One of the things that those outside don’t realize about
academic life is how much rejection is involved. From job applications to article submissions
to grant applications, all of us get rejected on a pretty regular basis. It’s *hard*. Depending on the rejection, we may feel a
part of ourselves has been rejected. And
yet, we mostly continue. What do you do
to manage disappointment? Chocolate?
Whiskey? Wine? A trashy novel? Do you have a thick skin, or do you have friends who help you? Do you have favorite kinds of self-talk? Go for a run? How do you keep on going!
Goals from last week
Allan Wilson: (goals for the fortnight; on holiday)
1) exercise twice (in
addition to what I do on holiday)
2) finish draft article for
non-academic source (2 weeks overdue)
3) meeting that was scheduled
in the last week on FS, or progress on its analysis problem.
4) complete new draft ms WHK
that incorporates co-author additions, and send back out to co-authors
Amstr:
Survive
Contingent Cassandra:
(1) self-care,
(2)some garden work,
(3) taxes!!!!
Daisy
1) Paper B - just do it dammit!!!
2) Come with experimental plan and timeline for summer and new project
3) Run
2) Come with experimental plan and timeline for summer and new project
3) Run
Elizabeth Ann Mitchell
1) Make doctor’s and dentist’s appointments.
2) File into paper files for a half hour three times.
3) Fix the first 20 footnotes in the dissertation.
2) File into paper files for a half hour three times.
3) Fix the first 20 footnotes in the dissertation.
Good Enough Woman:
To be set retrospectively
Humming42
1 Present finished, professional-sounding conference papers.
2 Catch up on grading.
3 Indulge in self-care.
2 Catch up on grading.
3 Indulge in self-care.
JaneB
Complete feedback on and return all the project drafts I have
from students (3 to go, plus three which may come in during the week - one
legit extension (funeral of close kin), one semi-legit (multiple two-day
graduate job selection panel events), one not legit (student had samples in
October, began work on them in February, is somewhat behind)) and write a plan
for Very Late, the paper I'm shifting my attention to (I should give it a more
positive name, right?).
Kjhaxton: (from 2 weeks ago)
2) plan the two articles that
I will write
3) plan
publication/presentation around small aspect of current teaching so that I can
put an evaluation plan in place to get a good paper
4) make figures for the paper
Matilda: (left over from last week)
1) Week 6-3 of Belcher's
book. Construct a better structure.
2) Continue to read the
important book.
3) Prepare for the classes.
4) Do short exercises between
pomodoro chunks.
5) If I want to have some,
have healthier snacks. Remember that I always have spots when I have chocolate.
Susan
1. Finish bill paying and financial organizing
2. Finish book review
3. Go back and re-examine one of the problem chapters and see if I can do some quick fixes.
4. Keep walking or exercising. (We may have rain tomorrow, which would hamper the walking, but I can exercise still.)
2. Finish book review
3. Go back and re-examine one of the problem chapters and see if I can do some quick fixes.
4. Keep walking or exercising. (We may have rain tomorrow, which would hamper the walking, but I can exercise still.)
I am very thin-skinned. I always remember the bad student evaluations, even if the good ones greatly outnumber them. I finally read the evaluations on my presentation, and one person said it was a stupid topic and a waste of time. Although I finally found it amusing that someone would sign up for a presentation that clearly states the topic, then decide it is a stupid topic, at first I was hurt by the remark.
ReplyDeleteI’m lucky to have family who are able to talk me down, and can remind me of the positive side of situations. I do immerse myself in reading "guilty pleasure" novels; I also write morning pages, to use Julia Cameron’s term, and I find that cathartic.
Last week’s goals:
1) Make doctor’s and dentist’s appointments. Yes, I made two doctors’ appointments and the dentist’s appointment.
2) File into paper files for a half hour three times.No, but instead, I went through several old files, shredded and recycled paper that I didn’t need anymore. Definitely a win.
3) Fix the first 20 footnotes in the dissertation.Yes, woohoo.
Next week’s goals:
1) Deal with the paper landslide in my office for a half-hour three times.
