People in academia spend their whole lives making applications—college applications, scholarship applications, internship and job applications, funding and grant proposals, conference and journal article submissions… Along the way, they face many failures and rejections. As one of them, I am failing all the time as well and here are my records.

Undergraduate Rejections

Ranking based on U.S. News & World Report 2025 Best National University Rankings

  • Princeton University
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Stanford University
  • California Institute of Technology
  • Duke University
  • Northwestern University
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • Cornell University
  • Columbia University
  • Dartmouth College
  • University of California, Los Angeles
  • University of California, Berkeley
  • Rice University
  • Vanderbilt University
  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • University of California, San Diego
  • New York University
  • University of Texas at Austin
  • Georgia Institute of Technology
  • University of California, Irvine
  • Tufts University
  • University of Washington

Graduate Rejections

Ranking based on CSRankings (2025, All Areas, the world)

  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • Georgia Institute of Technology
  • University of California, San Diego
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • University of Maryland, College Park
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich
  • Stanford University
  • University of California, Berkeley
  • University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Cornell University
  • University of Washington
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • University of Texas at Austin
  • University of Toronto
  • Columbia University
  • École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
  • New York University
  • Princeton University
  • University of Southern California
  • University of California Los Angeles
  • Johns Hopkins University
  • Harvard University
  • University College London
  • California Institute of Technology

Internship Rejections

Ranking based on CompaniesMarketCap.com

  • NVIDIA
  • Microsoft
  • Alphabet (Google)
  • Amazon
  • Meta Platforms (Facebook)
  • Tesla
  • Tencent
  • Salesforce
  • AMD
  • Alibaba

  • Walt Disney

  • Adobe
  • QUALCOMM
  • Electronic Arts
  • Baidu
  • Snap
  • Duolingo
  • Virgin Orbit

Conference Rejections

  • NeurIPS 2022
  • WACV 2023
  • ICML 2023
  • ICCV 2023
  • ICLR 2023
  • CVPR 2023
  • ECCV 2024
  • ICLR 2024
  • CVPR 2024
  • NeurIPS 2024
  • ICLR 2025
  • ICCV 2025