guest post

For this post of How I Fail I’m interviewing Ian Street, a plant scientist and science writer who tweets at @IHStreet and blogs at PostdocStreet.

1. Hi Ian, thanks for joining the How I Fail series! Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

I am a plant scientist, science writer, and editor. I am currently freelancing as an editor and writer (Get in touch if you have a potential assignment, @IHStreet on Twitter). You can find out more about me and see my writing at my science writing site The Quiet Branches. I am also involved in some things addressing the social/cultural side of careers in science as a co-moderator of The Diversity Journal Club (#DiversityJC) and as a co-host of The Recovering Academic Podcast dedicated to inclusion in STEM and transitioning to careers beyond the ivory tower, respectively.

2. Can you share some examples of failures which hurt the most, and why that was?

The failures that hurt most for me are the ones where it feels like I haven’t done enough or regret not even trying in the first place because I know ahead of time I’ll likely fail.  It’s a failure to have a growth mindset when I need it. I’ve been working to get away from it, however, it’s hard, especially as I’m not exactly a young person anymore.

The big failure that overarches all the others is a failure of never feeling like I’m enough to be worthy of anything. This hard to shake belief has led to periods of clinical depression, putting others (who are of course always more worthy/talented) ahead of myself has limited my own growth, especially as a scientist. Failures for years were catastrophic setbacks, almost no matter how small, but certainly bigger failures of not realizing what I’d done wrong or pursuing fruitless paths, felt like dead ends, and not platforms for new insights as many scientists are able to transform seeming failure into success.

I don’t mean to make it sound like it’s all failure. I’ve been pretty resilient in many ways and even had some good insights, but they are hard to appreciate. Part of depression is magnifying the negative and dismissing successes as flukes or luck. And that feels like a failure of imagination on my part to not be able to take well positive things.

3. In general, do you keep track of your failures? Why / why not?

In the sense that I can ruminate about a failure an unhealthy amount, yes. I do journal semi-regularly. I’d like to make it more of a habit. But I don’t keep a running list. After a setback, I reflect on and try to figure out what I might do better and work to improve the next time around, even if it is just by a little bit. I might be reminded of a past failure or something that bothered me, especially in my writing when I go back and think about what I’d do differently, so in that sense I track my failures.

4. What do you do when you receive a rejection? Do you have some process/ritual of dealing with failure?

First, I generally expect rejection to happen. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m immune from things hurting, but it does set expectations low, and I find that that helps.

A healthier version of this is to work to not be so attached to outcomes even though that’s hard to achieve. I haven’t worked out a good post-failure mechanism other than to look to figure out what I might be doing wrong and improve upon it the next time I do something similar.

5. You recently posted on Twitter about holding “rejection olympiad”. Could you say a bit more about your motivation for this?

Part of it is feeding into the idea of ‘The rejection game’, which is a series of cards someone invented to overcome social anxiety. Each card has a request to make to someone and the goal is to get rejected that day. The surprising thing can be that it’s not easy to get rejected, and even if you are, it’s not the end of the world. The game is designed to make you ask, take chances, etc. The idea is, by building a habit of rejection, it makes you more likely to keep applying, keep going.

Thinking of holding a rejection olympiad. See how many times I can get rejected in a week…And then try to break the record the next.

— Ian Street ? (@IHStreet) April 6, 2017

6. What are your thoughts about people being more open about sharing failures online? Is it a good trend or are there also some caveats?

I do think it’s good that people share that they are human. Imperfect, vulnerable, and most of the time doing the best we can to get by in what can be a harsh and cruel world. In many ways, science is the history of failure. What’s left is the stuff that stood up to scrutiny after repeated failures to take down the idea. Gravity, Evolution, cell theory, etc. Our understanding and interpretations might shift, ideally toward giving us a richer picture of the natural world that includes all it’s diversity.

The art of doing science may be in being productively stupid, or productively failing. So I generally think it’s good, but perhaps not natural to share our failures more openly. None of us succeeds on our own and most of the time we have a long string of things not working that well before hitting upon something that works. If you’ve put in the time to learn and attempt to master something, failures are inevitable. It’s not incompetency, it’s learning.

The caveat might be, and I do worry about this, is falling into the failure narrative too much, believing we’re failures, internalizing that. And then others might pick up on that as well. I worry that talking about not having a perfect CV or talking about depression and mental health so much hurts my chances on the job market.

7. You also mentioned “pre-rejection”, which as I understand it, is not taking an opportunity because you expect rejection. Could you elaborate on this?

It is generally about fear. And even a sense of resignation. I’ve tried for years to get jobs like X without success, why will the next time be any different? Those two things may be related.

