“Dear Liam, thank you for your interest in Teach For America and for the time and effort you invested in interviewing with us. After careful consideration, I am sorry to inform you that we will not be extending you an offer to join the corps,” the Teach For America email read.
That was not the end of the email — there was some B.S. about other opportunities “BEFORE YOU GO,” but I had all I could take. To my surprise, it was just another rejection email.
I quickly gathered my belongings from my desk in the first floor reading room of the British Library (my chances of returning to my studies that night had gone out the window), hurried to the bathroom in the building’s basement and let the tears flow hard.
I was devastated. I exited the building on the phone with my mom.
My mom told me the customary “everything happens for a reason” cliché, which failed to calm me down. I can provide no such takeaway for my reader here.
Teach For America had captured my attention at the Dahnke Ballroom job fair in January, and I quickly started to dream about life as an English teacher in Philadelphia, sharing the love for reading that I’ve been able to nurture at Notre Dame with my students. I was definitely drinking the AmeriCorps Kool-Aid, but I dreamed of inviting Zadie Smith to Zoom into my classroom or of introducing students to Joe Mitchell, James Baldwin and Malcolm X.
Was I more prepared than the person they chose over me? I genuinely thought so. I think they messed up and missed out — I’m passionate about this stuff!
But was I actually prepared to enter an inner city school and, as Teach For America proclaims, “build a more just world”? Was I about to use my passion for reading to reveal the liberating power of reading to my students?
Ten days of reflection later, I think that may have been a fantasy. I have no interest in bashing Teach For America in this column, but being rejected has allowed me the space to reflect on the realities of the program.
However, many of my classmates here at Notre Dame have sought out the fantasy (of which I seem to be the only one to have been rejected) in the quixotic pursuit of a decent and dignified job which none of us really deserve.
This fantasy, by the way, still sounds pretty appealing to me. So, if any readers know of any English teacher openings in the Greater Philadelphia area or anywhere in the Northeast for a passionate, unemployed and uncertified senior graduating from Notre Dame, you can find my email below.
As I have said already, there are no uplifting takeaways to this story. And the breaking news notifications from my phone’s NYTimes app haven’t offered much hope for finding a “good” occupation or graduate school opportunities — it’s all DOGE, DOGE, DOGE!
I don’t want to sound unappreciative here — after all, an education from Notre Dame puts me in one of the world’s most enviable positions for a young person to be in. Nobody can take the experience away from us who have attended this school. Not the books we’ve read, not the friends we’ve made and not the Ginger races we’ve watched.
It is hard to complain without sounding ungrateful. I would rather laugh here in my final inside column, as I did in my first some years ago, but it is hard to laugh when you want to cry.
