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In our new âhow can we help you?â thread, a reader asks:
Iâve increasingly come to appreciate how much rejection figures in academic philosophy. Itâs not easy. What strategies do you all have for dealing with rejections, whether it be from journals, programs, jobs, summer-schools, etc.?
Yep, this sure is an unending issue in an academic career. ÂŻ\(ă)/ÂŻ : (
Do any readers have any tips or strategies the OP might find helpful?
It’s really hard. I am someone who takes rejection very personally so maybe should have chosen a different field! I was warned about this problem very early on in my PhD by my academic mentor. I think that helped in the sense that I was already expecting rejection every time I applied for something or submitted a paper. Having now been on the other side of things as a reviewer and search committee member, it’s easier to see just how much of a crap shoot things really are – especially the job market. It doesn’t help in the sense that it still sucks not to get a job, but it does help with the “taking it personally” part. Getting rejected doesn’t mean that you’re not a strong candidate or a good philosopher.
I have started to treat the act of applying for/sending things off as if it is the win and giving myself a treat. Rejection stinks but its so constant that I have gotten better at just deleting the relevant email and moving on.
One of my mentors in grad school used to say “There’s a home for every paper.” When it comes to papers, anyway, I just think of getting rejected from a journal as a signal that my paper hasn’t found the right journal yet. And it can also become a game about asking a question that puts the odds more in my favor. Instead of asking, ‘what are the chances my paper gets into Journal A?’, I’ve started to think of it like, ‘what are the chances my paper gets into Journal A or B or C or D or E…?’
Along the lines of the first comment, not only are things a crapshoot, but pretty much everybody gets a bunch of rejection in all sorts of ways, so the fact that you get a bunch a rejection in all sorts of ways is no sign that you’re especially incompetent.
Real broad advice that is not easily actionable: Find patterns of living where your self-esteem and positive understandings of your self worth come from within – not from the validation of others and especially not by comparing yourself to others in the profession.
General device that is somewhat actionable: Take the mental steps needed to treat outcomes in this profession as largely luck-driven. Do your best work, give good effort, and then treat outcomes as significantly impacted by factors that you have no control over (factors whose influences will never be fully revealed to you).
Specific advice that has helped me:
-Try not to constantly check submission sites for updates.
-When you get a rejection, read the comments and only make edits if that strike you as absolutely necessary. If not, just get the article out to another journal. That process by itself helps me to move on from whatever disappointment I feel.
-Every job, school, etc. has a great many applicants who are sufficiently qualified and are deserving of a job/position. Do not take rejection from a job or program as an assessment of you in any way. I have been a part of searches where we gave general tier rankings to candidates, and there were VERY GOOD candidates in the 4th tier, below like 50 other philosophers. Keeping this in mind can help to remove the sting of a rejection. It is not that you deserve rejection. It’s just that only one candidate can be picked. (Here, again, there is a great deal of randomness.)
Still, it is hard to deal with the rejection in this profession. I have to consistently remind myself not to take it personally.
I wonder if you can expand on this “Find patterns of living where your self-esteem and positive understandings of your self worth come from within” So I personally find some rejections harder than others, and haven’t find the said pattern of living that helps with the hardest kind. Google only gives generic self-help advice that I don’t really find helpful. Can you provide more details?
I don’t think I can give a great answer here. I questioned the actionability of that initial advice I gave because the source of these things might differ so much from person to person. Maybe for some it’s family. Maybe for others, it’s religion. For me, it involved getting off social media, ceasing any sort of validation-seeking through online means, and consistently giving thought to what I’m doing and why I’m doing.
This might be an easy thing for me to say as someone who is professionally and financially comfortable. I don’t have to foster an online presence and no longer have to care where I publish. So, again, I am not sure how actionable this advice is. But I think it is a worthy goal for everyone to think about (and to try to determine what exactly internal validation would look like for them).
I don’t know if this is advice, exactly, but FWIW, I’m a tenured professor at an R1 going up for promotion to full in the next few years, and every single rejection *still* gets me in the gut and makes me feel like a crap philosopher. Which is just to say that I don’t think that it ever goes away for lots of us, but I find it psychologically easier to handle when I remind myself that the people I really look up to are getting it all of the time, too.
