Looking at rejections through a new lens 

My grandma always says, “Delayed but not denied!”

I can hear her voice saying it now. She always says it in repetition as if to cement it in stone. Delayed but not denied. Delayed but not delayed. It is a mantra of faith that my family has been instilling in me since I was young. It’s actively choosing hope in the face of anything or anyone that says no. It’s turning the nos, into not yets.

In my family, rejection doesn’t happen to knock you down, make you sad or steal your confidence, but rather, rejection is here to point you in a direction you may not have seen before.  

Turning my rejections into redirections got me through those early adolescent years when the people you want to be friends with don’t always want to be your friends.

It got me through my college application process – both rounds of it – when despite applying to 13+ schools, I still had little idea of where I wanted to end up. Rejection letters came, as they do, but instead of putting my head down and giving up, I channeled my grandma’s voice and saw the nos as pushing me towards the place I was meant to be. 

Without a conscious effort, the positive butterfly effect following a “no” may not be immediately apparent. But for many of us, the better things in our lives came out of something or someone’s rejection. I wanted to test this theory by talking to four different people I came across. It was fascinating how eager everyone was to answer, and even more fascinating how often stories overlapped – even with my own. 

The question I asked was simple: “What’s the best thing in your life that came out of rejection?”

Staying Close To Home

Emma Nnodi

Photo courtesy of Emma Nnodi.

When I approached DePaul Junior Emma Nnodi, the first thing that caught my eye was the elaborate wall art behind her. Rainbow-colored stars floated around large cutout letters that spelled “At OMSS, You Matter, You Belong, You Succeed. OMieSS unite!” The handcrafted message adorned a wall at the Office of Multicultural Student Success where Emma works. Emma spent many shifts perfecting the wall and cutting out each and every star. 

While Emma has been at DePaul for three years now, being 40 minutes from home wasn’t always the plan. 

She applied to seven colleges in her senior year of high school, with her top two being Northwestern University and New York University (NYU). When they ultimately rejected her, Emma said she remembers feeling extremely saddened. She had entered the process with a whole plan, but was left with only a question of, “So now what am I gonna do?”

When looking at colleges, common advice is to imagine yourself there and see if you’d fit. Once your mind feels that a place is right, getting rejected can feel like a closed dream that barely got the chance to start. 

Luckily for Emma, that closed door sent her to one that was already open. Home. 

Emma went back to the drawing board and ended up choosing DePaul and a new major. 

She sees this rejection as a gift instead. Now after being in college, she knows she wouldn’t have been ready to move all the way to New York.

While she’ll never know what NYU would have been like, Emma has gotten to experience so many things since being at DePaul. She’s been able to get scholarships and research opportunities that would have been a lot more scarce at NYU. 

Emma also said it’s much easier to travel 40 minutes to go home than 12 hours. 

“I would have struggled a lot. Being rejected definitely helped me, like, I dodged a bullet, basically,” she said, laughing. 

For Emma, the door closing on her dreams in New York opened up new doors, where everything finally fell into place. Losing out on that picture in her head turned out to be less a loss and more a gain of happiness she didn’t know she could have here at DePaul. When our dreams are hit with rejection letters, it is so easy to feel that all hope is lost. But, so often, we’re steps away from living the dream that’s just right for us.

Hitting a HomeRun

Xavier Marchan

Photo by Asia Thomas.

I met 15-year-old Xavier Marchan at my neighborhood Whole Foods. He had just come from school and was dressed head to toe in his JROTC uniform. 

He seemed shy, but he was still willing to talk with me. He asked me to clarify what I meant by rejection, but after that, we jumped right in.

I learned that Xavier was in high school, and while youth is often associated with naivety, he had already experienced rejection and eventually redirection as well. 

He had tried out for the football team at school and the coach told him no. Xavier was hardly upset when he recalled this memory. Instead, he said, “I realized like, after that, I didn’t really like football in general.”

Though Xavier’s answers to my questions were very straightforward, it was apparent he didn’t let anything stop him. Instead of football, he tried out for the baseball team, and it ended up being a great fit for him. 

“So I guess it was like the better option because I was able to go like, work for, um, different sports, or different, like, things that I actually like. Instead of doing something that I didn’t really like,” Xavier said. 

Xavier’s memory of trying out sports teams brings me back to my grandma’s message of delayed but not denied. Xavier may have had to wait longer to find the sport he loved, but if he had given up at the sign of that initial rejection and denial, he never would’ve found it all. And who knows, he might not become the person he is today. 

Building Connections

Kat Rodriguez

Photo courtesy of Kat Rodriguez.

When I met Kat, I stole her away from intently working on her computer. It was midday on a Thursday, a day many DePaul students like to call “DePaul Friday” because of our lack of Friday classes. Kat, however, hadn’t called off for the weekend yet.

