Just recently, I blogged a little bit about “being wrong,” or specifically what I learned through being rejected from grad school. Twice. The first time I applied to Ph.D. programs in psychology was in 2000. Then again in 2002. It wasn’t until my third try in 2003 that I finally got an acceptance letter. Multiple acceptance letters, actually.

To be real, it’s very easy for me to sit where I’m sitting now and proclaim that I learned something beneficial each time I applied, that it made me more knowledge about the graduate admissions process. While all of that is definitely true, my experience in the “meantime” of not knowing whether I would get in if I tried again is a completely different story.

A reader asked me the following question in response to my piece on grad school rejection:

How did you overcome the ego blow of not getting in on the first try? How did you overcome of the fear of failure of trying it again?

And the answer is simple as this question…

Is This What You’re Meant To Be Doing Or Not?

If you’re sitting on the other side of grad school rejection, thinking about putting in all the effort to complete multiple applications all over again and feeling absolutely weak, ask yourself if you REALLY want this career as much as you originally thought.

No. Seriously. Dig deep and answer honestly. Were you on the path of pursuing grad school because of others’ expectations? Because you’re chasing a bigger paycheck? Because, at the end of the day, what will help you put all of the pieces together successfully is if this is what you were BORN to do.

Keep reading if the answer is YES, this is what I’m meant to do, and if you have a driving reason for WHY you belong in grad school. Now the next step is figuring out HOW. And hopefully, you’ve been doing something other than than licking your wounds this entire time. What can you do to shape yourself into a more attractive candidate?

Pull out all of your old admissions materials and review them with a critical eye and a fine-toothed comb. Leave no essay prompt or sentence unturned. Find out the ONE action you can take to dramatically improve your chances of getting in this time. And if you need outside perspective, make some moves to seek that out as well, especially before everything gets crazy hectic and smack dab in the middle of application season again.