December 2024

The Importance of Rejection in Academia

At this point, I have lost count of how many applications I have submitted since becoming an “academic.” Though, the labyrinth of folder trees remembers (it always remembers). For many of us, the reality of the brutality of academia happened during our applications. I remember thinking “How can they expect us to submit (semi) unique applications to 10+ universities all at the same time, and then expect us to wait months to figure out if we get in?” Essentially half a year of my life down to an email on a cold day in February. All of which could render that labor useless. Little did I know that this timeline would be all that awaited me on the other side.

As I write this, I am hitting the nine month mark of waiting for an article to be published in a journal. Not only that, but it has been a total of three years since the project started. Grant and paper deadlines also are piling up – I have five deadlines of a mixture of fellowships/papers/conferences right now.

All of this work and stress only to receive so. many. rejections.

Academia is particularly brutal because, for many of us, there is really only one metric of success: the publication. With such long timelines for actually doing the research, tacking on one+ years for it to get published is taxing. It feels like a monumental marathon which can have all of the wind taken out of its sails with a swift, template email notifying us of our failure. Perhaps even worse, months pass only to have unfair and unrealistic reviews from our peers. Not only this, but it seems like no one acknowledges your pain. That it is all too normalized, and either you are successful or you aren’t. But, it is on you. Much of this holds with grant, scholarship, and fellowship applications. Oftentimes these are the foil to papers – the designs of our hopes and intentions, which we hand off to a stranger to rule on whether it should come to fruition.

So, what are we to do with all of this?

I will provide three pieces of advice that have helped me through the drudgery, and then I will talk about how useful failed applications have been for me.

Advice #1: Failure is normal. The paper I referenced above has gone through three submission cycles over two different venues. There have been a total of five peer review rounds. The paper took about a year to finish, but has taken two years to get published. Ask your peers. You will find this is more common than not. You will be shocked by hearing faculty talk so casually about passing a paper around venues. Going through any number of rejections. The ways my chair describes it as being in the “review-sphere.” Just leave it there and once you get the results, go from there, but don’t stress in the interim. As grad students, this is our time to fail. If you want to be faculty and be charged with your own research agenda and grad students, then you need to know how to fail gracefully and pass this along to your students. If you believe the paper is good, then it will get published, it’s just a matter of time.

Advice #2: We as grad students are still learning. I am very happy that my committee have been so supportive of my failures. Many times I have been told “Aspen, I can do this for you, but this is the time to learn and work through this skill.” Whether that is preparing a manuscript or coordinating revisions or writing a reviewer response letter. There are political and social norms that we just can’t know until we go through this. Our failure is expected, not because we aren’t competent, but because there are humans on the other side of review and we are still learning the culture of academia. Most of the PhD is about learning how to create knowledge. This is no small feat. So, just remember publishing that work is a completely different skill. A rigorous, novel paper can easily be desk rejected if you send it to the wrong venue. We can only do our best in selecting where to go, and we learn. So, give yourself the grace to learn now, rather than when you have your grad students looking to you for advice!

Advice #3: These processes make your paper better – and therefore you a better scholar. Yes, there is always reviewer 2. The asshole who is so unbelievably unfair that you seem powerless to ever please them, but for the most part I have had genuinely excited and invested reviewers. They asked hard questions and held my paper to high standards. They pushed my assumptions, refined my manuscript down the word (no, literally), and asked me to own and defend my decisions. After these types of reviews, I am ride or die for my paper. And I know it’s better research after the fact. Ignore the overly harsh reviews, embrace the helpful ones, and let your paper get better. Then pass it on when you are the reviewer.

The last thing I will say here is that I see a core divergence among my peers. There are those who have to, or choose to, learn these skills. They are reckoning with the unwritten codes and norms of academia until they figure out and internalize them. Then there are the students who choose to, or are subject to, committees that micro-manage and hideaway all of these processes. While the latter may produce more publications, it leaves the student completely unprepared for a life in academia, and their future students and collaborators will suffer their incompetence. You’ve probably met faculty who are just now figuring out these norms and processes well into their faculty role. Having said that, a lot of this learning is in your hands, so the trade-off is yours to make.

Okay, now let’s talk about what we do with all of these things we wrote.

For me, I have a folder tree structure for my applications and I tag them with their status. For example, “Journal of Information Technology and Politics [SUBMITTED].” So, when I scroll, I can see at a glance the myriad of [REJECTED], [ACCEPTED], and [DID NOT FINISH].

Within them are good ideas in varying stages of quality and feasibility. Instead of trying to tell you in detail how to reuse these ideas, I will instead list a few real-world examples of how my materials have seen new life in the four years of my program.

1. 1. When I first applied to graduate school, I reused my statement of purpose to write my personal statement for the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship – which I won.
   2. The personal statement from my PhD application materials I re-used to apply for the Sloan Foundation’s Minority PhD Fellowship – which I won!
   3. The research statement from my GRFP application became the research design for my very first research grant application – which ultimately got rejected, but I did make it to the final round.
   4. The summer of my first year, I attended the Summer Institute on Computational Social Science (SICSS). At the end of the program, I presented a project performing NLP on a Reddit dataset. It was not quality research, but all of the code I wrote/documented, and the data cleaning process I easily exported to the methods section in an Association of Internet Researchers extended abstract (accepted).
   5. Recent example: I wrote a grant application to the Hawai’i Pacific Foundation (rejected), which was actually an improved version of my dissertation proposal. That grant application was then paired down for the Scholar’s for Social Justice Freedom and Justice Institute. I took the fellowship application, extracted the project proposal and fleshed it out into a two-page research statement for a Microsoft Research internship application. And, surprise!, the same project will be an upcoming part of my dissertation.

I hope this helps show how you can minimize the total writing and labor that you put into the punishing publication and grant world. Stay well and don’t work too hard!