Thank you for the thoughtful reply, although you like most others don’t seem to “get it”. Despite the relatively high marks, or despite how great people SAY the application was I’m still without external funding while someone who worked no harder than me is with it.
I don’t buy into the whole “rejection is only your fault, so you can’t blame it on others” notion because I know the work and effort that I put into the application that I crafted.
If I have to be alone in refusing to blame myself for something that I know didn’t fall short at what was asked, I will be, I just supposed there would be others who could relate at a level beyond “I was rejected too once but now I’m wildly successful, do what I did”.
I can’t to lend credit to someone who isn’t on a higher plane than but has the benefits of an Ivy League undergraduate education and not being black or studying contemporary African Americans. Especially not when I came from a small-mid sized urban campus where the under-recognized worked incredibly hard to assist in the opportunities for the relatively under-recognized student body. I’d be selling out the work I’ve done to claw up the ladder to be on the same playing field as the former category of people that I mentioned.