There are a lot of jobs I just don’t apply to because I simply think there is no way. I’m not _____ enough. There are a lot of things I don’t go for for that reason. Sometimes these fears are rational and justified. Other times, I’m just not going for it because I want it, but I’m afraid to go for it, or more that I’ll flub the attempt and then that makes me look bad forever or something like that.

8. In a recent Recovering Academic episode you talked about fear of failure. Would you say that giving in to the fear, is a sort of failure in itself? Do you have any ideas of how to combat this?

It may well be, though fear is trying to tell you something. It’s not an un–useful response. After all, you want your brain to alert you when things are actually threatening– socially or physically. It tends to be set to highly favor false positives over false negatives. Again, for survival, that makes sense. Calibrating the sensor well for our modern world is hard. In science and other creative fields, the map isn’t always clear. We have to choose to put our brains into fear and uncertainty time after time and be willing to stand up again. So being stubborn/persistent can help. Trying to frame things as exciting rather than fearful might help too; they are two sides of the same coin.

Then there’s preparation. Chris Hadfield, in his TED Talk talked about this idea in going to space which is extraordinarily dangerous and fear inducing. But you train. And train. And train. Work every problem as it comes up, know as well as possible what you’ll face. Be prepared and fall back on your training (perhaps after taking a deep breath). I think there’s a scene in ‘The Martian’ that strikes a similar chord. This kind of thinking is also likely common in the military, I’m guessing. But again, being in a creative field of work, unfamiliar situations will come up and matching training to circumstances may not always work. The goal is to survive, learn, and be ready to go into the situation next time better prepared.

9. Can you think of something that felt like a success, but you wouldn’t generally find on a CV?

The thing that comes to mind is much more successful management of depression the past few years. I’ve gotten back to a place where I can actually function well, put my work out into the world, and learned a quiet persistence. It’s still a work in progress, but the progress I’ve made from where I was is impressive. Being able to tell the story is a success to me, at least.

There’s also the fact that I listen to a lot of friends who are anxious or depressed. It’s not something I can or will do for everyone, but if you’re a friend of mine, or a colleague I’ve gotten to know, I will listen, and it will all stay between us. I do think that that can be valuable, but not something I put on my CV.

10. When something is successful, do you have a similar ritual as for dealing with failures?

Sadly, I don’t really. I may go out every so often to celebrate something, but mostly, I’m just onto the next thing. Sometimes, I’ll link something specific to a success, but I haven’t worked out a particular reward scheme that really works for me. Part of this is building up my muscle of enjoying things again after years of being too depressed to really enjoy anything (see above answer). So for me to take real pleasure in something is a high bar. A lot of times, it’s just me going out to the coffee shop on a weekend with a book and not feeling guilty about it.

11. Is there something we can all do to improve how failure affects others in academia?

I think just to realize that it’s the medium we all exist in. We’re working to map the unknown and failure is a part of that. Some people with equally prepared minds get lucky, others don’t (even if they all have the four traits so-called ‘lucky’ people have).

Being willing to listen and be compassionate would help too. It’s not quite a set feature of academia. Being there to pick someone up when they’re down could go a long way, I think.

And of course, training can help. Give us all a course in growth and fixed mindsets, in resilience, and of course, in the discipline itself. Being trained in management of people as well as the work of academia would have helped me immensely.

12. What is the best piece of advice you could give to your past self?

Adopt the growth mindset and don’t be so perfectionist about things.

For this post of How I Fail I’m interviewing Darren Boehning, who is a professor at the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. You can find out more about him on his blog or on Twitter

 1. Hi Darren, thanks for joining the How I Fail series! Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

I got into science somewhat accidentally. I was going to go to medical school, but decided to take a year off. I quickly learned that it is difficult to find a job with a BS in Biology, so the only position I could get was as a research technician at a university. I loved it so much I didn’t submit my medical school secondary applications and applied to graduate school. I did my Ph.D. in the same lab I worked as a technician. I then went on to a ~4 year post-doc before taking my first tenure-track faculty position in 2005.

 2. Could you share some failures with the readers, and why those failures were memorable to you?

Like most scientists, I fail on a daily basis! Failed experiments, rejected manuscripts, and triaged grants are all part of this profession. This really bothered me as a graduate student, and at some point I felt like I would never graduate and should just quit. I had a great and productive post-doctoral experience, but applying for faculty positions was the single most stressful experience up to that point in my life.  I don’t know how many positions I applied for, but it must have been upwards of 100. I even saved some of the rejection letters!

Cleaning out a file cabinet and found a folder full of rejection letters. Didn't even know I saved these! pic.twitter.com/AeRS5q44Au

— boehninglab (@boehninglab) November 4, 2016

Of course as a faculty member, getting grants is probably the single most important and stressful thing in my career. I got my first NIH R01 grant one month before my startup ran out. My renewal of this grant was in a no cost extension and the first submission was triaged. The revised (A1) version received an excellent score and was funded. Being close to the brink of closing your lab due to the inability to get funding is demoralizing. Unfortunately the funding situation at the NIH, NSF, and other US funding agencies makes this job extremely undesirable for the next generation of scientists.