She’s a junior studying marketing at DePaul and her days are filled with great amounts of homework, intense classes and searching for internships in a competitive market.

Despite all this, Kat kept a smile on her face throughout our conversation. 

She says her most annoying rejections have come from searching for internships in a tough market, which is getting increasingly more difficult according to CNBC. 

“I just kind of wanted to like leave them alone and just not send up a follow-up or anything,” Kat said when describing her initial feelings following rejection. She described using every trick in the book – Glassdoor, LinkedIn and even old-school coffee chats – but still, she struggled to get that offer letter. 

But instead of taking their unresponsiveness as a rejection, Kat saw it as a chance to build connections. Rather than merely moving on to the next job listing, she makes the most of each rejection by keeping in contact with companies.  

“You still, like, keep moving forward in a sense. So that’s what I’ve done and I’ve gotten, um, the recruiters to message me back and say, you know what, like, if anything else pops up, like, you’ll be the first person that will send the list to or the email to,” Kat said.

Talking to Kat felt like a relief amid my own navigations of summer internships. I was comforted  to know that all the emails reading, “We decided to select another candidate” were likely not only sent to me. It was also reassuring to hear her sense of acceptance and maintained positivity. 

Despite it all, you still keep moving forward.

Re-Directing your path

Luke Socie

Photo by Asia Thomas.

Before our conversation had started, Luke told me all about the leather jacket they were wearing. It was their first time wearing it after buying it while studying abroad in Berlin. It was vintage and had dozens of pockets, but no one had noticed it yet. The jacket was quite cool, and it broke the ice on what was already a free-flowing conversation. 

Luke said they thought about this idea of redirection quite frequently. From our jacket conversation, I could tell that they were an observant person, in both observing how they are perceived and the cause-and-effects in their life. 

Luke studies film at DePaul and is set to graduate in about two months. Four years ago, however, high school Luke was hoping to take a very different path. 

Being from the suburbs, they were always planning to apply to DePaul and enter into a creative film. Luke acted all through high school and wanted to extend this theater experience at DePaul’s coveted Theatre School. 

Luke applied for the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in acting, toured the school and sent in a self-tape. But, they never got a callback. 

They weren’t alone in waiting for a notification in their email box. DePaul’s Theatre School is a conservatory program that is ranked in the top 10% of the country. They get roughly 1,900 applicants each year and only 120 BFA’s are selected. 

Still, statistics do little to bandage the pain of rejection. “I was like super, I was super crushed. I like cried about it in my car when I got that email,” Luke said. 

After that initial shock, Luke decided that the only thing they could do was pick their head up and pivot. “ I still want to do something creative in my life, and I already got accepted into DePaul, like the school. So I’m like, well, the film school, you don’t have to apply for it, you can just do it.”  

Their eyes light up when they talk about film and if this passion wasn’t enough to confirm they made the right decision, everything else was. Luke entered college right around the height of COVID-19, and at this time, live theater was suffering.

That, and Luke isn’t always a fan of the infamous theater kids. “It’s a very good thing I didn’t become like them. Because that would be a very different person,” they remark. 

Luke found that they didn’t need to go far to find a new, better path after their initial setback. The Theatre School is just a short train ride away from the College of Computing and Digital Media, where the film school is located.

Luke’s story reminds me of all the times I’ve been stuck on a stopped train, unable to make my desired destination at the predicted time. It reminds me also of the couple of times the red line skipped my stop entirely and led me to think of a new plan at the drop of a hat. 

Though annoying, none of these red-line offenses affected more than an hour of my day. Like Luke, all I had to do was look for another path. A new direction that, luckily, wasn’t too far out of reach.

From left to right: Me, My Grandma, My Dad, My Mom and My Sister. Photo courtesy of Asia Thomas.

Each story of redirection brought me back to the moment I decided to forgo every plan I had for myself and pursue a career in film. This was a full 180 for me considering I had “dreamed” of being a doctor my whole life. I was going to be the first doctor in the family. But, after years of sitting in science classes I did not want to be in, I rejected this dream and decided to try a new path.

This new dream, however, didn’t come without its own fair share of rejections. A year after changing my major I now have a stack full of nos from freelance opportunities, internships and film festivals.   

Rejection is something we cannot run from, and trust me, I’ve tried. I pretended to not care about the girls who turned down my friendship in 3rd grade. I’ve deleted all of the unfortunate emails from my inbox. And I tend to scroll past Instagram posts of events I wasn’t invited to; I’ve done every trick in the book to escape feelings of rejection. However, I’ve found that acceptance was the only thing that truly helped me soothe all the bruises of rejection. Accepting that all of these denials were simply a delay telling me to wait for something better to come. 

Header by Hailey Bosek