Editorial: Trust the process

Your hands are sweaty, you’ve been waiting for this moment all week.

You calmly move your cursor over to the button and close your eyes. In the briefest instant of time, your future flashes before you and you yearn to have your dreams fulfilled. Your eyes shut a little tighter as you push down with your finger.

It’s time to face reality.

You slowly release the pressure from your mouse and lift your eyelids just enough to make out the blurry message on your computer screen.

What you see will yield one of two narratives.

The first is sheer elation, followed by a Facebook update: “LEHIGH UNIVERSITY CLASS OF 2021!!!” The status is likely to get hundreds of likes, and you know the next time you walk into class you’ll be a mini celebrity for at least that day.

However, the second story is not so public. The tale might even start and end on that same day, in an effort to suppress feelings of disappointment. If tears are shed, it will happen behind closed doors.

We tend to ignore the second version of things because it’s not always obvious to us that for every student Lehigh accepts, it turns away about three candidates.

And this mindset holds true beyond just the regular admissions released by Lehigh on Thursday. We forget that our failures are numerous and usually much more probable than our successes. In fact, failures are so omnipotent in our lives that it is a valuable skill to know how to rebound from them.

The other problematic way we view our rejections is that we backtrack and try too hard to justify the result with potential reasons. We’ll tell ourselves we didn’t work hard enough or that we have a specific weakness that was exposed through the process.

However, we have very limited knowledge about the steps that actually yielded the result. Much of the rationale comes from arbitrary weight placed on various efforts to create diversity of skill sets and interests. Maybe Lehigh was looking for a trombone player, but you play the viola.

That doesn’t stop us from feeling trapped by the decision. The bigger the letdown, the more it seems to be an inescapable determinant of our future. After college it will be graduate school. After graduate school it will be the job market.

But in reality, they are just steps in the process.

There is no disputing the fact that a rejection lessens the future possibilities for a person. However, there are valuable skills to garner in each step toward our goals.

Just being able to attend college is a privilege. As long as you are able to find a subject you are passionate about at a four-year university, you will get to explore it in depth. There are countless examples of professionals who attended unknown undergraduate programs. The key was hard work though — they would not have been able to better their situation without it.

The same can be said about the job market. Maybe you didn’t get the internship you wanted or the starting position you thought would leave you destined for greatness. But no matter where you end up, it will never hurt you to pick up some skills and experience in the process. And if you want to get a good recommendation from the company you don’t think you belong in, you still have to work for it.

It’s important to remember that everyone goes through sub-optimal situations to pursue a better future. Maybe some have to struggle in greater amounts, but that doesn’t change the fact that successful people, when they finally achieve what they want, have been through a plethora of rejections.

We all know the classic motivational anecdote that Michael Jordan didn’t make the varsity basketball team as a sophomore.

Maybe the next President of the United States was just rejected from Lehigh.

We’ll have to trust the process if we want to find out.