Not an R1, but would consider myself relatively successful (certainly beyond what I would have hoped when I got rejected from every single job my first few years on the market…). I agree– it helps hearing about others’ failures! It makes it seem less personal and shameful and more just part of the deal. So, wildly successful academics, please share your failure stories! In fact, maybe we need an open thread? A series of posts? I’d write one but it probably wouldn’t be any good đ
Second this idea and hope this happens! I knew a wildly successful philosopher, now full professor at a leiterrific program, who only got his first job because all other candidates declined.
Revisit your successes! Revisit them frequently.
It is hard, and it doesn’t help that lots of those rejections are unwarranted! My own approach, which helps some but not a lot, is just to assume that anything and everything I do will just be rejected 100% of the time. And then when something does come back with an accept, then I’m pleasantly surprised. (For instance, when a paper is ready to go out to journals, I generate a list of 3-6 journals to send it to on the supposition that of course it will get rejected. Similarly, when I apply for jobs, I don’t check to see if interview requests go out; I just assume I got rejected. Let the interview request surprise me.) This approach doesn’t always work, but it helps some.
I don’t know how qualified I am. I’m a late stage PhD student with 4 peer-reviewed pubs, 3 current R&Rs, and ~25 rejections. For me, exposure has been so helpful. First, you just get used to it. Second, once you get a couple acceptances (or even R&Rs), you realize that seemingly devastating reviewer reports do not mean the paper is not publishable and other reviewers will think much more highly of your paper, even at similarly prestigious journals. Third, you get a few extremely stupid and obviously incorrect reviewer reports which lets you tell yourself that other reviews where you’re unsure might also be incredibly stupid and incorrect.
I’m in a fairly low-prestige department and I would say that I have the most publishing success out of any graduate student currently in the department or that has graduated in the last two years. It is evident that I am not the most talented graduate student. There are plenty that are more well-read and more thoughtful philosophers than I am. But I send papers out and they don’t, and that’s the difference. None of them have close to 25 rejections. In part, they don’t do it because of the very feeling you describe. But, for me, exposing myself to that feeling has been helpful for me. So, my advice is just to keep doing it.
This sounds correct to me, too.
I canât recommend mindfulness enough!!
I used to be an actor where rejection was just as common as philosophy (often in an even more personal way, as you were being judged in part on how you look, which at least isnât an issue with blind review!).
It has been so life saving to have a daily mindfulness meditation practice to help me take care of my sadness, investigate my thought patterns, and also ruminate less, all while building up my capacity to find some happiness in simple things in life that are completely independent of succeeding professionally. Being able to enjoy a cup of tea, enjoy a movie with my full attention, etc., can really improve oneâs quality of life and enable one to be less affected by rejection.
For example, I got rejected from over 60 jobs this cycle, and I was only sad once about the job cycle. Now, Iâve experienced PLENTY of anxiety, but mindfulness has also been super helpful in managing that!
I believe that we are capable of meaningfully changing our relationship to rejection, though it can require a lot of patience, diligence, and self-compassion.
I would also recommend psychologist Kristen Neffâs work on Self-compassion. She has some good conceptual work on what self-compassion is, as well as practical workbooks for helping to cultivate it. For skeptical philosophers, there is some good empirical evidence that we can, in fact, increase our self-compassion (and mindfulness) by engaging in certain practices like compassion/(mindfulness) meditation. So, itâs worth a look at!
Always happy to talk with OP or anyone else about this, as a lot of my work is on mindfulness and I am also a mindfulness teacher đ you can find my email on my website (which should be attached!)
I’ve come to realize just how flawed this profession is in terms of recognizing/rewarding philosophical promise. I guess in a way I’ve always suspected this, but it didn’t really become clear to me until several years post-Ph.D., after working at several different institutions and many years on the job market. I’d be lying if I said rejections don’t sting anymore, but I have gotten to the point where I invest very little in the decisions of hiring committees, editors, referees, etc. This can be hard to put into practice, and I struggle to do it myself, but I really do think the trick is to stick to whatever philosophical questions/issues/figures speak to you – on almost a gut level – and to do work on them in whatever way(s) you find deeply interesting and fulfilling. If amongst all the rejections (and all the other headaches) you still have that, then you’ll be okay. Don’t ever let the profession take that away from you.
One you get tenure, it gets easier. Especially when you realize that the most that almost any of us can expect is for our papers to perhaps generate a bit of a literature that probably fizzles out in a relatively short number of years. And that’s fine. And even if you don’t manage to succeed at that, it’s still fine.
Whatâs the BATTING AVERAGE youâre after? Batting 0.300 in publication attempts is very good, maybe outstanding. The larger remainder is in now way âfailure.â Especially for early careerers.
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