CV of Failures

I’ve faced my fair share of rejection and failure along the way. My CV highlights what worked out; this page tells the other side of the story — the opportunities I missed, the doors that closed, and the setbacks that shaped my journey.

Every admission rejection, by round.

  1. Fall 2026

    • Setback

      Master’s Thesis Scooped

      Found out that another group had already published the idea I planned to build my master’s thesis on.

    • Rejected

      Paper Rejection

      A paper from my KAIST research was rejected by Transportation Research Record (TRR).

  2. Spring 2025

    • Rejected

      Master’s Rejections

      • Harvard University — Computational Science and Engineering
      • Johns Hopkins University — Applied Mathematics and Statistics
      • University of Southern California — Applied Mathematics
      • UIUC — Computer Science
      • UIUC — Applied Mathematics
      • Virginia Tech — Mathematics
      • Stanford University — Computational and Mathematical Engineering
      • University of Michigan — Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics
      • University of Chicago — Computational and Applied Mathematics
    • Rejected

      PhD Rejections

      • MIT — Computational Science and Engineering
      • MIT — Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
    • Setback

      Undergraduate Research Unpublished

      Couldn’t turn my undergraduate research into a paper. Work kept me busy, and I lost confidence in my ability to do research.

  3. Spring 2024

    • Rejected

      PhD Rejections

      • MIT — Computational Science and Engineering
      • Stanford University — Computational Science and Engineering
      • Caltech — Computing and Mathematical Sciences
      • UC Berkeley — Computer Science, CDSS Track
      • Georgia Institute of Technology — Computational Science and Engineering
      • UIUC — Computer Science, CSE Track
      • Princeton University — Computer Science
    • Setback

      Job Search

      Couldn’t find a full-time job in my field for more than 10 months after graduating.

  4. Spring 2023

    • Setback

      Unexpected End to My First Research Experience

      During my first research experience, other undergraduate research assistants and I contributed to data collection and dataset preparation for an LLM research project. Our involvement ended without prior notice, with limited explanation beyond the supervising PhD student’s availability. The research was subsequently published without acknowledgement of our contributions.

  5. Fall 2022

    • Rejected

      Undergraduate Transfer Rejection — Computer Science

      • Georgia Institute of Technology

  6. Spring 2022

    • Rejected

      Undergraduate Transfer Rejections — Computer Science

      • Stanford University
      • Brown University
      • New York University
      • Northwestern University
      • University of Pennsylvania
      • Rice University
      • Georgia Institute of Technology
      • Harvard University
      • Princeton University
      • Cornell University
      • Duke University
      • Yale University
      • UC Berkeley
      • UCLA
      • UC San Diego

  7. Spring 2020

    • Rejected

      Undergraduate Admission Rejections — Computer Science

      • Rutgers University–New Brunswick
      • Penn State University Park
      • Stevens Institute of Technology
      • University of Michigan
      • Lehigh University
      • Georgia Institute of Technology