current mood: annoyed.
It really, really gets to me when I spend untold hours on a fellowship application, submit it, receive a personal e-mail by way of receipt, even… and then get rejected and do not hear about it. Honestly, considering the number of things I apply for, I expect to get mostly rejections. But why keep me stringing along? You want to reject me, fine; I applaud the many people who’re better suited to your venture. But do let me know, and preferably in a timely manner, so that I can go on with my life. How hard can it be?!
In academe, I cannot assume that silence equals rejection; things take forever, deadlines are hopeful at best and arbitrary as a matter of fact, people have too many things to do and continually overcommit. So I cannot take silence for an automatic no: they may just be running late. So it sits on my plate, for no reason at all, and I play the “should I e-mail them? should I wait some more?” game. Worse: weeks after the supposed notification date, I e-mail the authorities in question and get a form letter in response. For goodness’ sake! If you have a form letter, why in the world didn’t you send it to me before??
You wouldn’t know it from this post, but I’ve had an excellent day. RolandHT is coming together; we got haircuts and they are great, and for all of the stress that accompanies the week preceding a big event, it’s also by degrees easier to work long hours: the adrenaline keeps me going. I honestly wish I could call that up whenever I wanted, and get a lot of work done in a haze of sleepless, delirious joy.
This happened to me when I applied to Harvard for grad school. I heard from everyone else, I heard about school-specific fellowships, I heard from my external fellowship; deadlines for commitments were fast approaching; and finally I had to email them to find out whether they were maybe getting around to perhaps letting me know one way or the other whether I might have been accepted. The response was a kind of off-hand, “yeah, we decided to reject you [implicit: weeks ago {further implicit: but didn't think it was worth bothering to say so}]“.
Not like I had any high hopes pinned to that, but I was dismayed and angered by the manner of it. I also (because such is my nature) felt embarrassed and ashamed of being so forward as to ask them for an update. But in retrospect it just makes me annoyed. For pity’s sake, when you’re paying large amounts of money for the privilege of applying in the first place, you’d think they could afford a brief letter and a stamp to answer you with.