failure cv

Many times, people look towards others without knowing the full story of their life. I don't want to be that person. So here you go, if you're looking. A list of not just times I hit the rim and bounced off, but literally whiffed the net, maybe even missed the backboard and was being hurled into the crowd in anger.

• Rejected from Stone Center Summer Institute

• Failed the field paper in the first round

• Failed the first round of both qualifying exams

• Number of professional opportunities I've walked away from because I was simply too dumb:

  • Working with a professor on a paper for a new auction mechanism

  • Working with a professor to develop the one-act play I wrote

  • Being offered an internship on the Senate Banking Committee and choosing, for some strange reason, to work in the front office of Senator Brown instead

• Applying for Graduate School: rejected from

  • Stanford

  • Harvard

  • Princeton

  • Berkeley

  • Yale

  • UCLA

  • University of Michigan

  • UW-Madison

  • UCSD

  • University of Minnesota

  • MIT

  • Penn

  • CMU (I don't blame them, four years of me was likely enough)

  • University of Maryland, College Park

  • UC Davis

  • University of Rochester

  • University of Chicago

  • Columbia

  • NYU

  • UT Austin

  • Brown

  • Northwestern

  • Duke

  • Cornell

• Applying for master's: rejected from

  • Fulbright Scholarship

  • London School of Economics MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics

• Federal Reserve:

  • Was not renewed for a third year contract

  • Got a C+ in undergraduate-level real analysis (I don't have an excuse here, just gave up)

• Applying for RAships:

  • Rejected from 50+ RAships, received one offer (and thank god)

• Unemployed immediately after college for four months while looking for jobs. Gained 20 lbs

• Bad grades:

  • Bocconi University: 102/110

    • 22/30 on Statistics 

    • 21/30 on Political Economy

    • 22/30 on Monetary Policy

  • Carnegie Mellon: 3.42 GPA

    • Failed a research course in undergrad, where I was supposed to RA for a professor

    • C in Calc 2

    • C in Discrete Mathematics

    • Rejected from the CMU Qatar Program

• Applying for College: rejected from

  • LSE

  • Dartmouth

  • Harvard

  • Yale

  • & more, that I cannot be bothered to remember. Only got into CMU and OSU.

• High school

  • ran for student council and lost, twice

  • ran for class president and lost

  • applied to be valedictorian speaker and lost

  • failed my AP Calculus BC exam

  • didn't even know I was supposed to study for IB exams

If you've read this far...

... I'm guessing you need something more than what I've shown you so far. And I get it, because I needed it too. 

Let me tell you one thing I've learned now, looking back on my continuous string of failures. Each failure ended up with me being pushed harder than I'd ever imagined. When I first got into Ohio State, I was confused and puzzled because I'd liked the program enough to apply but wondered what was wrong with me that I'd been rejected by everyone else. Only through being at Ohio State did I receive a deep, technical, and rigorous training that changed my entire philosophy of research, while getting exposure to some of the greatest minds in American politics and public policy. I'd originally dreamed of going to LSE, but getting rejected from the Fulbright and going to Bocconi instead allowed me to meet Guido Tabellini, whose words and demeanor changed my professional career. Not being renewed at the Fed was a blessing in disguise, because I met Andrew Metrick who sparked my deep interest in the relationship between institutions and economic outcomes. Being so bad at the Fed, all the time, made me understand what it was that made research (and research assisting) serious and good. Even going to CMU was not my dream, I truly wanted desperately to go to MIT. But being at CMU gave me the technical foundation that would completely change how I saw the world, and the empathy to think about the humanity behind the decisions that others make (e.g. what makes someone truly believe in surveillance capitalism? what makes an institution build partnerships with the sister locations it does? and who, really, are the people who have the most power, and how do they live?). It wasn't my dream to grow up in Ohio, but growing up in Ohio forced me to contend with the fact that the people who voted against my rights were also people I was friends with; people who would buy me drinks at bars and talk about how cool I am. 

Research is a lot like writing. Fitzgerald says we have one good story to tell, and if we're lucky, people will listen to it again and again (I think, I'm just saying whatever I want, no one can stop me). If I didn't live the life I did, if I wasn't completely rebuffed from the dreams I had at every turn, I wouldn't have the courage or tools to tell the one story I did want to tell, over and over, and will continue to tell as long as people will listen.