Will rejection ruin your career in science?
The short answer is no.
When I was a brash young oceanography PhD student, forty years ago now, I walked into my supervisor’s office and stepped on some papers scattered on the floor. I bent down to pick them up, and was greeted by a terse “Leave them there!”. I asked what they were, and Carl eyed me balefully as he sat at his lab table. “It’s a rejection letter for a research grant”. He left the papers there for a day or two while students, colleagues, and visitors walked over them, leaving their footprints. It was a lesson in mental health.
In my career as a fisheries oceanographer, a lot of my work suffered greater or lesser degrees of public scrutiny. First it was graduate school fellowship applications. When I first arrived in the U.S. from New Zealand, I had no idea that students were often funded by teaching or research assistantships. I missed the deadline to apply, so I put in an NSF graduate fellowship application. The result was an honourable mention, but no funds. I was offered an alternative thesis topic, but I didn’t really like living in Texas, so I went to Canada, and the student funding was more generous. Being willing to move was the key.
Then it was ideas. They poured out of me, fresh and glistening, wrapped in enthusiasm, and I laid them on the table like a prize fish. My fellow students and thesis committee devoured them, tearing the offerings apart, or refraining from praise. I put the leftovers in my pocket, hoping to reconstruct something, but inevitably had to retreat to try to land another, more suitable set of ideas. Fortunately I found many topics interesting, and with study, soon settled on ideas that found favour.
Manuscripts followed and were published. My supervisor was annoyed. I was publishing too early and too fast. A gentle colleague read drafts and coached me. I received praise from another senior colleague, and it made me realise that opinions on the worth of a paper might differ, and still be valid. I struggled to write some papers, while others flew through the peer review system with minimal revision. I began to realise that if a paper made me bleed to write it, there was a high probability that reviewers would also have trouble with it. Learning to put down and walk away from things that I had invested a lot of effort in was difficult, but necessary.
Gaining suitable post doctoral and contract research associate positions caused me considerable anxiety, because they were highly competitive, located worldwide, and not always suitable for my family. I applied for about a dozen positions and watched the rejections roll in, until to my surprise, I was offered several. Lots of applications was the right thing to do.
After an idyllic postdoc in New Zealand, I experienced crushing funding anxiety in the U.S., followed by a contract position in Canada where my experiments failed, my colleagues were unsuitable for me at the time, I failed to publish anything, and I simply lost interest. I took a management job just to get back to New Zealand, and put up with it for two years, before moving to the main centre and continuing to do fisheries research in a new field for me. The key was flexibility. Willingness to move countries, to move cities, to take an unsuitable position as a stepping stone to a better job, and to change fields.
After eight years of interesting research, rejection again reared it’s head as my organisation restructured, and my job was made redundant. This time, I saw it coming, and prepared well by applying for other positions ahead of time. When the axe fell, I had already secured another job in Australia, took a two week holiday and a redundancy payment, and left. Awareness of my situation, preparation, and flexibility saved me. The job was interesting for a while, but not what I was looking for. I took my time to find the right job, and eventually landed the best position of my career. I led the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program for NOAA for eleven years in La Jolla, California. It was a wonderful, enriching experience, full of exciting research and intellectually stimulating colleagues. And there were some further rejections, but I had learned to deal with them. Did they rock the boat? Yes, but they didn’t sink it. Rejections won’t ruin your science career, but they are unavoidable. Taking practical steps to deal with them, and maintaining a flexible attitude, will help you to survive and flourish.
