Hopefully, you’ve applied to college by now. If you did, congratulations on completing the process and good luck handling the wait for decisions to come out. If you haven’t applied, fear not; plenty of colleges have late deadlines. For those who have applied, most likely, you applied to some safety schools and some match schools; even more likely, you applied to a few reach schools. In that case, chances are you’ll get a rejection letter or two.

So, what should you do about it?

Well, for starters, you shouldn’t curl up into a ball and cry about it, and you shouldn’t develop some newfound sense of anger and disgust towards what once might have been your dream school. Instead, you should work towards accepting it and, bluntly put, getting over it. Fortunately, Andrew J. Rotherham of Time Magazine gives some advice in “College Admissions: How to Deal with a Thin Envelope.”

Rotherham encourages student to, firstly, and maybe most importantly, tell yourself, “This is an initial setback, not the end of the world.” While you may have visited the campus and fallen in love, it doesn’t necessarily mean you would love it for the next four years; the “perfect” school that you were absolutely dying to go to might not have been all that great in the long run anyway. Given the number of students who apply to some colleges and how selective they can be, admissions can be a lottery – so don’t obsess over the decision.

Secondly, don’t give up if you got wait-listed. Being on a waiting list just means that a college needs to consider the number of accepted students who have enrolled, and then reevaluate a number of “wait-listed” students to fill the remaining spots. Because colleges can only offer a number of seats to those on the wait list, if you’re completely sure about attending that school, make sure the people there know you’ll go if you get an offer.

The last resort, Rotherham advises, is that if all else fails, you can always transfer. It’s important to look into other schools and give them a shot, but college doesn’t have to be a jail sentence; if you’re truly unhappy and still chasing after that dream school, transferring is an option.

While rejection in any form hurts, and while you may feel tempted to sulk about it, do your initial pouting and then come to terms with it. Ultimately, it’s important to realize that a rejection letter doesn’t define you and it doesn’t make you a bad student. Maybe everything does happen for a reason, and if a college happens to send you a rejection, they weren’t the right college for you anyway.