2) Clean up my dossier folder on email.
3) Fix the next 20 footnotes in the dissertation.
Good for the appointments!
DeleteOh, I meant to answer GEW's question about whether I'd decided to go back to the dissertation. I haven't yet decided, but I thought I'd work on it. Maybe working on it will help with the decision.
ReplyDeleteInsert thumbs up icon here. :)
DeleteHi all,
ReplyDeleteI am becoming better at handling criticism of my work - but still not so good on rejection. When my first paper was rejected, I cried. The comments seemed really harsh. Now I have learned that a hard critique can make a paper better, and to "embrace" it to some extent, although sometimes with difficulty. But, when criticism feels unjust or mean, even with the passing of time, that still burns me.
A rant is great to get over crap! I tend to talk it through with close friends/ colleagues, to get out the negativity, putting whatever it is away for a while until I can bear to look at it again. And, good old exercise.
Last fortnight's goals
1) exercise twice (in addition to what I do on holiday) YES
2) finish draft article for non-academic source (2 weeks overdue) YES- wow that was an effort, but I feel great about it.
3) meeting that was scheduled in the last week on FS, or progress on its analysis problem. YES- a good meeting about this.
4) complete new draft ms WHK that incorporates co-author additions, and send back out to co-authors. NO - my new goal for this week.
allan wilson
Yay! You made your appointments!
DeleteLove the rant as part of your recovery technique! And congratulations on finishing the non-academic article... that's hard to write!
DeleteSorry! My "appointments" reply popped up in the wrong place...
DeleteI hope you won't mind terribly if I skip the topic for now? I am feeling so thrilled about all I accomplished this week that I don't want to think about rejection. Instead, I want to tell you what I've done. This past week was spring break for hubby, the kids, and me. We had planned a big road trip, but about two weeks before break, we started to rethink the trip. In the end, we opted for a staycation. For me, it was a TLQtion! I got so much TLQ stuff done:
ReplyDelete1. I finally sent a long update and a progress timeline to my PhD supervisor.
2. I had a great mommy-daughter date all day Wednesday.
3. I finally fixed my son's computer Minecraft account, and he is thrilled.
4. I made a doctor's appoint for this week (I'm going to have to reschedule for next week because of body timing issues, but, hey, I'm going in the right direction).
5. Hubby and I spent the bulk of Tuesday completing and filing taxes, followed by a brief date at the local ale house.
6. I added a bookshelf to the study and cleaned up the room.
7. I cleaned out a cabinet (of bags, jackets, and various other items)
8. We joined a luxurious athletic club that I never thought we could afford, but since we didn't go on our trip, we used the trip money and a two-week free guest membership that we cashed in for towards our dues. We are going to live the fancy life for at least a year!
9. On Saturday, hubby took the kids camping, and I went to the fancy club. I took a yoga class, swam laps for half an hour, basked in the sun for 15 minutes, and then had lunch there on a lovely patio. I am a new woman, and I have a new favorite thing to do on Saturdays. If you come visit me, I will take you, too.
10. I read several chapters of theory books related to the thesis.
11. We went on a family hike on Easter Sunday.
12. We had good friends over for a good dinner on Monday.
13. We let the kids have friends sleep over on Friday.
14. I slept late 2 or 3 times! (Remember how I said I was feeling fatigued because of perimenopause? I think I just hadn't been getting enough zzzzzzzs! Did I mention that I am a new woman?
15. I walked the dog at least twice.
16. We made reservations for summer plans, which include me attending a week-long NEH Seminar on digital humanities (because I was accepted!) and then a detour through Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons on our way to Colorado.
Yes, there are still a lot of TLQ things that didn't get done, but I am thrilled with the way the staycation gave me time to pay attention to the house, my kids, myself, and the thesis. I totally blew off the TRQ tasks and my actual job. I will pay for that this week, but whatever. We have only five more weeks of instruction before finals!!!
