Mike: Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. We’re in the admissions category, but we’re also in the “a little bit of everything” category. I’m going to be talking about, why does denial from a college or a law school—in this case law school—hurt so much, and what can you do about it going forward? What are the actions you can take?
[0:30] Before I begin, I’m going to read an email I received recently. Stop me when this doesn’t sound familiar, and you’re never going to stop me, right? If you’ve ever gotten a denial in your life, this is how they sound.
“Thank you very much for taking the time to apply to speak at TEDxSarasota 2026 and for sharing your idea with us. Unfortunately, we are not able to accommodate your talk in the event. We received over 300 applications this year, and the selection process involved many difficult decisions. Please note that your not being selected is in no way a reflection of the quality or relevance of your idea. Our decisions came down to overall program balance, timing, and thematic fit.” And there’s a reason why I slowed down at that end, but let’s take this piece by piece.
How important was this to me? Well, I’ve never applied for a TEDx talk before. I speak all the time on podcasts, at college campuses, and in the media. I had no desire particularly, but this one stood out for personal reasons about being in Sarasota at a particular time, so actually, this was pretty high on my list on the importance. Not as high as a dream school, okay? I can’t even say in the same category, but it was high.
But there’s another variable that goes into this. I kind of thought I was going to get it. So think of a school you think you’re going to get admitted to—and this is happening so much this cycle; you’re not alone—now, there are 300 applications for four or six speakers, so I could have been a little bit more realistic with myself, but I’ve done so much public speaking, I have such a resume and bio, I had to link my Wikipedia page, I had to do a video, all of those seemed particularly adapted for this particular TEDx talk, so I thought I was going to get it. So that made the rejection feel—the denial, not a rejection. They’re not rejecting me; they don’t know me. It made it hurt a little more when I got this email and opened it up, because I had these expectations.
[2:22] There’s a psychologist, Gary John Bishop, who talks about “accept, don’t expect.” I expected, and it hurt. You have something called your apocrine system; it’s attached to stress and emotions. Which, again, if you’re listening to this because you’ve had a denial, you’re going to know what I’m talking about. For me, this was only a couple seconds, because I’m 54 years old and I’ve gotten a lot of denials. But you get that biological response. I mean, it’s for evolutionary reasons, but my heart beat a little faster. I felt anger and pain. Your rejection pathways are tied to your pain pathways in your brain.
So I didn’t get what I wanted, and it stung, and this was a couple weeks ago. And I barely remembered it to bring out for this podcast. And this is going to tie in to why admissions denials hurt and what you can do about it. I’ve been there. I’ll be there again. I’ve been denied thousands of times in my life. It hurts.
Why do admissions denials hurt so much? Well, let me start off with, the more important and supersized something feels to you, the more the denial is going to hurt. I keep thinking back to deans of law schools who I’ve known in my 26-year career, who are cool as a cucumber, never seemed amped up, applied for college presidencies, didn’t get them, or professors applying for deanships, didn’t get them. I can remember a time when I was at WashU, and one person in particular, one faculty member, just so revved up about, “Why didn’t I get the deanship, why didn’t I get the deanship?” And they couldn’t stop ruminating about it in their heads. We just had a podcast with Dr. Guy Winch about rumination. We had another podcast that we’re going to link about handling rejection.
[4:06] So number one—and I’m going to give you the five reasons why denials hurt, I’m going to break them all down, and then most importantly, I’m going to tell you what you can do going forward. Number one, it feels like personal rejection. It’s not, and I’ll get there. Number two, it involves our belief systems. Okay? Our belief systems are overly negative; I’ll get there. Number three, it’s a blow to our self-esteem, our esteem systems. I’ll go there. Number four, it involves comparing with others. Number five, it involves uncertainty about the future. This is the hardest one for me to knock down, but I’m going to try to knock them all down.
