A few years ago, I sent off my first application to the Schwarzman Scholars program. I had energy yet not much proof. The decision came back later: the review committee did not move me forward.

Last week I opened LinkedIn and found a Sponsored Message from the same program. Not an admission letter, it is an ad. That detail matters. It wasn’t a random broadcast. LinkedIn lets organizations aim messages at people who match specific profile signals, it can be degrees and fields of study, leadership roles, honors, skills, affiliations, etc. I now light up that filter. Ph.D. in engineering. An education line that runs through Auburn, UCLA, and Texas A&M. Leadership in Tau Beta Pi, Theta Tau, and Chi Epsilon. Global work through the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers and the Clinton Foundation’s CGIU. So the message wasn’t “we remember you.” It was the quieter, more telling signal: “you look like the audience we’re seeking.”

That contrast, declined then and targeted now, taught me something straightforward about growth. Gatekeepers and algorithms work differently, but both respond to what you ship into the world. A committee reads a file and makes a call. An ad system scans public signals and draws a boundary around a certain kind of person. If your signals are weak or scattered, you fall outside the boundary. Strengthen them through work, roles, and results, and the boundary moves to include you.

None of this changes how I feel about the program. I’m not applying again. It’s no longer upstream of my goals. But the episode offered a clean mirror: external systems, like hiring platforms, fellowship portals, scholarship databases, even ad dashboards are always mapping who we are becoming. They don’t bend their rules to flatter us. They pick up patterns. When your pattern gets strong enough, you show up on the map without asking.

There’s also a useful humility here. Being targeted by an algorithm isn’t glamorous. It’s not a medal, a title, or a phone call. It is, however, evidence. A trace. It means that the work you’ve been doing has accumulated into something legible to a system that wasn’t built with you in mind. In a noisy world, that’s nontrivial.

What changed between my first application and now? Not one magic credential. Accretion. I kept stacking small, verifiable pieces: harder classes, better projects, service roles that touched real people, writing that reached new readers, collaboration that compounded. None of it looked decisive at the time. Together it redrew the contour of my profile. That’s the part worth keeping. We don’t control review rooms. We can control the signals we emit, like clarity of focus, quality of work, usefulness to others, the habit of finishing, you name it. Over time those signals cohere. Systems that once ignored you begin to route around your orbit. You move from the margins to the center of someone else’s map, it is not because you asked but because you built something that shows up.

So if a scholarship or program rejection turns you down, take it in stride and keep moving. Let the dust settle. Keep doing the work that compounds. Over time, the signals you send will start showing up on the maps that matter.