Goals for this week:
1. Call Monday to reschedule the doc appointment.
2. Call to make one or two other doc appointments.
3. Go to the fancy club at least twice to swim or do yoga.
4. Start drafting the commencement speech (I have to give the faculty speech at commencement this year, which totally freaks me out, and which is only about six weeks away).
5. Read 20 pages related to thesis.
And get caught up with TRQ.
My TLQ temp is a 10 today, and I'm so grateful that I have all of you with whom I can share my accomplishments (overdue as they might be). Thank you!
So glad you had a good week!
DeleteBrilliant- inspiring! Allan wilson
DeleteCongratulations! You accomplished so much! You deserve much celebration! (I definitely want a fancy fitness club date when I'm out to visit next.)
DeleteAmstr, You got it!
Delete(belated) Congratulations! As I get older, I'm increasingly considering a chance to catch up on neglected tasks at least as rejuvenating as a "break" break (though I like, and need, those, too).
DeleteLook at you and your accomplishments! Congratulations!
ReplyDeletetopic: I am very very bad at this when it comes to drafts and collaborators, but cope much better with the bigger stuff like grant applications and journal articles. Somehow the former feels much more personal! Even though it's sometimes no doubt the same people wearing different hats... I definitely like to rant, to sit on the ground and have a proper tantrum (metaphorically), and to put the document away out of my sight, then revisit it a few days later when I have some distance from the emotional reaction.
ReplyDeleteMy PhD supervisor had excellent advice for this - he said it was a waste of time and energy to work on something until you really believed it was perfect, because you'd not only spend a lot of time on one thing at the cost of other things, but because you'd also be more hurt by/resistent to criticism of it when you let other people see it. He said you should work until it was 'pretty good' given the time you'd available, then send it out into the world. Either people would agree it was pretty good and you'd have a chance to add a little more polish later, or they'd give you feedback which you could then use to work on it some more, and the feedback would let you use the time you'd've used trying to go from 'pretty good' to 'perfect' much more efficiently.
There is so much luck and chance in this game we play (in who referees things, what else is competing with your thing, in the particular circumstances you know not of from a bad lunch to a personal tragedy to a stuffy room and being first or last on the panel's list), taking it personally is actually a bit arrogant!
That doesn't stop me taking it personally, by the way, but it does give me some perspective...
DeleteThis is all wise. And I agree on not perfecting things. And luck and chance are frustrating, because we so want it to be rational!
DeleteI love the approach of not perfecting every single thing. My supervisor is the polar opposite, at the stage where I wanted to submit things, even to my committee members her response was that anything sent out to anyone should only elicit one question from them, and the question should be where you are publishing it. Which is insane because without feedback from people other than her my defense was an enormously stressful event, I had tons of revisions and some papers are still in limbo. I've started sending things to my own selection of mentors for feedback now, but while I was officially her student that was a big NO.
DeleteI like that approach (and can think of at least one project for which I should take it to heart, finish it, and send it out).
Deletegoals: Complete feedback on and return all the project drafts I have from students (3 to go, plus three which may come in during the week - one legit extension (funeral of close kin), one semi-legit (multiple two-day graduate job selection panel events), one not legit (student had samples in October, began work on them in February, is somewhat behind)) and write a plan for Very Late, the paper I'm shifting my attention to (I should give it a more positive name, right?).
ReplyDeleteachieved: all project drafts returned. Have not touched Very Late, but have engaged in a lengthy email exchange about another paper, and begun to work on Crunchier's Little Brother, using some data that were cut out of the draft of Crunchier that is now with readers. More than nothing!
Gah, today is clearly going to be a day of hitting publish rather than thinking, then having to reply to myself which always seems like bad form somehow.
Deletegoals for next week: an hour of work minimum on each of five days on research writing, an hour somewhere on planning, and 30 minutes on each of five days on decluttering
Love the paper name Crunchier's Little Brother.AW
DeleteI always love the early stage of looking at stuff for a paper!
