grateful for the numerous "yes" I got in the past. Professor Saheed Aderinto has always reminded me that "every win is a big win" and this has taught me to learn lessons and take rejections lightly. Most times when we get a yes, we often ascribe it to the quality of our applications. We might not be hundred percent correct. My experience evaluating applications and listening to students pitch ideas for seed funding at the ARUA Centre of Excellence for Unemployment and Skills Development,University of Lagos coupled with having to review applicants for the Mandela Washington Fellowship also taught me that a significant number of applicants are extremely brilliant and usually have something valuable to bring to the table.
So, for the yes' I got, it is not as though I was better than other applicants. It must have been that the time has come as the Bible stated. It might also have been that something I wrote piqued the interest of a significant number of people on the review panel. Beyond these, I think getting a rejection is a learning pathway and should spur one to do more. In my case, I find the feedback provided for applicants extremely useful when organisations deem it fit. It gives an applicant an idea of areas of improvement and also provides a critical pathway for progress.
I am saying this because my first major rejection was from the Mandela Washington Fellowship. I had scaled to the semi-finals (This makes me feel good right now). This means that out of 15,000 applicants from Africa, I made it to the top 600. I didn't make it to the finals but going through the process and interviews reinforced my capacity to keep showing up, applying, and reapplying until I will get the yes!.
In addition to these, scaling through to the semi-finals and getting the opportunity to be interviewed helped me to develop the tenacity to apply for many other prestigious fellowships. As I often say to my student entrepreneurs, there are lessons to be learned when people share success stories but deeper lessons are embedded in an entrepreneur's failure story.
I'm on my way to completing the next round of applications😁 and sincerely desire a yes. If it comes, I will be happy about it, if it is a "no", I will be happy to learn again!
How have you been handling rejections? Have you learned any lessons so far? Kindly share
