🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️
Rejection always sucks… but how it sucks evolves…
After a brutal start to the year in terms of rejection after rejection, I wanted to post a Hacking Academia video on the nature of rejection, and how it can evolve, in a professional academic and research career.
In the video, I cover the transition from rejection feeling very personal early in your career, to rejection generating concern over the wellfare and reactions of those in your team involved in the rejected initiative, especially junior and early career researchers and academics.
I cover how rejection, to a certain extent, is a sign that you’re setting your sights and aspirations at about the right level.
I touch on the broader perspective you gain later in your career, where you have enough data points to know that something you’re confident is good value work has a good chance of eventually getting over the line, but that the short-term volatility can be brutal. Of course, knowing that rationally, and feeling fine about it emotively, is a whole different matter…
Finally I cover what can be a somewhat confronting concept – that sustained rejection can be a useful signal that you are no longer competitive in a certain area that formed your core identity earlier in your career – confronting, but by no means career ending: just a signal that can help you continue to evolve your career over time. This situation can occur for a wide variety of ways: most typically simply that what you were 110% dedicated to early on is now just a part-time component of your role, especially in ultra-competitive fields where you can’t really part-time it.
And yes – that’s a clear clickbait thumbnail for the video – am experimenting, I’m sure some people will hate it, but let’s see what the various algorithms do…
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Full Video Notes
Rejection sucks. I’ve been in an academic and professional career for a little over two decades, and I would love to say that rejection gets easier with time. But all I can really say is that the way it sucks evolves as you go from being junior in your career to being more senior. That’s what I want to explore in today’s Hacking Academia video.
This year started off as a pretty brutal one in terms of paper rejections, and also rejections for centres and grants. In a career like academia or research, you will inevitably go through periods where it feels like all the odds are stacked against you, where fate has conspired to deliver rejection after rejection after rejection.
Over my career so far, I’ve probably been involved in around half a thousand paper submissions of one kind or another, and dozens upon dozens of grant, fellowship, and centre applications. Overall, you get rejected more often than not. There are also things like prizes and awards. So, getting used to rejection is very much a necessary part of being in an academic or research career.
Early on, I remember how rejections felt during my PhD. Getting a paper rejected could feel deeply personal. It felt like the reviewers were attacking me, attacking my work. And in a few rare cases, with genuinely toxic reviews, that was true. But most of the time, they weren’t attacking me personally. They were offering constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement. The problem is, without the benefit of experience, it’s hard not to take that personally. That’s when your supervisors, friends, and colleagues are especially valuable. They help give you context and support.
What I want to focus on in today’s video is how rejection changes as you progress in your career. Later in your career, you might be supervising or leading a research team, or even heading up a centre. Rejections, whether of papers or grants, still hurt. That feeling of disappointment has never completely gone away for me. But the way I process rejection has changed.
Let me give you a couple of examples of how rejection can feel worse as you become more senior, and also how it can feel a little bit better. After experiencing hundreds of rejections, and assuming you’ve been fortunate enough to continue in your career, you start to develop a bigger-picture view. You know that, over the medium and long term, you are doing good work and making solid contributions. You also know that success rates in most academic activities are low, and that even if you improve your work between submissions, you can still hit long streaks of rejections.
At the same time, you understand statistical variation. While subsequent versions of a paper or grant proposal are not entirely independent, the outcomes can still be unpredictable. You know that you can improve a rejected submission, take on the useful feedback, and resubmit with a better chance of success. Many grants, fellowships, and papers get accepted on the second, third, or even fifth try. Sometimes it takes even longer, especially for more ambitious proposals.
As I said earlier, rejection still sucks. But it sucks in different ways. One example is that as you become more senior, you become much more concerned about how the rejection affects other people—especially those you are mentoring or supervising. This might include PhD students, postdocs, junior faculty, or colleagues in your team or centre.
If a PhD student is involved, you worry about how the rejection impacts their timeline or their ability to complete a fulfilling and successful PhD. As a senior academic, individual rejections don’t carry as much personal consequence anymore. The bigger worry is how they affect those in your care. You still feel the sting, but now it’s about your responsibilities to others, not just yourself.
Eventually, with enough experience, you begin to understand something even more confronting: there are stages in a career when you are no longer as competitive or relevant in certain areas. Your career evolves. You may move into leadership, strategy, or broader influence roles. But at the same time, you may no longer be as technically sharp or competitive in the fields that once defined you.
Rejection is part of that transition. While an individual rejection might just be bad luck or harsh reviewers, a pattern of rejection can be a weak signal that you’re not quite as relevant or competitive in that area anymore. That can be tough to accept, especially if your identity is wrapped up in being a top researcher in that space. In fast-moving, highly technical fields, part-time involvement usually isn’t enough. You have to be fully immersed to stay at the front. If you’re not, you can slip behind. And when that happens, rejection becomes a signal that it’s time to shift your focus.
Through all these years and hundreds of rejections, I’ve learned a few important things. One is that, if you are supervising or mentoring others, a big part of your job is helping them through rejection. Students and junior colleagues can feel genuinely distraught. You can’t remove their disappointment, but you can provide perspective, encouragement, and guidance for how to move forward and resubmit something stronger.
Another important lesson is that some rejection is actually a healthy sign. If you’re getting every single paper or grant accepted, you may not be challenging yourself enough. You might be aiming too low, going only for the easy wins. On the other hand, if you’re getting rejected over and over again, with little to no success, it might be time to reevaluate your strategy. You could be aiming too high, or not aligning your work with the right venues or topics. Rejection, when viewed objectively, is a feedback signal. It may be telling you to make some adjustments.
Finally, and this one I’ve learned the hard way: you must celebrate your wins. Celebrate them properly, and celebrate them in the moment. If you wait too long, the next rejection may hit before you get a chance to enjoy the success. That missed opportunity can rob you of the sense of accomplishment you deserve. So when something gets accepted, savor it. Reflect on how much effort went into it. Acknowledge the hurdles you overcame. Let it sink in before the next challenge rolls in.
Rejection is a core part of any research or academic career. A certain amount of rejection means you are pushing yourself and aiming high. It also means you’re engaging with the broader community and putting your work out there. The way rejection feels will change over your career. It starts out feeling intensely personal. Later, it becomes about the people you’re responsible for and the bigger picture of your role. Through it all, the goal is to improve, resubmit, and ultimately achieve the success and recognition your work deserves.