An academic career is an art of dealing with uncertainty and rejection. Would you agree?
Being a competitive profession, rejection in academia is inevitable. It’s rather brutal as we often identify rejection of our academic work with personal failure.
To stay motivated and become a successful academic, you need to develop a defence and coping mechanisms to deal with the uncertainty of outcomes and academic rejection.
Although I briefly mentioned this in my previous article titled 5 ways to deal with common PhD challenges, I feel that this is an essential subject for PhD students and early career researchers like yourself.
I learnt the meaning of rejection in the early stages of my education. At that time, I got really interested in art and social sciences and decided to put my application to a high school that was inclined towards such subjects.
Unfortunately, I literally scored 1 point below the minimum required score that year and ended up in the high school that was inclined towards maths, geography and chemistry.
At that time, I felt like a failure. Such rejection hit me really hard. I was devastated and did not know what to do with my career.
Reflecting on this experience from the perspective of more than 15 years, I am grateful that I scored 1 less point on that exam! If it had not been for this rejection, I would not have been where I am now!
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Why is rejection good for you?
I agree that no one wants to be rejected. Yet by joining academia, you expose yourself on a continuous influx of feedback, mostly from unknown peer reviewers, who judge your research papers and proposals for research projects.
Rejection hurts, even if you have a couple of years of academic experience and are an expert in your field. My work gets rejected from time to time. Despite several successful proposals and accepted papers earlier this year, I recently got a few small project proposals rejected in a row.
So how you can stay motivated and keep on pushing the boundaries of knowledge in such a competitive and uncertain environment, especially when you are a PhD student or early-career researcher?
What helped me was the understanding that everyone gets rejected from time to time. It is challenging, if not impossible, to maintain a 100% success rate.
Hence, as I mentioned in my earlier article titled How to be positive, motivated and productive by self-aware procrastination, motivation changes over time. And rejection is the critical aspect of being an academic that may influence your self-esteem and motivation.
This may seem strange, but I want you to understand one important thing about why rejection is good for you.
As your proposals and papers get rejected, these usually expose the weaknesses of your work that you were not aware of (aka. blindspots). Unless the peer-reviewers are just mean or biased. Assuming they were not, such rejection provides you with a focus on how to improve your work and try again.
I published my most cited research papers after they had been initially rejected by other journals. The same applies to my most successful proposals. For example, I applied for a fellowship at the end of my PhD. Unfortunately, it was rejected regardless of receiving high scores. Yet, I pushed myself to consider the feedback from the reviewers to significantly improved it. A couple of months later it was approved for funding – happy days!
Understand your emotions to deal with rejection
As you now understand that rejection is an inherent part of being an academic, you may want to know how to deal with it.
Before I get to the 5 steps I use to deal with rejection, I want you to understand that rejection per se does not influence your motivation. It is the associated emotions that affect your self-esteem and how you feel about it.
Broadly speaking, each of us (including myself!) goes through 5 stages of rejection grief. This is known as