Caitlin Kirby, a doctoral student at Michigan State University, defended her dissertation while wearing a skirt made of rejection letters she had received during her studies:
She told Lansing State Journal that she made the skirt as a way of normalizing rejection and taking pride in overcoming it:
It took 17 rejection letters to make the skirt, rejections from scholarships, academic journals and conferences. To make the skirt, she printed them out and folded each one into a fan, connecting them in rows until they resembled a skirt. Kirby still had many left over.
“The whole process of revisiting those old letters and making that skirt sort of reminded me that you have to apply to a lot of things to succeed,” she said. “A natural part of the process is to get rejected along the way.”
You can get a closer look here.
