Academic life is primarily about failure. The article that you invested so much time into gets rejected. Your grant proposal is a close third, but only two are accepted. You apply for 75 academic jobs, and if you are very lucky, you might get one. Rejection is all the more central to academic life as we enter a period of decline in the academic market that will likely last for years. The majority of this job is managing failure and rejection.
The great Rob Robinson, now retired former Indiana sociology professor, gave me some perspective-altering advice in my second year of graduate school: to succeed, you need to respond to rejection and failure with stupidity and resilience.
Why stupidity? Well, because it is completely reasonable to retreat in the face of rejection. Especially early on in one’s career, it *really hurts* to get rejected. I find that it still hurts! I faced some painful and, in my opinion, questionable rejection decisions recently. I felt really hurt and sad. When you face rejection, either in the form of not receiving a grant, having a paper rejected, not getting a job interview, whatever, the completely rational impulse is to pick up your ball, march home, and cry. But success in this field is predicated on the fact that success typically follows stupidly walking again and again into the rejection waves that crash into you.
This is your resilience. I have needed to find healthy ways to process the sting of rejection and move forward, as if it weren't going to happen next time. Weirdly enough, the best response to a paper’s rejection is to try and quickly edit it and—assuming it doesn’t have a poison pill that makes it unpublishable—promptly resubmit it to a new potential home. After about a decade in this game, I've learned that sometimes I am *not* rejected! Sometimes success *can* be had! Many great papers in our discipline had long and circuitous paths along multiple submissions and rejections. It is tempting to view the rejection of a paper as an all-encompassing valuation of the work’s merit, and to throw the manuscript into the desk drawer, never to be seen again. I think that’s a bad idea. And one of the biggest self-sabotaging acts I’ve observed among graduate students / early faculty / myself is to respond to an early rejection with a long fallow period of a paper’s submission life cycle.
One of the awful things about being a graduate student, and one of the awful things about the pandemic, is that it can be difficult to learn about the sheer quantity of rejection and disappointment that the most successful people in the discipline face. There’s a very real benefit to having an informal conversation with people who you think are really, really great, and to hear their recent frustrating experiences with getting their papers rejected.
Notes:
A prompt response to rejection does not mean that you needn’t learn from your experience, or that you should simply send the same version of the manuscript/grant/whatever out exactly as it was sent out before. On the contrary, it is very important to lean into rejection comments and read them in their most charitable form. In one’s early career, it’s really useful to find someone who will go line by line through rejection decisions and distinguish which comments are more useful and which ones are less useful. I’m going to write about this in the future someday.
I think it is important to find insiders, or mentors, who you feel comfortable sharing the emotional downs of the job. It’s really rough to go it alone. And it’s also really rough to try and ride out the emotional aspects of the job with other folks new to the field, who may not have a broader perspective to bring.