So yeah, in December and January, I applied for an internship at the
University of Minnesota's Supercomputing Institute. The deadline for getting materials in was February 28. Mine were all in before the end of January (though I recieved no confirmation of this).
It was getting to be about the time that I should have heard something from them, so this morning I called them and asked when I should know something one way or the other. I was told that I should have already heard something, and when I gave them my name, they told me that I had been offered a position (awesome!). They next told me that since they hadn't heard anything from me, the position had been given to someone else.
Apparently, they sent me an e-mail (only) telling me of my acceptance. When I applied, everything that I gave to them was sent through the US mail, so it seems a bit odd to reply only in e-mail. So, I searched my mailbox and indeed there was the message. It was sent on 28 Mar 2006 and required me to respond by 4 Apr 2006. That is exactly one week.
Now, why didn't I notice this incredibly important email?
The message looked like spam. The subject line was "offer of internship". There were no capital letters, no mention of the Supercomputing Institute, REU, or the University of Minnesota. I get over 1000 messages a day at my
guyblade.com e-mail addresses. Over 99% of these messages are spam and a reasonable percentage of that spam is of the "free dipolma online" variety. This message, which was from someone that I'd never heard of and which had a poorly chosen subject line, looked to my cursory inspection as if it were just another piece of spam.
I'm not going to blame them for my error. They sent the message to the proper address, I simply failed to read it. If I'd read the e-mail, I'd have accepted it in a moment. If they'd sent it by mail, I'd have read it and accepted it. If I'd known when to expect the message, I'd have contacted them sooner. There were mistakes made by everyone. Their mistake was in not keeping me informed as well as they could have. Mine was in not paying enough attention. Regardless, I have now lost what was a great opportunity.
Just a note, I was accepted to work on the project
High Performance Algorithms for Predicting the Properties of Electronic Materials.
Fuck.
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