Both college societies I spent weeks preparing auditions for rejected me today. This comes on top of sending out over 40 cold emails and LinkedIn messages for summer internships without hearing a single response. Meanwhile, half of my batchmates have already secured prestigious campus council posts or remote analyst internships—not because they're exceptionally gifted, but because their elder siblings or seniors directly referred them. What hurts isn't the rejection itself; it's the realization that meritocracy in college is mostly a polite myth. If you don't know the right people, don't belong to the insider cliques, or don't have personal connections to leverage, you're invisible. I'm sitting here questioning my self-worth over arbitrary club interviews. Does hard work actually count for anything, or is life just an endless game of networking?