🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️
In academic and research careers, so much can feel so far out of your control.
But there’s one way I’ve found very useful, both for myself and those I mentor, to pull back a little bit more control of your fate, and that is the concept of:
𝐂𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞
And that’s the topic of today’s Hacking Academia video and podcast – the 40th in the series!!! 🎉🎉🎉
When you apply for a grant, fellowship, project, award, job or promotion, you face a number of choices that are mostly within your control:
❓ how closely should I pitch this project to the work I’m already doing?
❓ how grand or narrow in scope a project should I propose?
❓ how incremental or impossibly blue sky should the proposed research be?
❓ how strongly should I make the claims about contributions relating to a prize or promotion application?
❓ where on the underselling to overselling spectrum do I want to pitch this research?
Your answers to these questions are shaped of course by the guidelines of the scheme you’re engaged in – for example some grant schemes being risk averse, whilst others are deliberately “blue sky” (risky fundamental basic research).
But they’re also shaped by something within your control – your ability to significant bias how your application would be rejected – if it is at all.
So why would you do this?
Because it has the beneficial effect of 𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘢𝘭 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘦𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘥.
It also has the beneficial effect of making you deliberately think about how you want to pitch whatever it is you’re submitting – which can also improve the overall clarity and quality of the submission.
Extra points for the golfing analogy (at 1:36 in the video) for my golfing colleagues 🏌♂️ ⛳
Video is in this post, but you can also check out the:
Full Video Notes
If you’re in an academic research career or a research career outside academia, it can sometimes feel like many of the critical things you’re meant to achieve are completely outside your control. To some extent, that’s true. Factors like the assessments of reviewers who evaluate your grants or job promotion applications can feel arbitrary. However, there are ways to think about the core activities you do that can restore a sense of control over the outcomes that are critical to your career. That’s what today’s Hacking Academia video is all about.
The key concept I want to discuss today is choosing your preferred rejection mechanism. Fundamentally, in careers like this, you’ll be submitting a lot of things—whether they’re paper submissions, grant applications, fellowship proposals, or applications for prestigious prizes or promotions. Each of these has a binary outcome: success or rejection. In highly competitive fields, or when you’re really stretching yourself, many of these efforts will unfortunately end in rejection. Hopefully, that rejection is temporary. What I want to explore is how you can think strategically about how you’d like to be rejected to regain some control over these critical outcomes.
The Golf Analogy: Controlling Your Failure
Let me start with a simple analogy. Imagine you’re playing golf, and you’re trying to hit the ball onto the green, but there’s a big creek or lake in front of the hole. You have a choice: you can aim carefully to land the ball near the hole, risking it falling short into the water, or you can deliberately overcompensate, hitting it harder so the ball ends up past the hole. While this might not be ideal, it takes the biggest risk—landing in the water—out of play.
This is an example of exerting some level of control over your preferred failure mechanism. Similarly, in an academic or research career, you can make deliberate choices about how you approach key activities to manage how rejection, if it happens, is most likely to occur.
Example 1: Grant and Fellowship Proposals
A common scenario is submitting a proposal for a grant or fellowship. One key dimension to consider is how closely the proposed work aligns with your previous research versus how much it pushes into new territory.
If the grant scheme values expertise and experience, you might choose to emphasize how closely the proposal builds on your existing work. This reduces the risk of reviewers questioning your qualifications but increases the risk of them criticizing the proposal for being too similar to what you’ve already done.
On the other hand, if the grant scheme encourages novelty and growth into new fields, you might decide to stretch into completely new territory. In this case, you run the opposite risk: reviewers might doubt whether you have the expertise to execute the project, but you eliminate the risk of being seen as unoriginal. By deliberately choosing which risk to take, you’re exerting some level of control over the feedback you might receive.
Example 2: Incremental vs. Blue Sky Proposals
Another consideration when crafting proposals is deciding how incremental or ambitious your ideas should be. For risk-averse schemes, where feasibility is key, you might opt for an incremental approach. This minimizes the chance of rejection for being too “out there,” but you risk criticism for being insufficiently innovative.
Conversely, for schemes that reward bold, blue-sky thinking, you might go all-in with a highly ambitious proposal. Here, you’re deliberately accepting the risk of being seen as “too crazy,” while ensuring that reviewers won’t reject it for lacking ambition. Again, you’re choosing how you want to be assessed, even if the outcome is ultimately unsuccessful.
Example 3: Narrow vs. Grand Scope
The scope of your proposal is another axis where this principle applies. You can propose something very narrow and focused to avoid being criticized for overreach, but you might risk being seen as insufficiently ambitious. Alternatively, you could propose something grand in scope, running the risk of being deemed overly ambitious but ensuring the proposal isn’t dismissed as too limited.
Example 4: Prizes and Promotions
For prizes and promotions, a key decision is how confident you come across in your application. Many people struggle with talking about their achievements and claiming appropriate credit. If this resonates with you, it’s worth deliberately erring on the side of overconfidence—making sure reviewers or assessors clearly understand the significance of your work.
This might feel unnatural at first, but the goal is to leave no doubt about your worthiness for the prize or promotion. You run the small risk of being seen as overstating your case, but you avoid the more common pitfall of being too modest and having your accomplishments overlooked.
Example 5: Research Papers
When submitting a research paper, the venue and quality of the work often dictate your strategy. If you have a major breakthrough—one of those once-in-a-decade pieces of research—you might deliberately underplay its significance, letting the work speak for itself. This reduces the risk of being accused of overhyping but increases the chance that someone might miss its importance.
In other cases, you might need to emphasize the significance of your contribution more assertively, particularly if the venue demands strong claims. Again, the key is to think about which risks you’re willing to take and how you want to manage rejection, should it occur.
Key Caveats
There are a couple of caveats to this approach. First, most decisions don’t exist on a simple one-dimensional axis. For instance, the decision between incremental and blue-sky proposals involves multiple factors, such as feasibility, innovation, and alignment with the scheme’s goals. While simplifying these decisions helps clarify your strategy, it’s important to remember that real-world scenarios are more complex.
Second, this approach doesn’t eliminate risk—it simply allows you to manage it more intentionally. If taken to extremes, such as overhyping a research contribution, you could damage your reputation. Reviewers and peers are usually tolerant of enthusiasm, but they won’t tolerate factual inaccuracies or blatant overstatements.
Restoring Control in an Uncertain Career
While this isn’t a magic trick to guarantee success, it can help restore a sense of control in an academic career where so much seems outside your influence. By deliberately crafting your submissions and thinking about how you want to be assessed, you can better understand and influence the potential outcomes—whether successful or not.
I’ve found this approach helpful, and so have many of the people I’ve worked with. It’s a way to think more strategically about your career, making the process a little less daunting and giving you more confidence in navigating its uncertainties. I hope this resonates with you and provides some valuable insights.