All my career rejections

See the discussion of this post on Hacker News.

I've been reflecting on rejections lately. I've been fortunate to have more successes than I had ever imagined, but receiving a rejection email is never a fun day. I decided to write out every single rejection in my career from industry jobs, academic jobs, conference papers, and research grants.

Over 50 times I have been rejected in my short career. Gotta collect em' all!

Rejected industry positions

I first interviewed for a full-time industry position in 2013 right before graduating with my masters, and it did not go well. I've had some offers, but quite a few more rejections.

• Yelp, software engineer
• ABB Research, research intern
• Apple, software engineer
• Samsung Research, research engineer
• Adobe Research, research scientist
• Impira, software engineer
• Kite, software engineer
• Microsoft Research, research scientist
• Microsoft, program manager
• Repl.it, product engineer
• Apple, research scientist

Rejected academic positions

Typing this list out makes it feel really long. I was very fortunate to receive numerous offers even though I didn't expect to get a single one. Big thanks to my Ph.D. advisor, Scott Fleming, and mentor, Margaret Burnett, for their help preparing me.

• Texas A&M University
• Case Western Reserve University
• Temple University
• University of South Carolina
• Clemson University
• University of Utah
• University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
• University of Notre Dame
• Virginia Tech
• Cornell University
• Northeastern University
• University of Southern California
• Kent State University
• University of Chicago
• Boston University
• Duke University
• Washington University in St. Louis
• University of California, Irvine
• Rice University
• Oregon State University
• University of Rochester
• Vanderbilt University
• University of Alabama, Birmingham
• University of Texas, Dallas
• University of Colorado, Boulder
• University of Pennsylvania

Rejected conference papers

Paper rejections don't sting anymore. I seem to have about a 50% acceptance rate with my submissions. And with the help of many great collaborators, I've co-authored strong papers that have won several awards. The rejections are inevitable and generally lead to a better paper anyway, right?

• IEEE VL/HCC 2014
• ACM/IEEE ICSE 2015
• ACM/IEEE ICSE 2016
• ACM CHI 2017
• ACM FSE 2017
• IEEE VL/HCC 2017
• ACM CHI 2018
• ACM CHI 2019
• ACM CHI 2019
• ACM UIST 2019
• AAAI HCOMP 2019
• ACM CHI 2020
• IEEE VL/HCC 2020

Rejected grants

I've had two grant proposals funded and two rejected, so I should probably submit more...

• NSF SHF small grant
• Google Research Scholar Program

More rejections to come!