Abrams reflects on as a fourth-year-undergraduate receiving an email at the beginning of what was anticipated to be her final semester of undergrad that Abrams had been denied from a graduate program she applied to. This denial lead to Abrams experiencing so much shame around her inability to meet her colleges expectations of going onto graduate study that she did not tell her peers about the denial until the end of the spring semester, this shame also compounded to depression and anxiety that lead to Emily taking a fifth year to complete her undergraduate degree.