DeleteIn the first two years or so after I finished my dissertation, nearly everything abstract I sent out was accepted. I thought I was just golden. The last few years have been rejection after rejection. I am not sure why this is, but I have tried to think about it rationally rather than considering it emotionally. I have a degree in creative writing as well, and my mentor would say that sending out poems was like sending out bills (clearly back in the day when we didn’t pay bills online yet). It wasn’t about the quality of your work but about finding the right fit. I try to bear that in mind, but I do still feel like an inadequate scholar when I get rejections. Glad for the insight of others here.
ReplyDeleteLast week:
1 Present finished, professional-sounding conference papers: managed to pull that off.
2 Catch up on grading: not quite.
3 Indulge in self-care: not really.
This week:
1 Finish old article and submit (really TRQ now, I am ashamed to say)
2 Again, catch up on grading
3 Again, take care of self exquisitely (not an indulgence, as JaneB wisely noted last week, but an obligation)
I hadn't thought about the flip side, of how we think we are so special when we succeed! (And I do that...)
DeleteAs to the question: I've been more rejected than not in my career, so have developed lots of strategies. Some are undoubtedly rationalizations -- I've always followed my nose in my research, so it's never been fashionable, for instance. And because it's off the beaten track, when I get comments, they are all, "Why aren't you approaching this the way everyone else is?" With comments on essays, I read it quickly, complain to the universe, and then look again rationally a few days later. I never expect grants, and jobs, when I haven't got them, I just put one foot in front of the other, and realize I am probably better off as I am... At various times I also vent to someone who I trust, or indulge in alcohol, or chocolate, or trashy novels. Or all three. I think the key is being able to acknowledge the dismay/anger/sorrow/frustration, and then I can move on.
ReplyDeleteLast week's goals:
1. Finish bill paying and financial organizing DONE
2. Finish book review DONE
3. Go back and re-examine one of the problem chapters and see if I can do some quick fixes. DONE (I cut 1000 words which were cluttering up the argument)
4. Keep walking or exercising. (We may have rain tomorrow, which would hamper the walking, but I can exercise still.) Three days, but. .
I'm still recovering from the conference we hosted on Friday and Saturday, and I'm still driving an hour each way to visit my mother, at least every other day. I bring her home Wednesday, and take off for another conference on Thursday. Really, I only have time tomorrow for anything TLQ. So my goals are very modest:
1. Make progress on grant application
2. Catalog a few of my offprints
3. Walk two mornings
You've got some great strategies here. Acknowledging emotions and being able to move on is right on.
DeleteI hope your mother is well. The extra driving and post-conference exhaustion sounds hard. May your week have moments of rest.
It's strangely symbolic that my to-do list starts with 2 rather than 1. Feels like a general philosophy at the moment! I'm going to be plugging away on this for the next two seeks.
ReplyDelete2) plan the two articles that I will write
3) plan publication/presentation around small aspect of current teaching so that I can put an evaluation plan in place to get a good paper
4) make figures for the paper
I like the topic. I tend to move past big rejections fairly quickly, adopting the Jed Bartlett approach of 'right what's next' and just dive back into the next thing. Sometimes things resurface but sometimes I go home and think 'well today was rubbish' and I can't remember why! It's the small day-to-day stuff that eats away and leads to big sulks, the incremental rejections and inequalities that tend to do damage because, as with most minor trauma, I don't have the coping mechanisms to deal with them because I don't recognise them as major enough to try. So it's being overlooked or ignored, ideas being rejected, people ignoring me as a potential collaborator, someone not responding positively to something... To deal with it, I have to be able to recognise it for what it is and I struggle to do that.
Otherwise, a nice cup of tea or some chocolate (while at work), whiskey (end of working day/at home), cooking something very methodical like risotto, or generally sitting in the garden imagining I can zap weeds with the power of my mind alone.
That's an interesting distinction between the big rejections, and the small day-to-day stuff. And I agree, it's the micro-aggressions that are harder to handle. And risotto is a great solution. I will actually pull up the weeds!
