Why would you get that?
Why do we let people who knew us at fourteen define who we are in our twenties?
About a year ago, I received an exciting offer: The White House Unit internship at NBC News through the NBCUniversal internship program for the 2025-2026 academic school year.
I decided to post on LinkedIn to share with my network as I do with most of my career updates. As of publication, the post is my most viewed at over 35,000 views. It was also the one I enjoyed writing the most. In the post, I reflected on something people rarely talk about: the rejection coming before the potential acceptance.
A year ago I applied for an academic year internship at NBC News and made it all the way to the final interviewing stages before I was cut. It was pretty crushing at first. The memory of looking out the back window talking to my mom about the rejection at the DC Superior Court during my lunch break while working at DC Witness at 1:15 p.m. on June 20, 2024, will be burned into my mind forever.
But I am very happy I was initially rejected and feel I am ready more than ever to take on an internship of this magnitude due to all of the experiences I had last year. Rejection sometimes means the opportunity is not happening now but maybe later. And that is ok! (Fun fact: GW was literally my 13th choice college and going into the journalism industry was my plan-B career).
Because the post received so many views, I started getting messages from people with responses. I had many private messages from people who had gone through a similar trial and error process with internships. My goal with my messaging was to make people feel less lonely about their own rejection experiences.
I was generally happy with the responses the post received until a former classmate reached out over iMessage. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he asked me a question about my internship offer I have never forgotten:
"Why would you get that?"
I completely froze.
Why would I get that?
Why would they pick me?
Am I even deserving of such a competitive internship?
Did they make a mistake?
Should I have gotten rejected?
For a moment, my emotions got the better of me. My first thought was to send a link to my LinkedIn profile and write, “I do not know, maybe look at my experience.” But I quickly brushed off that anger driven impulse.
I replied by explaining I had moved to Washington, built experience through internships, and worked hard to get there.
He responded he did not mean it like that.
I genuinely do not remember if I texted back or not. But the important part is, in the midst of all the excitement about my offer, this is a real conversation I had about a year ago.
And it is the one which stuck with me the most.
But it made me question: Why did one message from someone I barely knew still have the power to make me question myself?
The more I thought about it, the less interested I became in what he meant. I became interested in why I cared. Why did the opinion of someone I had not spoken to in years carry more weight than the opinions of the mentors, editors, and colleagues who had watched me grow?
I had met this individual when I was fourteen and we were very close for a few years. But I was a very different person back then than I am now. I have grown up, lived on my own, and worked various jobs in journalism. These experiences made me more mature and professional than I was in high school.
High school has a way of freezing people in time. When we think about former classmates, we remember them as they were, not as they have become. The people who knew us in high school often remember a version of us that no longer exists.
Maybe this is why his message stayed with me. It was not because he knew who I was, it was because, for a brief moment, I let someone from my past define who I had become.
Sometimes the opinions affecting us most come from people who no longer truly know us.
I had moved to Washington.
I learned how to report.
I was rejected.
I was accepted.
I built a life he had never seen.
And maybe that is the lesson.
The people who knew us at fourteen do not always know us in our twenties.
And this is ok. They are not supposed to.
Filed Stories are the personal essays of Maggie Rhoads. On this Substack, she does not represent the opinions or stances of her past, present, or future employers and organizations of which she is a member.
