OccasionallyCaffeinated

I applied to 8 top-20 schools and didn't get into a single one, or waitlisted. I have a coauthored pub and worked at a big well known demography center. I can see (from my lay person acceptance-less POV) points of improvement, like producing a much better writing sample and doing better on my quant area of the GRE (though got above 90 for everything else). I cried yesterday, because I'm a very neurotic future forward, long term thinker, and getting rejected from grad school was like... a shattered dream. Who am i, if not a future Dr./life long bookworm/baby sociologist?? As corny and pretentious as it sounds, academia was really important to me, my identity and my future. It's been hard as a first generation college student, to not read my rejections as a sign that: you're not only under-qualified, you can't even sell yourself or dress yourself up pretty on paper. At the same time, I recognize that academia is also one of the least meritocratic fields out there (let's be honest, entry level investment banking may be more diverse nowadays -_-), kids from PhD families are most likely to get into these programs, the type of stuff you do in academia you can get do in many other jobs, and the growth we have in industry and other fields is bigger and more likely. Sad truth is: I'm more likely to land a $70,000 entry level marketing gig right now (srsly) than get into Columbia, and I'm not sure what message to take from that. What I can glean is that I'm not quite sure this is a race I want to keep running in. I'm gonna swim around the corporate world for a bit (I'm 24 ATM) and if by my late 20s I start getting that urge to write a literature review, I'll reconsider reapplying.