Embrace Behind-Events
This page used to be called “Embrace Failure,” but instead, we can call them ahead and behind events.
2020
- Paper rejected from EACL (technically withdrawn)
- Paper rejected from AACL, COLING, and EACL (technically withdrawn)
- Paper rejected from AACL, COLING
- Rejected from Salesforce and Alibaba internships
- Rejected from NSF Fellowship
- Rejected from PhD programs at Princeton, University of Washington, Stanford, MIT, CMU
- Doordash doesn’t ask me to return after a fall internship
2019
- Rejected from Benchling and Figma after phone interviews
- Rejected from Neeva, Coda, Robinhood, Affirm, Palantir after onsite interviews
- Paper rejected from JAMA, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, npj Digital Medicine
- Paper rejected from ACL
- Paper rejected from NAACL, ACL, EMNLP
- Paper rejected from CVPR, JAMIA
- Rejected or no response from 46 summer internship applications
2018
- Paper rejected from Modern Pathology, Cancer Research, Lancet Oncology, Lancet Respiratory Systems, Journal of Thoracic Oncology
- Paper rejected from Gut
2016
- Rejected from all acapella groups
- Rejected from Dartmouth Club Tennis
- Rejected from Caltech
I’m not specifying paper titles because other co-authors might not want their rejections listed.
As expected, my list of successes is much shorter:
- 2020: Got an AI residency offer at Google and contractor offer at Facebook
- 2020: PhD offer from USC, Master’s offers from CMU, Cambridge, Oxford
- 2019: First paper accepted to EMNLP
- 2015: Got in Dartmouth and UChicago
- 2014: Got an SAT score my parents were OK with