Reader Crystallizing Chaos asked the following question:
It would be great if you could share your thoughts on how you handle failure. I know you’re amazing at what you do and a very successful academic but you must have faced failure or rejection (professional) in the past. How did you deal with it?
First of all, thank you very much for the compliments I greatly enjoy them. 🙂
Rejection is a staple of an academic’s life. Can’t handle rejection? Don’t become an academic.
Have oral stage traumas? (Smoke, drink, overeat, etc.?) Prepare for every rejected article to feel like the people of the world have unanimously agreed to kick you off the planet for being a total waste of space. And then experience the collective kick of 7,5 billion people.
I’ve worked very hard on this with my psychoanalyst and I’m happy to report that these days rejections feel like only half of the people in this world have agreed to kick me off the planet with the rest abstaining. Give me a few more years, and maybe the number of the kick-offers will be reduced to 1/3 of the planet’s population.
No, seriously, it gets better with time. By the time I turn 92, I will have gotten so many rejections that I will be totally jaded to the whole process.
I’m sorry if this isn’t too helpful but at least we are all in the same boat, suffering from rejection. That’s got to be somewhat comforting, right?
Some resources that you might find marginally helpful:
Here is Jonathan’s post on handling rejection with some useful suggestions.
Here is something really helpful my husband once said to help me deal with getting an article rejected.
Here is my old post from when I was getting nothing but rejections.
Clarissa's Blog 
Oh, everything I’ve ever done has been a failure. One has to enjoy it. Get into some parachute landing falls.
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Yeah, learn to hang your boots together, bend and roll ;-D
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That’s the one.
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Speaking as someone who has recently been tenured and who has a modest yet respectable publication record, Clarissa is absolutely right: rejection is part of the life of an academic…..especially for those of us who are a bit younger/more junior in our careers. The bottom dropped out of tenure track hiring just as “our generation” (meaning my and Clarissa’s) were applying for jobs; top tier journals and presses became saturated just as we started publishing. So I can assure you that rejection has become a constant part of my adult life. And rejection is miserable. Nobody likes it. Nobody. On the plus side, it has helped me honestly assess myself. And the rejections (I think) have helped me become a more open and empathetic teacher.
And, as Clarissa mentions, it gets easier. I have come to realize that “me as Evelina Anville” has not been rejected: just one piece of work/application has been rejected. And that piece of work just represents a portion of Evelina Anville’s overall work which in turn only represents a potion of Evelina Anville’s totality. At the end of the day, the only person who can reject me is myself. I choose to accept myself and no outside force can change that. (I realize how cheesy that sounds. But it was comforting when I had that epiphany.)
Also, rejection means that I’m doing something competitive. I know some academics who have taken the route of applying for only noncompetitive venues and I haven’t chosen to go that way. So in some ways, I take a rejection as a weird badge of honor. I’m still in “the game.” Maybe I’m not the most well known person in my field but I’m a player. And I can accept that.
I don’t know if that helps at all Crystalizing Chaos. I guess I just wanted to say that all of us academics have been there and to let you know my personal “rejection process.” 🙂
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I noticed back when I bothered that the vast majority, over 90%, of jobs I applied to in the US did not even bother to send me a rejection notice of any kind. Really, how hard is it to send a form e-mail out?
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There are only two possible interpretations.
a) we’re so disorganized that we can’t even keep up with basic correspondence
b) you are beneath our notice
Neither makes the people responsible look good.
Oddly, this is one of the things I hate among academics – the idea that being purposefully rude gives or underlines or strengthens their status.
Sadly, it works more often than not and otherwise intelligent people accept that being treated like dirt means the person dishing out the abuse must be really something special.
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Oh, I’ve never been impressed by academics who are rude. I have a very deep notion that powerful people are subtle and that they do all their dirty work in a way that actually minimises the dirt. That, to me, is impressive. But once people start to get overtly smelly, my estimation drops from “aristocratic” to “bourgeois”.
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It’s a weird thing, but I have so often been embarrassed FOR people who are rude, especially if they could have been more subtle, whereas I suppose those same people think I am embarrased BY what they have said. I’ve never felt ashamed on my own behalf.
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I think in my case it is b.
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I’m generally not happy with projects that are meant to be provocative or contentious unless I’ve upset a LOT of people …
That’s because anything worth risking in those senses should have significant effects.
Apathy and ignorance mean I haven’t reached enough people.
Mass anger therefore becomes my way of keeping score.
ENJOY YOUR TWO MINUTES OF HATE. 🙂
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I’ve had some business ideas rejected by the market. I just think of them as if I bought a sweepstake ticket that didn’t win, let’s buy the next one. However easy for me, because being rejected by the market (a large group of indifferent/unbiased people) is much better than being rejected by a small group of professionals that academics have to handle. I think I couldn’t take that so easy, because in my case I know my idea was just not viable, the whole situation is clear for me. In the academic’s case there can be many other reasons behind the rejection that can be hard to figure out. Maybe the sweepstake-analogy wouldn’t work there.
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Thanks for sharing this, Clarissa! 🙂
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Writing grants, which in the sciences and engineering you have to do all the time, is an exercise in skin-thickening. Right off the bat you know it’s almost a lottery, yet you have to keep doing it as it funds your research program and your students. Over and over and over. It’s quite maddening. I think I do too well with rejection in the professional sphere. I now entirely expect it (in grant writing) so it’s hard to muster the optimism that I think has to go into it. Yet I have to keep writing…
Paper reviews don’t faze me at all any more. That’s an upside, I supposed.
But this is very interesting:
Have oral stage traumas? (Smoke, drink, overeat, etc.?) Prepare for every rejected article to feel like the people of the world have unanimously agreed to kick you off the planet for being a total waste of space. And then experience the collective kick of 7,5 billion people.
I used to smoke and I overeat. I am curious to know more how oral-stage trauma relates to processing rejection, because I think at baseline I am much more dependent on the approval of others (and hurt by disapproval) than average. Please share! Thanks!
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This is in response to J. Otto Pohl above. As a member of an institution that doesn’t always send out rejection letters, I think I can shed some light on this. It is neither of the possibilities that Cliff Arroyo mentions (i.e. it’s not necessarily disorganization or deliberate rudeness on the faculty hiring committee’s part.) I’m obviously biased but in my experience, academics are almost ridiculously afraid to give offence. 🙂
Anyway, at my institution (and at many other’s), the only body that can officially hire or reject a candidate is the upper administration. And since the job market is impacted and if there are multiple searches running at once, there are (sadly) hundreds of first round rejections to send out. And sometimes the administration just doesn’t do it. And the faculty hiring committee can’t do it. It doesn’t make it right of course. But it’s not a deliberate snub or comment on your application.
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The worst rejection letters were the ones I got for my job applications back in 2007-8. Those were horrible because most of them said that the search was being cancelled because of the situation with the economy. There were dozens of them, and that looked scary. I’d much rather to be rejected because I don’t measure up than because the field is collapsing. 😦
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