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In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:
I’ve increasingly come to appreciate how much rejection figures in academic philosophy. It’s 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. ¯\(ツ)/¯ : (
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 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.
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.
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