Maya S. Turre '00 moved into Holworthy 13 a celebrity. Four months later, she was abruptly packing up and moving out, unsure if she would ever return.

Back in 1996, New York Times Magazine writer Bruce Weber found a star in Maya, the lucky stiff who edged out her multilingual, multitalented classmates at Van Nuys High School in southern California for a spot in Harvard's Class of 2000. Today, the three other students, once victims of the statistical probability of Harvard rejection, now graduate from their own prestigious universities, with stories to tell.

Anna Fudacz, whose Harvard interview four years ago was "spoiled" by a curmudgeonly alum, earned departmental honors in economics at Stanford, reveled in Silicon Valley and plans to work at Intel next year. Mira Lew, who had hired a professional college counselor to help her win the admissions game, became a history major at Columbia--and has since landed a job at Marvel Comics. Parham Yashar also moved on quickly from his Harvard rejection. He will be graduating Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA a week from Saturday, then off to Northwestern Medical School.

"Honestly, I've never looked back," he says.

In the end, it was the chosen one, Maya, who would have to be most resilient to realize her dreams. An aspiring architect at a college without a program in architecture. What was she getting into?

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The Harvard rejection letter is four paragraphs long. There is the traditional line about an outstanding pool of applicants, as well as some hard-to-swallow words of wisdom. "The particular college a student attended is far less important than what the student does to develop his or her strengths and talents over the next four years." Anna found it annoying. "The rejection letter was just this Xerox copy," Anna recalls. "It seemed kind of cold."

The weather in the Northeast, too, seemed uninviting, and she declined four years in Providence for sunny Palo Alto. "To be honest, I went back [to Brown] over spring break, and it was snowing," she says. "And I was like, 'I don't know if I can deal with snow in April.'"