Rejection

It's something we deal with regularly, whether it be in our academic, professional, or personal lives. I recently was on the receiving end of an academic rejection from an institution, who, for propriety's sake, shall remain nameless. 

First of all, in my opinion (and in the opinion of pretty much everyone else ever) here's how academic rejection letters should begin:

"Dear Applicant,

"We regret to inform you that..."

OR

"Dear Applicant,

"Thank you for your interest in [Department] at [Institution]. Unfortunately..."

A well-written rejection letter should convey to the recipient that s/he has been rejected before the end of the second sentence, using words like "regret" or "unfortunately".  However, as you will see below, not all institutions follow this code of conduct.  Here's the letter that I got:

"Dear Alexandra, 

"The [Institution] Department of [Program] had a very large number of excellent applicants to our Graduate Program.  In addition to considering the overall qualifications of each applicant, it was necessary to consider the existing and projected workloads of individual faculty members that most closely match the applicants' areas of interest.  For this reason, we were able to accept relatively few new students.  As a result, many applicants, of which you are one, could not be admitted."

It closes with the traditional "thanks for applying" and "best of luck in your future endeavors" and whatnot.  But seriously?  How did anyone think that this was a good letter?  I had to read three really long sentences before I got to the punch line, which I had to read three times before figuring out that this was actually a rejection letter.  Let's look at this line again:

"As a result, many applicants, of which you are one, could not be admitted."

Is this even a rejection?  This is a textbook case of the vague antecedent*.  Yes, I am one of the applicants, but am I one of the many that could not be admitted?  Not to mention that this is the biggest "I'm trying to depersonalize this" cop-out of a rejection ever.  I wonder if this is how the author of this letter turned down dates in college:  "Many men, of which you are one, are not going to go out with me.  Thanks, and good luck."  Yikes.

You might be thinking, "come on, Alex, you only think this is a bad letter because they rejected you; sour grapes and whatnot," but even objective third parties and persons with a vested interest in my not moving away came to the same conclusions about the ghastly nature of this letter.

In terms of the real feelings about this, though, I'm not heartbroken.  It was a really good program, and had I gotten in, I would have given it serious consideration.  However, it was in a place that had very little to offer a twenty-six-year-old unmarried Mormon woman, and the program would have taken much longer to complete than I would have liked.  So in general, I'm good, and really, nothing dulls the sting of rejection like the chance to mock other people's sentence structure.



*If you're an English major and this isn't actually a vague antecedent, I apologize, but it's something along those lines, yes?