Rejection is in the air...

My graduate program is hosting an open house this week for incoming students - last year too many of us showed up after getting accepted - so this year the program was only able to accept six students. Lots of applicants were rejected. I myself also received bad news over email today. I got rejected for a fellowship I had applied for last fall. It's a big bummer because it would have been 3 additional years of funding and I really worked hard on the application. But it's better to know now - and at least I got an email instead of just no information forthcoming - I find it much more respectful than when you just never hear back. C'est la vie. So I went and got myself a consolation prize of an external harddrive.... Why? A good friend of mine on law school dropped her laptop a couple of days ago and her hard drive went bust. She lost over 400 pages of typed notes from the semester as well as two twenty page papers that she had written over the last week (she had no hard copies or recent external backups when this happened). Rejections I can handle, there are an infinite number of worse things that could happen I suppose.