It feels like personal rejection. You can listen to our Dr. Guy Winch podcast, or I can summarize. The theory, evolutionarily, is, for hundreds of thousands of years, we had to travel in packs and tribes. So almost everything we do, believe it or not, has an evolutionary backbone to it. There’s a reason to help to survive as a species. Sensing that you are going to be rejected made you alter what you were doing, which by the way is very important; I’m going to end on that note, adaptability. So you get stimulus, feedback, you alter your behavior, and you don’t get kicked out of the tribe and pack, and you live. What happened to the people that didn’t alter their behavior? They got kicked out of the tribe and pack, they died, and they didn’t pass on their genes. So for hundreds of thousands of years—and I just want to think on this for a second—the people with the harshest self-criticisms, the strongest feelings of rejection, for hundreds of thousands of years, were passing down that gene of feeling rejected.
Unless you’re on some weird game show where you literally live on an island, I think Dr. Winch said, you don’t need that anymore. You can survive on your own. So we’re all existing on this planet with these super-sized genes of rejection that we don’t need anymore. We’re not going to die if we get rejected, but that’s literally what it feels like, which is why it hits our apocrine system, our pain system, and has our brains going haywire. If you’ve ever been broken up with in a relationship, no different. That’s denial. It’s just even more personal; it’s rejection. And you biologically, for a period of time, go haywire.
In the admissions process, it’s not a personal rejection. They don’t know you. So there’s an evolutionary echo that’s causing that, which happened to me when I opened this stupid email. It’s causing a temporary—I really want to focus on that word “temporary,” because you’re going to move on a month, two months, a year later. You’re not going to stay mad at the school a year later, I can promise you that, and we’ll get there.
[6:40] So it involves belief systems about ourselves, was number two. We have a negativity bias that, again, is evolutionarily built in. Our great ancestors, however many thousands of years ago, they go foraging for berries. They find a new berry, it tastes good. Great. You can eat it. You find a new berry, and it’s poisonous, and you’re sick for two weeks, and you almost die. That memory is much more strong than the good memory of tasting a blueberry. Dr. Paul Conti, one of the leading trauma and psychologists and therapists on the planet, who we’ve invited on our podcast—we’ll link his podcast with Mel Robbins about this.
Point being this: we talk negatively to ourselves for adaptive reasons, evolutionary, that are maladaptive now. Can you imagine if I hired someone, your biggest enemy, to shadow you all day, telling you negative things about yourself? That’s what we do to ourselves. I wouldn’t have to do that, because we are hardwired to do it to ourselves. So when you get denied from a law school, you have insecurities about yourself, you have beliefs about yourself—we all do, by the way. Dr. Gabor Maté, just about the most famous psychologist on the planet, talks about this, and we can link his podcast. You are no different than me. I’m no different from you and everyone else applying. We’re going to have some fear-driven, instinctual beliefs about ourselves that aren’t all positive, and the second you get that email with the denial, those light up, and all the many, many, many positive things about you, you’re not thinking about.
[8:15] Number three, it’s a blow to your self-esteem. We live in the most psychologically pernicious society ever to exist. Physically, survival-wise, we’re doing great. I just read a book on Magellan circumnavigating the globe. They started off with, I don’t know, 300 people on the boat, and eight survived when they came back around two years later. Hard to survive for much of human existence. Easy to survive now. So we have all this time to be in our head.
And we live in this society where we’re getting so much esteem from other people—what did they post on Reddit? Did that person smile at me? Did that family member tell me I did a great job for getting admitted? That’s other-based esteem. It’s conditioned on others.
Attribute-based esteem. Did I get into the higher-ranked school? Conditioned on something else, not you. If you’ve listened to my podcast, you’ve heard me talk about these before.
The third, which is the one that I struggle with, is performance-based esteem. Did I beat the people online? Did I win the race? None of these are real. They’re all conditioned on someone else. They’re all going to go away over time.
The only kind of esteem that matters is our unconditional belief system—I talked about that in number two—about ourselves.
[9:29] But the problem is—and now we’re going to segue to number four—in this society, 24/7, you can see how many upvotes and likes your parents are getting. That’s passed down to us. We’re on social media all the time, looking at carefully curated profiles of others. So we are comparing against other people, not growing inside, not comparing against our own self (“How do I take this as a learning experience? How do I get better?”). Compare and despair is the world we live in.
