I wonder how often it is that professors are teaching at a school which, at some point in their academic careers, rejected them? E.g., John Doe is teaching at Harvard University, when Harvard rejected him as an undergraduate (or better yet, for the Ph.D. program in the department he now teaches in).
On the one hand, that must be the ultimate feeling of vindication. On the other hand, I feel like I, at least, would have trouble with an inferiority complex if I taught at a law school which had rejected me as a law student. After all, I'd basically be looking out on a group of individuals who -- according to the value system I've enmeshed myself into -- are considered to be qualitatively smarter than I am. That makes it tough to project that scholarly authority thing.
You mean like Einstein, at the University of Zurich, I think it was?
ReplyDeleteAcceptance to a particular institution, I've found, is not always a reflection of the quality of the candidate.
If I somehow ended up teaching at Harvard, Yale, etc., I'd just assume that they overemphasized the areas of my application in which I seemed weak and thus missed the true brilliance that was evident in the areas where I was strong.
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