Graduate School and rejection letters
Friday, April 21st, 2006 - 11:46am
I am applying to Grad School this year, and I just received the most insulting rejection letter that I have ever seen.
It was an e-mail.
They did not have the $0.50 to put together a form letter and mail it to me. Even worse I have talked to the admissions department for this particular school numerous times, and gotten into a nice rapport with one woman there. All I got was an e-mail??
So, the question arises for you more modern students (I am 30 and I have been out of the loop for years). Should I feel insulted?
I am going to take a few days to write a letter to them explaining to them the lost art of ettiquite, and that one should send a letter after all the work I did and hoops you made me jump through. Nevermind considering the costs involved in applying to these programs. But I am smart enough to wait for me to cool down a bit. Oh and I am calling them too. I want an explanation, and I am persistant.
Playing WoW as: Vilius (70 NE Druid)
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” John K Galbraith
Any chance we could see it?
Or some excerpts?
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Stick with the persistence. If there is an open slot later on, they might remember you. I had a friend in law school who applied three times before she got in, but was on a first-name basis with the whole admissions office by the time she did.
"All that time you waste dating and having sex could be better spent scouring the web for new game developer press releases." - Quintin_Stone
My thoughts exactly. I'm with you though... calm down, and write a letter to them, explaining that their ways of doing things are FUBAR. After I payed to put through an application, and put the work into making it good enough where I think I have a good chance of getting in, the last thing I should see is a crappy insulting email.
IronClad Online: PurEvil
My senior year in college, my hallmate got a med school rejection via email. It was immediately printed and hung to the wall of shame (space in the dorm where everyone posted their rejections for all to see, oddly carthartic) and quickly became the most annotated. WTF!! was the most frequent scribble as most were appalled by the lack of letter. It was the first email rejection anyone had seen. Hell, Computer Science grad schools still sent out real rejection letters.
This was in 1998. This may be the norm now, but it still feels like insult to injury ("Hey Crip! Nice tie!").
Xbox Live: Stilgar Black
I looks just like any other rejection letter. Thank you for applying, we regret to inform you. This was done after careful consideration, blah blah blah. It was just an e-mail.
For example:
They even had the gall to add this at the end:
Which is hysterical because I already have a Bachelors degree.
Playing WoW as: Vilius (70 NE Druid)
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” John K Galbraith
Dayam. Sounds like they said "if you decide you want a degree from a REAL university....". That's just rude.
This is the internet! In our natural environment, atheists run in packs and have dictionaries! --- JoeBeDurndurn
I dunno. When I applied for physics graduate programs just last year, I got two email rejections, and one email acceptance. It certainly was quicker that way. It didn't occur to me that the email rejections could be personal affronts, no more than the email acceptance I got was one. I just figured that's how some schools were doing it nowadays.
Anyway, I don't think you should take it personally. Contacting them by letter AND phone might be overkill. And don't expect an apology; just tell them, "Hey, I thought this was rude, and for future reference, you may not want to include that in your letters". That's all you really can do at this point. Getting mad won't change their minds, of course.
Still, good luck with the grad school hunt. I hope you get some positive offers soon! Applying to grad school is such a stressful process, and I hope it goes better for you than this.
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Write a letter... tie it to a bottle of JD... add rag to bottle... light rag... toss into admission office....
thats what I'd do!
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WOW: Bounce
I'd move on. I've found that getting irritated about this kind of thing is tempting but ultimately pointless.
Sending a response by email isn't rude. Not sending a response at all is.
A couple of years ago, I applied for a faculty position at a respectable, mid-sized university in a nice location. Nothing Ivy League, but a step up from my current institution. I was happy to find out that I was one of two finalists for the position, from a pool of over 100 candidates.
Interviews for tenure-line positions are generally multi-day affairs, including lunches and dinners, a campus tour, meeting about every damn person on campus, giving a lecture, and teaching a class or two. My interview went pretty well--nothing spectacular, but I've been on and have myself conducted enough interviews that I know I didn't "blow it" at all.
In general, it looked like a good opportunity; the faculty was nice, as were the grad students (whom I'd be teaching almost exclusively). The job involved more research & publishing than my current job does, but that's something I'd welcome. I sent a thank-you note after the interview, and waited.
And waited. After a couple of weeks, I sent an email, and shortly thereafter left a phone message, politely asking for an update on the search status. I never received a response.
Not receiving the job offer wouldn't have bothered me--it's happened before and it just means that there was another candidate that was better qualified for the position than me. But not to get an answer at all...It still baffles me, and of all the people I've mentioned it to, many of them having spent decades in academia, no one has ever heard of this happening. It's really shockingly unprofessional, and the type of thing that is really avoided in academia, whose social circles are really very small. Given this incident, I suppose I'm glad I wasn't offered a position.
About a year later, I ran into the department chair in an airport where we both had a layover. He recognized me and asked how I was doing. He was very friendly. I didn't bring it up, as it just didn't matter to me anymore.
"Come, amigo, throw away your mind." --Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Maybe it got lost in the mail?
Untrackable snail mail sucks.
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When I was applying for med school last year, I received plenty of rejection letters by both snail mail and e-mail. I think e-mail is seen as common practice these days so I wasn't insulted.
What was insulting was that one school called me up for a late interview and I said sure. I booked my flight and took care of all that stuff. 2 days before I leave, I receive in the mail a rejection letter from the same institution. Boy was I pissed. I sent them an e-mail asking what the hell was going on. I still went there to interview like the sucker that I am.
That and like what Yon Rabbit said - when you don't hear back from the institution I find it insulting. I understand they have craploads of applications to sort through but when they're taking $35 for a primary and ~$50-$75 for a secondary application, it would be nice to at least send me some notice my way.
Let it go. Some schools are e-mail only (I think the probably a third of the school I applied to did all correspondence via e-mail) and that's OK. Alternatively, the paper form may be delayed in the "main" graduate school... either way, no point in stepping on toes.
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That is all I wanted to know. I just took it as bad ettiquite considering what one does to apply to these programs, but it seems like the norm from a few of the responses here so I will take it as it is.
Oh I had come to the conclusion that colleges consider you as a number and an money spigot a long time ago. No I do not take rejection per say personally, just the way it was done. But like I said I am a persistant S.O.B. and I will be writing them.
The way I saw that last paragraph is that they just took a form letter, edited a few lines, and just sent it. Heck they could create a program that can do it for them (insert X,Y, and Z variable and have program do rest). Just the usual "You are a number and an application fee" impersonal touch of the process.
Thank you all for all your feedback.
Playing WoW as: Vilius (70 NE Druid)
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” John K Galbraith
I've received both graduate rejections and acceptances via email. I'd say that around fifty percent of the schools to which I applied eventually responded via email; about thirty precent via snail mail; and about twenty percent, not at all. This last group really pisses me off. I paid these vultures upwards of seventy dollars in order to apply, and they want to leave me hanging for months on end with no word at all, even after I've made specific inquiries? Bastards. It's friggin' disgusting that we have to tolerate that sort of thing, just to be able to advance our educations.
Don't even get me started on ETS.
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