GSGLP, IHS, China Synergy

These days I have come to accept that disappointment is a part of life and I should get used to rejection. You win some, you lose some. But it really sucks to have lost the important one.

The 2008 Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program competition in the United States is closed and the selection process has now been completed. We regret to inform you that you were not selected to receive an award.

All selection decisions are final. In the rare case that an alternate must be selected, the alternate will be notified via telephone next week. Due to the volume of applications the program received, program staff cannot and will not respond to individual inquiries regarding the selection process.

Please keep in mind that the selection was highly competitive. Your achievements reflect great credit upon you, your parents, and your teachers. On behalf of The Goldman Sachs Foundation and the Institute of International Education (IIE), thank you for applying for the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program. We wish you much success in your all your future endeavors.

Well, it had always been a long shot and I wasn’t counting on it. It sucks to have not made the second shortlist for F2F interviews. Still, I put in a lot of effort into the application, though I guess I should’ve put in more. Also, this was my last shot at GSGLP, as I will no longer be eligible in future years. It would have been nice to get the scholarship money and the prestige – It’s probably neither necessary nor sufficient to leverage a summer at GS, especially given projected market conditions, but may have at least secured me an interview. Oh well. Good luck Geoffrey, you deserve to win it.

Congratulations! I’m happy to announce that your essay, “Sustainable Development through Capital Markets: Private Sector and Market Approaches to Economic Development” has won Second Prize in the Institute for Humane Studies Essay Contest for Undergraduates. We received more than 750 entries for this contest, and the competition was intense.

I won another IHS contest, and now I think my friends there are going to ban me from future ones. I wouldn’t blame them if they did, it’s meant to be an outreach tool. Then again, I’m not really sure that they are putting that much effort into outreach either: 750 entries is somewhat low for an essay contest, considering the size of the prizes relative to other contests.

It is our great pleasure to inform you that you have been selected from over 1,000 applicants to join the 9th China Synergy Programme for Outstanding Youth (CSP9), which will be held from 1st July to 17th July this year.

I’m glad I got into China Synergy this time since I will be in Beijing this summer, and hopping to Hong Kong won’t be too expensive. Last year, I assumed CUCSSA (the mainland chinese graduate students club here) would give me one of their assigned places, but I was probably internally rejected for not being a mainlander or a graduate student. This year I made no such assumption and suffered through the ridiculously cumbersome application form which required that I fill out all its pages at one time. Now, I get to chill with a bunch of chinese kids on their heavily-subsidized study tour from Hong Kong to Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xian and Tianjin. It’s going to be awesome.