Afraid of being rejected? Don’t be, in you’re in good company…

With spring, come the college admissions decisions. A recent Wall Street Journal article, said “with next fall’s college freshman class expected to approach a record 2.9 million students, hundreds of thousands of applicants will soon be receiving the dreaded [rejection] letters.”

According to the same article, “rejections aren’t uncommon” and that “Harvard accepts only a little more than 7% of the 29,000 undergraduate applications it receives each year, and Stanford’s acceptance rate is about the same.”

So if you’re rejected, don’t sweat it. Take a look at these famous folks that that didn’t make it into their dream schools. And all feel that the rejection may have been the best thing to happen, in the end.

Warren Buffet, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. – After Harvard Business School said no, everything ‘I thought was a crushing event at the time, has turned out for the better.’

Meredith Vieira, ‘Today’ show co-host- Had she not been rejected by Harvard, she doubts she would have entered television journalism.

Lee Bollinger, Columbia University president (rejected from Harvard) – To ‘allow other people’s assessment of you to determine your own self-assessment is a very big mistake.’

Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate in medicine – Rejected twice by Harvard’s medical school. One dean there chastised him and advised him to enlist in the military.

Ted Turner, Entrepreneur - Rejected by Princeton and Harvard. ‘I want to be sure to make this point: I did everything I did without a college degree.’

John Schlifske, President of Northwestern Mutual - Lesson he learned from Yale’s rejection helped him years later counsel his son, Dan (standing), who was rejected by Duke.

Tom Brokaw, Broadcast journalist – Harvard rejection prompted him to settle down and stop partying. ‘The initial stumble was critical in getting me launched.’

So if you receive a thin envelope from one of your favorite colleges, just remember what Lee Bollinger said, “The question really is, who at the end of the day is going to make the determination about what your talents are, and what your interests are? That has to be you.”