 3. Do you in general keep track of your failures? Why / why not?

I do not. I look forward to future successes, not revisiting past failures.

4. What do you think of the “CV of Failures”? Is it a good trend or are there also some caveats?

I do not see a benefit personally, but maybe others do. I can see the benefit for students/mentees, but I can’t imagine having a section on my professional CV describing my failures.

5. In your “Failure is an option” post you write “We all have to get used to failure, because it will happen often in our careers. This does not make you an imposter” Can you elaborate on this?

I have felt outside of my league many, many times in this profession. As a grad student it was learning electrophysiology, as a post-doc it was essentially teaching myself neuroscience and of course the awful experience of applying and getting rejected many times for faculty positions. As a faculty member, the evisceration of my grants has been very disheartening. I don’t know if I have fully overcome these feelings (which I would presume are perfectly natural), I just keep trying to do my job to the best of my ability.

6. You mentioned you wrote about “your mediocrity” before in your “Working class scientist” post, where you rank yourself against your field / career stage. Is this something you’ve done throughout your career?

I think everyone aspires to be the best, but there is always someone better. This is true in any field or profession. I think the point of this post is that I am perfectly fine with this, and I am happy both personally and professionally.

7. In this same post you conclude you survive by “working your ass off”. This is a positive message in a sense that “everybody can get there with hard work”. But to be honest, I think it might also encourage imposter feelings – for junior researchers who are worried they won’t be able to work hard enough to keep their heads above water. Have you considered this?

Let me counter with this post.

I FULLY support work/life balance both personally and with my trainees. Importantly, I put no pressure on others in my lab to work long hours, and allow them to make their own schedule. Personally, I have four children and a wonderful wife who, frankly, are much more important than my career. Actually, the flexibility of my schedule has allowed me to spend much more time with my family compared those close to me in other professions. I hope others don’t come away with that impression from the working class scientist post.

 8. Are there any opportunities you regret not trying out, even if they might have ended up on your (hypothetical) “failure” CV?

I still wonder what my life would be like if I went to medical school. My wife jokes that I teach so much in the med school I have probably already finished the didactic requirements!

 9. Can you think of something you did that felt like a success, but you wouldn’t generally find on a CV?

I have volunteered quite a bit and I also have also participated in a program similar to Big Brother Big Sisters of America. These experiences have been incredibly rewarding. Also, I think my wife and I have done a good job raising our four kids, which is a much harder job than academia.

10. How about something that’s typically on CVs, but doesn’t feel like an accomplishment?

There is so much bias which comes into play when being invited to give a talk or seminar. You have to take this section with a grain of salt.

11. What do you do when you receive a rejection? Do you have some process/ritual of dealing with failure?

Depends on how catastrophic the failure is! Having a nice dinner with my family and going for a run does wonders to calm me down.

12. What about when something is successful?

Interestingly I don’t think I do much to reward myself. If I get a grant I usually take the lab out for some activity because my grant success is due entirely to their efforts. The same thing applies to papers. I don’t think I did anything for my promotions.

13. Is there something we can all do to improve how failure affects others in academia?

Be supportive mentors.

14. What is the best piece of advice you have received in the past?

Submit every round.

15. What is the best piece of advice you could give to your past self?

I have no major regrets. Having a family has enlightened me to what are the truly important things in life. Professionally, try not to sweat the small stuff.

For this post of How I Fail I’m interviewing Michael Ekstrand, a computer scientist studying human computer interaction and recommender systems. You can find more about him on his website or follow him on Twitter.

1. Thanks for joining the How I Fail series! Please introduce yourself

I’m Michael, an assistant professor of computer science at Boise State University in Idaho (northwest USA). My training is in human-computer interaction, and I do most of my work on recommender systems with broad interest in algorithmic assistance or mediation for information access (information retrieval, a lot of machine learning and data mining, etc.). One way I think of my work is that I smash people and intelligent information systems into each other and see what happens. I get to do this work with a lot of great people, particularly my colleague Sole Pera and our students in the People and Information Research Team, and my collaborators at Minnesota, Eindhoven, and elsewhere. I also maintain the LensKit recommender systems toolkit.

I joined Boise State in 2016; I received my Ph.D at the University of Minnesota (with the GroupLens research group) in 2014, and then spent as an assistant professor at Texas State University. I also spent a summer as an intern at Autodesk Research in Toronto while working on my Ph.D.

