Failure

Today I got to work from home all morning. This is just another piece of freedom that I am slowly starting to regain post children, and it is wonderful. I had a lunch meeting close to my house so I stayed at home and worked in my upstairs office while the kids played with Jake downstairs. They are accustomed to Tuesdays being Daddy's day, so they accepted that I was unavailable. Then Jake took them outside and I actually had a quiet house, to myself! What a luxury! I love my little upstairs office. I love sitting at my desk and facing the window, which looks out onto our tree. I love watching the tree change over the seasons, from the full leafy greenness of summer, to the changing colors of autumn, to the bare branches of winter, to the buds and flowers of spring.

(We're still firmly in bare branch territory here).

Anyway, I am thinking about failure because I lost an election recently. I ran for a position in our national organization because my tenure committee chair told me to. He suggested it would be a good idea to get some national service on my record for tenure. I picked this particular office because it is kind of a smaller position, one that younger assistant professors run for (like me). The bigger-known full professors tend to run for the bigger positions. So my committee chair nominated me, and I wrote up my bio, and that was that. Until I found out that the other person running against me was...my advisor! So anyway, she won the election and I lost.

As it turns out, in the meantime I happened to be appointed to a different position for the same national organization that is more high profile anyway, so I think it is okay because I will have this other thing to show on my cv for national service. So in the end it is not a big deal.

But it got me thinking about how failure is something that is such a regular part of this career. Everything we do is a competition. We compete to get our conference proposals accepted. We compete to get our journal articles accepted. We compete for grants. Every part of my job is about being judged by other people. And failures happen regularly. An article might get rejected, or a conference proposal might get rejected, or a grant might get rejected. As the years pass I am getting a little better at dealing with rejection and failure. My work gets better as a result of incorporating the suggestions and critiques of the reviewers. I talk to my senior colleagues, well known people who show me their file drawers full of rejections. Those rejected articles were re-tooled, re-written, submitted elsewhere, and eventually accepted. So it is a natural part of the process, and judging by my successful colleagues, regular failure and rejection is part of the journey on the road to success.

This reminds me of a story about my mentor. He submitted an article to our field's top journal, and it was outright rejected. Not even a revise-and-resubmit, but full on reject. But he believed in his work and thought that the reviewers were wrong and had misinterpreted his data. (By the way, that level of confidence is, to me, a very gendered trait and one that is completely foreign to me. I regularly try to emulate this trait of his). So he rewrote the article, gave it a different title, and submitted it again to the same journal. That time, it came back as revise and resubmit. So he revised it again, resubmitted it, and they finally accepted it. And so it was published in our field's top journal, and now it gets cited by others. Of course anybody who reads this article doesn't know its history. They don't know about the first two rejections. All they see is the final result, which is a published article in this prestigious journal.

So that story tells me that when you are rejected or experience failure, you just have to keep going. You just have to keep trying. So that is what I am doing every day in my career.

Rejection and failure, I imagine, have different flavors pre-tenure than they do post-tenure. Right now, especially at this critical time junction, it is more important than ever for me to get articles accepted and grants awarded. So if I get a rejection now, it's hard to take it into stride because it is tied up in my "OMG this means I'm going to lose my job!" panic. Everything feels so high stakes right now, because I have to get certain things accepted or I know that I am not going to get tenure. But I wonder what it'll be like after tenure.