Zachary Porat

Being Comfortable with Rejection

Posted on May 4, 2025

I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Denton, TX. The first half of the trip was spent at the 37th Automorphic Forms Workshop and the latter half was spent serving as a project assistant for Arithmetic Geometry at UNT. Fair warning, ten days is a long time to spend anywhere… but ten days of math in a row makes for a long trip. Despite battling conference fatigue, I still made a lot of friends and had a wonderful time. However, I would suggest that anyone with a similar travel schedule be aware of how exhausting it can be and take breaks throughout the trip to maintain mental sharpness.

In today’s blog, I want to talk about rejection; in particular, I want to talk about becoming comfortable with rejection. Unfortunately, rejection is commonplace in academia, especially for graduate students. As funding sources become more scarce, you will face rejection from conferences and workshops that you really want to attend. Your papers will get rejected, your grant applications will get rejected, your job applications will get rejected—the list goes on. Frequently, the answer will simply be no. When you inevitably get rejected, though, do not fret because you are in good company.

One of the Clay lectures at this year’s AFW was delivered by Ken Ribet. In addition to his talk, Professor Ribet served on a panel about succeeding in academia. While the panel was full of sage advice, perhaps the most insightful moment was when Professor Ribet told a story about his own experience with rejection. He explained that one summer, while still an undergraduate student at Brown, he applied to a summer symposium in number theory at Stony Brook. In response, the executive director of the program wrote on official AMS letterhead: “Since it appears you will neither benefit from, nor contribute to, the summer symposium, your application is denied.”

Of course, Ken Ribet did not let this rejection stop him. He would go on to graduate school at Harvard, earning his PhD under the supervision of John Tate. He then held a postdoc position at Princeton before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley. He also won the Fermat Prize for helping pave the way for the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by showing that it would follow from the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. In the moment, he recounted, the rejection hurt, but he did not let it dictate his future.

While generally the wording of rejections has become a bit more gentle, the rejections themselves still remain. A major aspect of this job is resilience, and you have to be willing to embrace it. Sometimes rejections will come with suggestions on how to improve your application or submission in the future, allowing you to make adjustments and learn from the experience. Other times, no reason will be given for the rejection, and you will just have to shrug it off. The key is to get back up, dust yourself off, and keep on chugging along.

All that being said, you should take the opportunities when they arise. I have regrets about saying no to certain programs, anticipating other opportunities I was certain I would be accepted to, only to be left stunned after getting rejected. I promise, it is not a good feeling looking back. You cannot expect yesses, and so you should seize them when they occur. I will leave you with one other piece of advice from the panel that I found quite profound: “You should never say no to an opportunity (e.g. attending a conference, giving a talk), if the only reason for declining is because you are scared.”

P.S. I would be remiss if I did not include a picture of a beautiful Texas sunset.