If you walk into the mailroom, past the day-student lounge and the wall of mailboxes, and turn left, sandwiched between the soda and snack machines, you’ll discover a blue bulletin board covered in letters bearing the crests of Harvard, Georgetown, Williams, Colorado College, UC Santa Barbara, Pomona, and Hamilton, all with their sincerest apologies.
This is the Wall of Shame, a place for seniors to pin up the contents of those notorious thin envelopes and to commiserate with classmates over rejections.
Wall of Shame creator and future University of Texas student KC Morris ’10 applied to no fewer than 18 schools and, so, considered herself a good person to start the Wall of Shame. “Just by the sheer numbers game of it, I knew I’d be rejected from a lot of places,” Morris chuckled.
Morris modeled the Wall of Shame after the one at her brother’s school. “When I came here my freshman year and realized that we didn’t have one, I vowed that that would be my contribution to this school as a senior.” Fully committed to her project, Morris posted all her own letters on the Wall of Shame.
“I didn’t want to do it half-heartedly, so I put every single rejection letter up there, even the ones that I have to print out,” Morris said.
She proposed the idea in her Facebook status to gauge its popularity. “I got three ‘Yes, do it’s, and one ‘No, that would be an awful idea, no one would ever use it, it’s such a private thing,’ and I completely respect that idea but it caught on eventually. My friends laughed at me, but they started putting their own letters up.”
Morris wanted her class to feel a sense of togetherness. “Being Deerfield students, people kind of assume that you’ve already done so many great things. Even if I was the only one up there for two months, it was a reminder to let people know that even if they didn’t want to put their letter up, they’re not alone.”