DeleteTopic:
ReplyDeleteRejection truly does not bother me much on a personal level. I used to be in arts professionally where from age 12 every single thing you do is critiqued and pulled apart and dissected, very often on stage with an audience (yay masterclass!) so that was great training. The thing that bothers me much more than the actual rejection is the time involved. When you do a show you get immediate feedback and you fix things for the next show. The damn reviews for papers take months (or years) and projects take years, and grant cycles only come once a year so every rejection feels like it erases a year's work. And then then you do another year, and try again. If there was a machine that could do it quickly so we could move on faster I'd buy one! I would much rather be rejected more often at greater speeds than save up for the big ones that come around less frequently.
This week's goals:
Exam prep last week, end of class chaos and so-on, so light on everything else...
1) Paper B - just do it dammit!!! WORKED ON IT, but not done...
2) Come with experimental plan and timeline for summer and new project DONE
3) Run DONE
This week (which is only half over!) is for tackling a program review and a newsletter that have both been languishing on the back burner. With a couple of more research-oriented things as usual.
1) Poster for conference
2) Paper B done
3) Program review
4) Newsletter
Both you and kjhaxton have suggested different types of rejection, and I can imagine how, if you're in a master class and get critiqued, it doesn't feel quite so terrible. That's what you're there for. But the time on grants, etc. makes it really difficult.
DeleteIn any case, congratulations on the progress you've made!
I was a music major for most of college, and master classes horrified me!
DeleteSomehow I've managed to avoid situations in which I might be rejected for quite some time. For my work, though, I think I've shifted mostly to seeing a piece of writing as it's own thing, not as a representation of me, so in reading comments, I tend to focus on whether what the reader says will make the work itself better. As I'm looking toward trying to get back in the classroom, the feedback feels more threatening--both because in the past I haven't taught in colleges/universities that had much structure to supported teaching development and because teaching feels much more personal than writing somehow. (I also have had to revisit some rather unkind online review from a local "rate my professor" in vetting my online search results. They're from 12+ years ago, and they certainly document my dissatisfaction with teaching at the time!) Anyway--I'm looking forward to a lot of rejection this summer as I look for a literary agent for my non-academic writing.
ReplyDeleteLast week's goal: survive.
Accomplished: I'm almost there! I have one last project to finish tomorrow, and I managed to finish taxes(!) and cancel another big deadline. (I was supposed to read Ali Smith's How to Be Both for a book group. Have any of you read it? I'm finding it fascinating and difficult, but fascinating.)
For next week:
1) exercise 3x
2) write 2x
Congratulations on surviving! I think one reason teaching feels more personal is that student evaluations (especially negative ones) are often excruciatingly personal!
DeleteHello.
ReplyDeleteTopic: when rejected, I first get very disappointed, angry, upset, and cry, then leave it for a few days, avoid doing things related to the project, while reading enjoyable novels, eating what I like, trying not to see the fact. After a few days, gradually I get calm enough to see the reality, thinking of seeing the bright side. Then I come back to the fact that I was rejected, and examine the reason. Usually things now turn out not so bad as first I thought, and then I think, ‘OK, I can do better next time.’ This is my usual pattern when I am rejected.
Last goals:
1) Week 6-3 of Belcher's book. Construct a better structure.- nothing.
2) Continue to read the important book. - some.
3) Prepare for the classes. - Done. Anyway, classes have started.
4) Do short exercises between pomodoro chunks. - None.
5) If I want to have some, have healthier snacks. Remember that I always have spots when I have chocolate. - Well, rather good. Anyway, I did not buy chocolate while these two weeks.
New goals:
1) Write the draft of the article, the deadline coming soon.
2) Reset myself. I want to start afresh - in some way.
I have been overwhelmed by what I need to do during these a couple of weeks. TLQ project has been nearly terminated by work-and-family -related TRQ things. Where am I who first energetically joined this TLQ term with confidence and determination? I thought I would nearly drop out. Well, the reality is always harsh and difficult, but I am here again, anyway.
Have a happy week, everyone!
I love your recognition that "usually things turn out not so bad as first I thought." That's so true! The intrusion of TRQ into our lives is inevitable, but always so hard.
Delete