Rejections

I have recently received two paper rejections within a 10-day period.

Academics are among the people who face frequent rejections in their lives. We also reject other people’s work quite often. Thus, one might say, it is karma.

I wish I could tell my students things like “You will get used to having your work rejected by others”, “It gets better over time as you get more and more rejections.” But that would make me a hypocrite, so I instead tell them a version of “It comes with the job.”

In fact, since I became a professor, rejections became harder to face. When I was a PhD student or at IBM Research, they didn’t upset me much.

During the first year of my PhD, I had to change advisors twice [1]. When I joined Natassa’s group, my main anxiety was about possibly getting fired again [2]. After a while, it became clear to me that Natassa had no intention to fire me, and my lab-mates valued having me around. Whenever I received a paper rejection, it wasn’t a big deal. At the end of the day, it wasn’t as big of a rejection as getting fired. I still had my nice job, could pay my rent, and could keep my residence permit. Those were the important things. At IBM, this attitude just persisted.

So why now, as a tenured professor, as privileged as one can get about job security in this world, I feel the impact of a paper rejection more? Did I get spoiled?

 

The main reason I love being an academic is the interaction with the students. That interaction isn’t always perfect and has its ups and downs just like any other human interaction in life. But it is a good enough reason for me to wake up in the morning and want to go to work.

The most fulfilling and impactful interaction you have with a student is when you are that student’s PhD advisor. In Denmark, it is uncommon for a professor to have dedicated PhD funding from the university funds. Therefore, you depend on external funding for PhD students. It took me roughly three years, and several grant rejections, to get such funding. I started noticing signs of me getting bitter as I was approaching that third year, which scared me. I never want to become bitter. I understand that that possibility comes with being human as well, but hopefully for only short periods of time, not long-term.

Now I have two PhD students and am expecting to hire a third one this year. PhD students are a must-have in my research field and are wonderful to have. They erase all the bitterness. They help you do independent research. They keep you in an actively-learning state. They force you to evolve and mature. Plus, you can take them to amusement parks.

My primary anxiety now is going back to the days where I had no PhD students as a professor. To prevent that I need my future grant applications to be accepted, which very likely depends on me maintaining a good publication record.

My secondary anxiety is, even if I am tenured, I would like to have options. Even though I am happy where I am now, I may want to switch to a different university or move to a different country again either for professional or personal reasons. Without a good publication record, I won’t have options.

 

In computer systems research, it takes time to create a decent conference paper submission, because of the time it takes to implement systems, run non-trivial experiments, and interpret the experimental results thoroughly. With each paper rejection, you are likely asked to do more experiments, which lengthens the time further. The PhD duration in Denmark being only three years doesn’t help with that.

Furthermore, I ended up slightly changing my field of research. From my perspective, things haven’t changed drastically. I still work on data-intensive systems on modern hardware. However, from the perspective of my research community, I am somewhat an exile now since the data-intensive systems I focus on these days are machine learning systems and not database systems. The kind of papers I write aren’t considered a good fit for the database community, which is the community I feel belonging to. Even though I love the systems community and have always been adjacent to it, I am not as familiar with submitting papers to their venues and being part of their conferences.

These two challenges combined with my work anxieties make me now more worried than I used to be when I receive paper rejections.

 

Which brings me to dealing with work-related rejections.

I know these challenges and anxieties sound like first-world problems in a world where many people don’t have the basic job security and horrible things happen every day, but I am trying to ensure the best life I can for myself, just like everyone else.

Last Sunday, around early evening, I first received some back-to-back bad news about two close family members, who have been battling with cancer the past year. In short, their conditions weren’t getting better. About an hour later, I received the email for the second paper rejection, the second of the two rejections I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The paper rejection of course wasn’t important in contrast to the news about my family members. However, it still felt like the final blow of the day given the state I was in.

In Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird, there is a scene, where the character Kyle belittles Ladybird’s sadness by comparing it to the Iraq War. In return, Ladybird yells “SHUT UP. SHUT UP. Different things can be sad. It's not all war.”

A paper or grant rejection, even though relatively unimportant compared to many other sources of sadness and grief in life, can be a source of sadness. There is significant amount of time and hard work put into any piece of rejected work, which comes as a result of many compromises in life. In addition, for a researcher, this work is very likely something you are passionate and opinionated about, so someone not finding the work as exciting and important as you do naturally hurts as well.

The easiest way to get over any rejection is to let yourself feel the emotions that comes with it without feeling shame for them and belittling them, but also realizing that those emotions are not here to stay. They will go away, because there is a relatively easy solution for a paper/grant rejection, unlike a solution to cancer, war, earthquakes, etc.  Just pick the next venue/call to resubmit to and list the changes to be done till then based on the parts of the reviewers’ feedback that you find constructive. Also, remember that statistically speaking (which means nothing coming out of my mouth, since I don’t know statistics well), it is normal to get more rejections than acceptances, since once something gets accepted, the counting ends for that thing.

What you do to feel and get over the emotions stirred up by the rejection is up to you, as long as you don’t act on them in a way that harms another person. Everyone is different. People used to tell me to go out and drink after a rejection, but I don’t find that useful for myself. My happy places are cinemas and the beach. I try to hit at least one of them. When I got the email for my second big grant rejection, I wrote the people at work that I wouldn’t come to work the next day. I went to the cinema that evening (the movie was X-Men: Dark Phoenix). After the movie, I ran into two colleagues, one of whom also had a grant rejection email that day. Their approach was to hang out and drink together to acknowledge the rejection. I joined them for one beer before going back home. The next day, I went to the beach. It was June and warm enough to swim for me [3]. This was time very well spent overall. After the beach, I was ready for my resubmission plan. Following last Sunday, this Monday, I took a walk to the beach and spent some time there, this time no swimming due to cold weather. The picture at the top is from that walk. Fingers crossed for the resubmissions.

 

 

[1] PhD Defense – Part 2: The Public One – Or from Amazonian Queen to Idiot to Humility and Fierceness

[2] Back then, when I talked about this experience, some people very opinionatedly objected to me saying “You weren’t fired. You were just on a trial period at that lab, and you simply weren’t accepted into the lab after the trial period. It is wrong of you to use the word ‘fired’.” Some others, including one from the corresponding lab, used the word ‘fired’. For me it was like being fired. Whatever you wish to call it, it was a big form of rejection either way.

To be clear, it was the right decision both for me and for the lab. I wasn’t a good fit there and that lab wasn’t a good fit for me. I have a lot of respect for my advisor and several of my lab mates from that time. I can neither deny the technical skills I learned there and the positive long-term impact of that “firing/unacceptance” decision in my career, since that is how I ended up with Natassa, nor undermine the damage of having such a big rejection that early in my career and that early in a foreign land on me in addition to certain unconstructive attitudes I received in that environment. This topic is not black & white. This is why, it comes up in several blog posts from different angles and in my conversations with people about the PhD experience.

[3] In Denmark, some people swim all year long, but I prefer some calm time at the beach after swimming.