There is a particular kind of email that anyone who has spent enough time applying for academic positions, fellowships, grants, and research opportunities will recognise.
It begins with gratitude.
We would like to thank you for your application.
Then comes the reassurance.
We read your materials with much interest.
Then the carefully calibrated praise.
We think there is great promise to your work.
And finally, the verdict.
We regret that we will be unable to proceed with your application on this occasion.
By now, I have received enough of these emails to recognise their verdict before I finish reading the first paragraph. One learns to read these emails without expecting much. But I have also learned to appreciate the occasional variation in wording, only for entertainment.
Recently, I received a rejection email that deserves a place in my career collection.
I had applied for a position on a research project at a university. Before the interview could take place, I accepted another job and withdrew my application. I had moved on. The matter was settled, at least from my end.
Then came the email.
The authors thanked me for my application, praised my work, and expressed regret that they could not proceed with it. They also mentioned how much they had enjoyed our conversation earlier that month.
There was only one problem: we had never had that conversation. I had declined the interview.
And so I found myself in the unusual position of being rejected for a position I had already rejected, in a process that apparently included a conversation neither party had participated in.
I laughed. What else was there to do? I usually reply, but I was not sure what to reply.
But the email also reminded me of something that years of applications can make difficult to ignore: how much of academic recruitment is conducted through the performance of personal attention.
Applicants are asked to demonstrate genuine interest. We tailor our cover letters, read project descriptions, study the work of prospective supervisors, assemble writing samples, and explain why our intellectual lives might belong within a particular institution. We are expected to be attentive to details, responsive to instructions, and convincing in our enthusiasm.
In return, we receive emails that sound personal, even when their details suggest otherwise.
Of course, a templated rejection does not prove that nobody read your application. An institution can genuinely appreciate your work and still use standard correspondence. Academics and administrators are busy people, and mistakes happen.
But the asymmetry is that the applicant must be particular; the institution can afford to be generic. We must demonstrate that we know who they are and what they do. They can occasionally forget what happened between us.
Perhaps this is simply how large institutions function. Perhaps it is the inevitable consequence of managing hundreds of applications through administrative systems. But after enough rejections, one begins to recognise the peculiar distance between the language of individual recognition and the machinery that produces it.
The emails keep coming. Each one arrives with its own little ceremony of gratitude, regret, encouragement, and closure. We file them away, sometimes with disappointment, sometimes with relief, occasionally with irritation, and, in this case, with laughter.
Meanwhile, life continues. We find other jobs. We pursue other projects. We write other applications.
Perhaps the real achievement for me is reaching a point where such an email no longer feels like a verdict on my intellectual worth. It is simply another piece of correspondence, occasionally informative, occasionally disappointing, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious.
I may apply to the same institution again someday.
But if I do, I hope we get to have that conversation first.
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