Famous Harvard Rejects
Every famous person who were not graduated from Harvard, may have been rejected by Harvard. But we have no way of knowing unless they are not embarrassed to tell us. So please comment on this article and let us know.
Rejections aren’t uncommon. Harvard accepts only a little more than 7% of the 29,000 undergraduate applications it receives each year (including 2,000 high school valedictorians are rejected each year.) Some of the rejects will end up to be celebrities such as Nobel laureates or billionaire . They include investor Warren Buffet, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, NBC “Today” show host Meredith Vieira, former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw, New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick, CNN founder Ted Turner, folk rock legend Art Garfunkel, Matt Groening, creator of the animated television series “The Simpsons,” Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center president Harold Varmus, and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger round out the list.
Warren Buffet
Mr. Buffett regards his rejection at age 19 by Harvard Business School as a pivotal episode in his life. Since Warren Buffet grew up before college was invented, he could not experience the thin envelope from Harvard College. Instead Buffet got rejected from HBS in 1950 at age 19 for being “too young,” and for being a prominent sharecropper (seriously – Buffet used his paper boy proceeds as a youth to start a “farmland leasing” racket). Looking back, he says Harvard wouldn’t have been a good fit. But at the time, he “had this feeling of dread” after being rejected in an admissions interview in Chicago, and a fear of disappointing his father. As it turned out, his father responded with “only this unconditional love…an unconditional belief in me,” Mr. Buffett says. Exploring other options, he realized that two investing experts he admired, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, were teaching at Columbia’s graduate business school. He dashed off a late application, where by a stroke of luck it was fielded and accepted by Mr. Dodd. From these mentors, Mr. Buffett says he learned core principles that guided his investing. The Harvard rejection also benefited his alma mater; the family gave more than $12 million to Columbia in 2008 through the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, based on tax filings.
The lesson of negatives becoming positives has proved true repeatedly, Mr. Buffett says. He was terrified of public speaking — so much so that when he was young he sometimes threw up before giving an address. So he enrolled in a Dale Carnegie public speaking course and says the skills he learned there enabled him to woo his future wife, Susan Thompson, a “champion debater,” he says. “I even proposed to my wife during the course,” he says. “If I had been only a mediocre speaker I might not have taken it.”
Harold Varmus
Harold Varmus, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, says getting rejected twice by Harvard Medical School, where a dean advised him to enlist in the military, was soon forgotten as he plunged into his studies at Columbia University’s med school.
Dr. Varmus, the Nobel laureate and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, was daunted by the first of his two turndowns by Harvard’s med school. He enrolled instead in grad studies in literature at Harvard, but was uninspired by thoughts of a career in that field. After a year, he applied again to Harvard’s med school and was rejected, by a dean who chastised him in an interview for being “inconstant and immature” and advised him to enlist in the military. Officials at Columbia’s medical school, however, seemed to value his “competence in two cultures,” science and literature, he says.
If rejected by the school you love, Dr. Varmus advises in an email, immerse yourself in life at a college that welcomes you. “The differences between colleges that seem so important before you get there will seem a lot less important once you arrive at one that offered you a place.”
Scott McNealy
McNealy graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in economics but was rejected from HBS. McNealy, who had a notoriously crap work ethic and a penchant for hockey (buggery on ice), eventually went to Stanford Business School, but not before the Cardinal rejected him twice. Rejected once, and then again, by business schools at Stanford and Harvard, Scott McNealy practiced the perseverance that would characterize his career. A brash economics graduate of Harvard, he was annoyed that “they wouldn’t take a chance on me right out of college,” he says. He kept trying, taking a job as a plant foreman for a manufacturer and working his way up in sales. “By my third year out of school, it was clear I was going to be a successful executive. I blew the doors off my numbers,” he says. Granted admission to Stanford’s business school, he met Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and went on to head Sun for 22 years
Ted Turner
Time puts rejection letters in perspective, says Ted Turner. He received dual rejections as a teenager, by Princeton and Harvard, he says in an interview. Little Ted got turned away from Harvard College in 1957 for being “an average student,” which, if you’re rich, means “fucking retarded.” After getting a 470 on his SATs, Ted ended up sailing at Brown, where he was eventually kicked out for rich-kid antic misbehavior and an unhealthy love for swabbing the poop deck. What on earth do you have to do to get kicked out of Brown? The future America’s Cup winner attended Brown University, where he became captain of the sailing team. He left college after his father cut off financial support, and joined his father’s billboard company, which he built into the media empire that spawned CNN. Brown has since awarded him a bachelor’s degree.
Lee Bollinger
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger was rejected as a teenager when he applied to Harvard. He says the experience cemented his belief that it was up to him alone to define his talents and potential. His family had moved to a small, isolated town in rural Oregon, where educational opportunities were sparse. As a kid, he did menial jobs around the newspaper office, like sweeping the floor.
Mr. Bollinger recalls thinking at the time, “I need to work extra hard and teach myself a lot of things that I need to know,” to measure up to other students who were “going to prep schools, and having assignments that I’m not.” When the rejection letter arrived, he accepted a scholarship to University of Oregon and later graduated from Columbia Law School. His advice: Don’t let rejections control your life. To “allow other people’s assessment of you to determine your own self-assessment is a very big mistake,” says Mr. Bollinger, a First Amendment author and scholar. “The question really is, who at the end of the day is going to make the determination about what your talents are, and what your interests are? That has to be you.”
Jann Wenner
Wenner got rejected by Harvard College in 1964 and went on to drop out of Berkeley to construct the ultimate college application essay – Rolling Stone (at least originally). The magazine’s first few years certainly captured a great “unique journey of self-discovery” narrative like the ones fawned over by college admissions officers.