I want you to remember something. You’ll have “stats twins,” likely, out there. These are your “stats twins”; they’re not your “app twins.” So if this person with the same alleged LSAT and GPA and maybe relevant undergrad school and even major gets admitted to a school, and you get waitlisted or denied, you know nothing about their application. You know nothing about the needs of the school that admitted them. There might be something in their application that you’ll never know about, highly likely, that fit an institutional need of that law school admissions office that you don’t have. It’s not a reflection of you. In fact, none of this is a reflection of you, and Dr. Guy Winch talks about that in the podcast we’re linking. How does an admissions officer, given a target LSAT and a target median GPA and 12 pages at most of your writing, an interview, know 22, 24, 26, 30 years of your existence? I can assure you they don’t, because I’ve been that admissions officer.
[11:04] The other aspect that comes into play—and so many of our consultants that are from these hyper-competitive elite schools, Yale, Harvard, etc., etc., I could go on—they say the same thing all the time: 60% of the people we denied, we wish we could admit. We just didn’t have room. We had to make these incredible difficult decisions based around building a class, and if we admitted this person with these attributes, from this school, with this major, from this state, it made it more challenging for someone with the same profile on these 12 pages. We didn’t know them. Or they did great in the interview—and I can relate to this so acutely personally, having done admissions—I loved this person’s visit, I loved their interview, I wanted to admit them, I fought all summer long to admit them; we just didn’t have space. The people we admitted early cycle to hit our target medians or whatever filled up the space. We really hoped to see them in the transfer pool. We really wish them well.
[12:03] So that’s why it hurts. I don’t want to minimize this. Because I know how much it can hurt. I’ve talked on both sides of this, as an admissions officer to people on the phone, devastated, and then running a consulting firm. We have, obviously, clients every year who don’t get into their dream school. It’s pretty rare to get into your number one dream school for a number of people. Let me put it in other words, it’s exceptionally rare for someone to go 12 for 12 in the admissions process. You hardly ever see it. Less than 1% of applicants are above the highest LSAT and the highest median GPA at the top schools. 175 median, a 4.0, that’s well less than 1% of the applicant pool.
So almost everyone, or I wouldn’t be doing this podcast, gets denied. You’re not in it alone. What do you do moving forward?
[12:50] Number one, I’ve already talked about this. Just sit down and realize this has nothing to do with you as a person. At all. I can’t stress that enough. They’re not denying you as a person. They’re denying a writing, an interview. And guess what? If you crush that interview, the person who wants to admit you, who just interviewed you, who might be screaming all summer to admit you, if their medians aren’t stabilized, they still might not be able to admit you, no matter how well you did. So it’s not about you. It’s not a reflection of your self-worth, which only can come from you. It can’t come from an admissions officer who doesn’t know anything about you.
Another way to move on is, talk to other people about this process. I love how Reddit, or other message boards or social media, TikTok, I’ve seen people supporting other people. You can see a lot of TikToks of people talking about their denials. They’re not rejections, they’re denials. You can seek support. You can talk it out with others. You can talk it out with family members. The worst thing you can do is bottle it up, because if you bottle it up, you’re going to make it about you and not about this cold process. And I know I’m sounding repetitive, and that’s intentional, because so many people internalize denials.
[14:01] You can focus on action. One thing I’m not bad at is turning failures into, “Okay, Mike, all life is, is ‘do a thing, get feedback, alter/adjust what you do, and do that thing again.’” That’s life. It’s so often just, take it as a learning experience. Dr. Winch didn’t get into a single school he applied to for his PhD in psychology, and now he’s one of the world’s most famous psychologists and public speakers. He did a thing, he adapted, he reapplied, he changed his application, and he got into NYU. By the way, he still didn’t get into his safety school the second year he applied.
