How much is our professional worth tied to our admissions?

[switch]

If an applicant with Ivy degree, multiple publications, work experience gets rejected by a lot of schools and an applicant with none of those things gets accepted by a lot of programs, how much does the mere acceptance or rejection reconstruct their market value?

For example, every time you apply for credit and get turned down, it hurts your overall credit score. Is reputational harm from grad rejections aking to that? Better not to apply at all, than to apply and be rejected?

Or is the applicant not harmed by a lot of rejections?

[wtncffts]

I don't think there's any 'harm' to one's professional reputation from rejections. In what ways do you imagine there to be? Nobody's going to ask you about it, and certainly jobs and tenure won't depend on it. Career progress in academia is about your work and abilities; a hiring committee isn't going to look at an impressive body of work and say, "but wait, this person was rejected from a few schools five, six, seven years ago, forget it". I'm doubtful that they would even have that information. Remember, this is just the first step in a much longer process.

[lyonessrampant]

Why, unless you decided to divulge that information, would any potential employer know what schools you got rejected from? Just don't share that information. What matters will be what you accomplished during those 4-6 years getting your Ph.D. and the brand of THAT school that did accept you.

[juilletmercredi]

The difference between this process and credit scores is that with credit, the rejections are there on a permanent record for people to look at, and generally you aren't competing with anyone else. If you apply for a mortgage at Bank of America and you get turned down, there isn't any other reason besides you. Then Capital One can look at your report and see it.

In academia, there's no master record of where you were rejected or accepted (other than your personal blog or something!) and no one can check it next year if you applied to a new batch of schools. And sometimes very qualified applicants are rejected for various reasons that have nothing to do with their qualifications.

[bluetourmaline]

Absolutely none. I was talking to a professor at my future school who is one of the big names of my field (a fourth-year course I took was basically dedicated to one of his papers), and when I mentioned that another well-known school rejected me, he laughed, "They rejected me too! Twice!"

If you have a decent GPA and meet the requirements, and people tell you that your SOP and writing sample are strong --- schools are not looking at your scoring on an arbitrary one-dimensional scale; they are looking at how well you fit into their culture and what the department is doing and where it wants to go. It's devastating, yes, but the rejection slips often really do mean it when they say that they're sure you will be a wonderful student somewhere else. The same way if you go on a date with someone and it just doesn't click, that doesn't reflect on their worth or yours,or that they or you are too ugly or too stupid or that either of you won't find great love and success somewhere or some other time or with someone else. It just means that the two of you aren't a match. At this time in your lives.

Make it into a decent grad school that's doing what you want to do, and whose people you get along with. Do the best you can there, and prosper. No one will ever know that one day long ago, you didn't click on a date with some admission committee.

[Azazel]

If an applicant with Ivy degree, multiple publications, work experience gets rejected by a lot of schools and an applicant with none of those things gets accepted by a lot of programs, how much does the mere acceptance or rejection reconstruct their market value?

For example, every time you apply for credit and get turned down, it hurts your overall credit score. Is reputational harm from grad rejections aking to that? Better not to apply at all, than to apply and be rejected?

Or is the applicant not harmed by a lot of rejections?

I can't see any "market value" downside to getting rejected. No one has to know about it unless you tell them. Now, if you are wondering about how rejection affects your chances of reapplication to some of the same places -- well, that I don't know.

On the other hand, I've already used my acceptance letters to enhance my credibility in certain "marketable" respects, unrelated to grad school. So really, I only see an upside.

Edited April 13, 2011 by Azazel