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  • Paper rejected from EACL (technically withdrawn)
  • Paper rejected from AACL, COLING, and EACL (technically withdrawn)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