So what can you do? Well, to begin with, there’s a waitlist process. I see so many posts on Reddit, “Cycle recap, cycle over,” and the person is still waitlisted at a number of schools they’re saying in the thread they would attend. It’s going to be, by my estimation, a highly active waitlist summer.
At minimum, there’s going to be more waitlist admits. I almost know this for a fact, having talked to other admissions officers. Now, there are also more people who have been waitlisted. So as a percentage, it might not be more, but schools have gone really slow and tempered their number of admits. And with the new federal loan cap, I think more people are going to be debt-averse. So you’re going to see this ping-ponging of people turning schools down and then getting more money from other schools, or more admits coming.
The waitlist is always a domino process. When the schools at the top are said “no” to—there’s a tiny number of schools whose yield rates are over 50%, maybe only one whose yield rate is over 75%. So even at the highest level, Yale, 2 out of every 10 are turning them down, roughly; maybe it’s 1.5 every 10. And you get below that, at most schools, it’s well over 50% are saying no, because the typical applicant applies to something like 9, 10 schools. You can only go to one. And schools have to deal with that throughout the waitlist summer. It’s going to be a big waitlist year.
[15:59] You can do what Dr. Winch did. You can reapply. Will next cycle be more or less competitive? Someone on the phone with me quoted a prelaw advisor of theirs who told them next cycle’s going to be more competitive. How would they know? We do this for a living, and I think we do it as well if not I’d like to think better than anyone predicting the future cycles. I have no idea if next cycle is going to be less or more competitive. I have instincts. My instincts are the data can’t keep going up like it has. My instincts are the LSAT scores, which have shifted to the right, higher percentages at the top are going to stabilize because of in-person. But I won’t have actual data to support this until the June LSAT. So many people taking LSATs now are taking it for waitlist movements. And then I’ll have a lot of data in September.
In September, I have a pretty good ability to tell you—and we’ll do a whole long podcast or blog—if it’s going to be more competitive (I doubt it), just as competitive (my best guess), or less competitive (my second best guess). But if it’s just as competitive, and you change something in your application, your LSAT score, your GPA, your work experience, etc., etc., you’re more competitive. And if it’s less competitive next cycle, you’re already more competitive even if you applied with the same data, which I would encourage you to shake things up a little bit.
[17:18] You can get off the waitlist. You could reapply. You can transfer. From having done this for so long, I can remember when I started off at Vanderbilt, so many people would come to Vanderbilt, as is almost every school, we were their backup. They had dreams of Duke or Penn or Chicago or NYU or Columbia or Harvard, and I would’ve gotten to know them, and they would say to me during the week of orientation—which we in admissions were still in charge of before we went on our merry way as admissions to the next cycle, people would say—”Hey, you know, I love that you admitted me, thank you so much, but I’m going to transfer out.” I was also a dean of career services. I would hear this all the time from 1Ls. “Hey, Dean Spivey, thank you so much for this admit, but my dream is to go to Harvard Law School.” 9.5 out of every 10 of those people never applied to transfer out. Because you don’t actually know what your dream school is. You might think it’s Harvard or Penn—and I get it. I get that right now you might think that, and you haven’t heard from those schools or you’ve been denied, and you’re listening to this podcast and you’re saying, “How can this person tell me that this wasn’t my dream point?” I can’t. But I also can tell you, you don’t know that that’s going to end up the best place for you.
So the point of my story is, 9.5 would say, Vanderbilt, I can’t believe how much I like Nashville, my classmates, my faculty, I have this summer gig in New York City at a big law firm, and that was the whole point of me wanting to go to Columbia, so I’m not transferring out. So you can transfer out, but from personal experience, and it’s a lot of it—and this is why I think the feeling of denial, the feeling of rejection, the feeling that it hurts, the sting, it goes away quickly. One, because you’re going to get, likely, admitted to some other schools. Even if you don’t have an admit now, most people, if you apply to the right scatterplot of schools in classic format (safeties, targets, stretches), sure, maybe the stretches have said deny. Maybe the targets have said deny and you’re surprised, like my TEDxSarasota email, which I can laugh at right now and it’s only been a week or two. Right?
