8 Stages of Getting Rejected from a Club

You went to the info session, you submitted the application, you had the interview. They told you that you would hear back “sometime over the weekend,” and it’s already 1 PM on Sunday. You can’t tell if you should be panicking already.

As the clock ticks closer and closer to midnight, you begin to refresh your email every 5 seconds, hoping that it will make the news come quicker because at this point you just want an answer. Every time a new one appears you get your hopes up, except it ends up just being Denice Cassaro. Finally at 8:59PM on the dot, you get a message from [insert overly serious, overly competitive club here].

Advice from our middle school teachers taught us that an email subject line should contain all the sender needs to knows. So when you look at the one in your email, and it says “Thank you” or “Regarding your Application” or anything that isn’t “Congratulations,” you already know how the rest of the email is going to go.

You began to read the email itself. It starts off with another “thank you” and goes on to mention the “incredible volume of applications and the deep talent pool” that applied this year, letting you know finally that you weren’t selected as member. You re-read the email just to double check, but you know your fate as soon as it closes with “Best of luck in your endeavors!” Because the only thing that feels worse than rejection is rejection from a form letter.

Did you even really want to join that club anyway? Yes everyone in it seems really cool, and the work they do seems kind of fun, but think of the time you would had to devote to that. Now you’re free to spend all your time doing all sorts of other things. Maybe you’ll get a job, or start a new hobby! The world is your oyster now that you don’t have to spend 5-10 hours a week on this organization.

Your frustrations have moved away from the club itself and now you’re just trying to figure out which of your immediate competition got in instead of you. If you’re lucky, the club didn’t obscure their recipients of the rejection email, so you can just check that. If they did, you immediately start texting people you know, possibly even someone you know in the club, to get the deets.

For the next couple of days, you run into every single member of that club. Your older friend who said he would get you in, the girl you really hit it off with at the info session, and of course, the kid you are convinced is the reason you didn’t get in. Each and every one of them avoids eye contact with you.

Somehow next semester you find yourself in the exact room, talking to the exact same people. They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. By that standard, you are certifiable–but hey, maybe this time you’ll finally get in.