MERCY

I applied to the Emerging Leaders in AI program 3 times. Year 1: Rejected. Year 2: Rejected. Year 3: Selected. I could have stopped after year 2. Most people would have. But here is what I realised between year 2 and year 3: I was applying as someone who wanted to be in AI. I needed to apply as someone already in AI. So I stopped waiting for permission and started building. Multi-agent systems. Production LLM pipelines. Published research. An AI tutoring server for Nigerian students. I was not just adding to my CV. I was figuring out who I am as a researcher and what I actually want to spend my life working on. That clarity is what got me in. Not a perfect application. Not connections. Not luck. Just showing up for three years and refusing to accept that the door was permanently closed. If you are on your second or third rejection from something you care about deeply — do not quit. Go build something real. Come back with a story only you can tell. Your rejection is not a verdict. It is a syllabus.