[19:12] If you get admitted, you’re going to law school. If you applied to 15, you can’t go to 15, you can only go to one. Maybe that school you thought was your dream school, you end up going to another school that was lower on your list, and after a semester there, a year there, I’ve heard for so many years of my career, “Spivey, I couldn’t have seen myself anywhere else.” There’s country music songs about this—what we thought were our dreams would’ve been nightmares because of where we ended up, which was much better than where we thought we wanted to be.
I never in my wildest imagination thought I would become an admissions officer. I was in the business world wanting to be a company vice president, and then when I was an admissions officer and getting my PhD in higher education, I thought I was going to be a college president. In my wildest dreams, I never thought I would be an admissions consultant. And now I work from home and get to dictate my own schedule. And if you had told me 30 years ago this would be my trajectory, I would’ve been upset and said, “Why am I not going to be a college president? These are who all my mentors are. This is why I chose to go to the graduate schools I went to.” So you’ll move on, is my point about that.
[20:18] My final point is going to be this. So you can take action, for sure. You can apply again, you can transfer, you can do everything you can to get off the waitlist. And often that involves retaking an LSAT. There’s all this mythology about “applying early is so important.” The most important thing is still going to be if you’re above their median LSAT. So a two-point LSAT jump from below their target to above their target can make all the difference in the world. The need this year for waitlist movement can make all the difference in the world.
But let’s say none of that happens, like I was just talking about. Make a lifetime of proving people wrong. Make it a goal. This is what I do. When I am denied, so from TEDxSarasota, and I never thought I would apply for another TEDx. I’ve already applied for three. I’m going to prove TEDxSarasota wrong, and I’m going to go to TEDxAtlanta or New York or Key Largo or whatever, and crush it. I’m not going to send them an email; I’m just going to say to myself, they messed up. There’s no way those six people they took, there’s no way all six did a better job than I just did at TEDxAtlanta.
If Harvard Law School denies you, Penn Law School, Vanderbilt Law School, Emory, Florida, Drexel, I can go down the list—go to law school. You’re going to. Stay passionate. Once you get an admit—I mentioned I would allude to this—once you get your first admit, that denial stings a lot less. And there’s a lot of people right now who haven’t gotten their first admit yet who are going to, or haven’t got admitted to a school they want to go to, who are going to. The Sarasota TEDx, it motivated me to apply to three others that make me excited. So that was a win. Prove them wrong.
[21:54] If you’re listening to this, it means you’re invested in the process. I know it hurts. You’re going to go to law school. You can kick ass at the law school you go to, you can transfer up. Transfer admissions is so much based on first-year law school GPA. The best predictor of how well you’re going to go do in law school is how well you’ve done in law school. Or stay at the same freaking school, crush it in the recruitment process for firms—and you’re going to get denials there, too. That’s life. The more failures, the more you’re living. The more you put yourself out there publicly—go listen to this clip from Scott Galloway, Professor Scott Galloway—the more you put yourself out there publicly and embrace those failures, the more successful you’re going to be at life.
So put yourself out there. Throw in an application to three more schools. Go to that school you didn’t think you were going to go. Be in the top 10% of the class. If you want biglaw or whatever, public interest, get that job you want. I was a dean of career services during the Great Recession. 50% of students were not getting jobs 10 months after graduation. And guess what? This is back in the day of Facebook; I’m connected to so many people on Facebook who were students of mine who didn’t have jobs at graduation or 10 months out. They’re thriving in their careers. They’ve proved those firms wrong.
I know for a fact, if you’re listening to this, that denial hurt, because you came to this podcast with the word denial in it. And I know equally for a fact it is temporary. The pain goes away. There’s a million things ahead of you in your life, most of which you can’t predict, that are going to prove that school absolutely, abjectly, that they made a bad decision, and that you should have been someone to bet on. So go forward and bet on yourself with someone else. This is Mike Spivey of Spivey Consulting Group.
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