Bleeding Fiction

I got my last email from UC Berkeley this evening. They reviewed my application and were unable to reconsider their decision. This isn't a surprise or anything, or even a big disappointment. I didn't really expect them to change their minds.

What aggrivates me, though, is the text of the email itself. Now, I do appreciate the time the woman took to write to me and even more the time she took to explain their reasoning; that was very kind and certainly more than they had to do. But there was one particular phrase in the email that really aggrivated me. It said "your statement for the FLAS fellowship...was not considered a sophisticated argument." Ouch.

Now, leaving aside the fact that my application for a particular fellowship shouldn't directly impact on my admission into the school or program at large, the woman had many solid reasons to restate my rejection from the program without citing my lack of a sophisticated argument. For example, she also cited the fact that I'm "not as far long on [my] language training [as the other applicants]." This is true and certainly the first reason that I would have to reject me from the program. She could easily have stopped there.

I can't, unfortunately, remember what statement I made for my FLAS fellowship application. For all I know it may well have been an "[un]sophisticated argument." I do make those from time to time. It may well be, and likely is, that I'm reading far too much into this. I want to stress that I'm not taking this personally; I know the woman and department haven't got it in for me and I bear her and them no malice, I know I wasn't the strongest applicant. It's just that I thought the tone of the statement - with its typos and use of the weak passive voice - was a little on the insulting side.