2. Do you keep track of your failures? Why/why not?

Not formally, although it is starting to emerge as a part of the record-keeping process to make annual review materials and eventually my tenure application easier to prepare. This isn’t the result of a conscious decision one way or the other – I have a mental list of failures that led to most of my CV lines, but I haven’t yet had the time to think about whether and how, strategically, I want to contribute my failure record to a healthier academic culture. This post is a start.

3. What do you think about sharing failures online?

It is an interesting idea that has a lot of potential merit. I have thought about doing it; the main reason I have not is – as indicated above – I haven’t decided to.

There are a couple of downsides that I see. One is Hal Daumé III’s point that they can come off as a humblebrag. I completely agree with that concern. Another thing I think about is the insidiousness of comparison. A reader will inevitably compare their own record with the one they are reading (or worse, their faulty memory of their record that may have an inflated reject count because they’re at a mental/emotional low point).

We need to do something as a profession to normalize failure and rejection, to bring out in the open that everything isn’t always as cheery and bright as it looks. I see promising trends in that direction, and that is very heartening. To the extent that publishing failure CVs helps that end, I am all for it.

4. What do you do when you receive a rejection?

I don’t have much of a ritual. I usually read the reviews, get grumpy for a bit, and then come back to them after a few days. I generally copy reviews – accept or reject – into a Google doc where my co-authors and I can mark them up, identify their discrete points, and discuss how to respond.

I often already have a secondary venue in mind when we submit a paper, so rejection becomes ‘execute on the backup plan’. Sometimes the feasibility of a fallback plan (coupled with my estimate of the odds of success) becomes a factor in deciding where to send something. This helps with rejection, I think – it’s just another possible outcome of the publication process that I’ve already been planning for.

Depending on the nature of the work and the target venue, I may tweet about the reject.

5. What about when you receive good news?

I usually share good news with my spouse, co-authors, close colleagues, and Twitter, in whatever order I talk to them next. I usually tweet acceptances, and occasionally rejects. Rewards often involve pizza and/or a good drink. Or something else nice, like good fish & chips.

6. If you would have a CV of failures, how would it compare to others in your field?

It’s hard for me to reason about the overall failure rate, but I can try to estimate it per category.

I think my rejects-per-published-paper rate is probably a little lower than average. There are a number of potential contributing factors, none of which involve me being a superior academic. Lab prestige is likely one factor, particularly before RecSys went double-blind. I’ve also targeted RecSys with the bulk of my work; I know the community well, and that probably enables me to more effectively target the audience with my writing. I feel like my overall submission rate has also been low, so there haven’t been as many chances for rejection as some of my colleagues. I’m working on fixing that.

My grant reject rate is probably at or a little above average. So far it’s 0 for 6 (or 7?) with the NSF (current success probability estimates are at around 10%), and 0 for 3 with private-sector grants. I’ve had one successful internal grant proposal. Boise State has fantastic grant writing support, though, and my ideas are getting clearer and better, so I am hoping to get a hit sometime soon. I find that writing support helps a lot: skilled writers with a good eye for making the proposal responsive to the solicitation make it so much better. The last proposal I submitted is the best I’ve ever written, and I hope to continue improving that skill.

7. Can you share some examples of failures which hurt the most, and why that was?

The parade of rejects when I was applying to graduate schools hurt at the time. I am extremely glad that I went to Minnesota, and would not want it any other way: working with GroupLens was one of the best experiences of my life, and it’s hard for me to imagine better advisers and colleagues. But at the time, I didn’t know that would be in my future. I wanted to do programming languages at Rice or Penn State, and they were saying no. I didn’t know what was next.

Seeing my software not take off stings a bit sometimes, particularly when I see other projects give ‘LensKit was too hard/impossible to use’ as a motivation for their work. I’ve put a lot of work into the tool, and want it to be a useful resource. I hope that it can still be one, and we’re doing work on trying to address a number of the particular pain points, but seeing it rejected can be frustrating.

And then there’s the 3^rd conference reject for one of my software papers. It was pretty clear that one of the reviewers had also participated in the first round of reviews, and is invested in a competing technology; that’s all fine. What was frustrating was that their review sounded like they were reviewing the first version of the paper again, so it felt like all the work we had been doing to improve the material wasn’t making a difference. We went on to publish the work in a journal, with a Major Revision round bringing the paper back around to an overall state that was remarkably similar to the original paper (though with many important improvements).

8. Can you think of something you did that felt like a success, but you wouldn’t find in a “success” CV?

It shows up on my CV, but does moving to a new position count as success or failure? Success, because I did two job searches that each concluded with accepting an offer? Or failure, because the best option my end-of-Ph.D job search produced didn’t wind up being a very good fit?

It feels like a success, because I started at Boise State with a much clearer picture of what I wanted to do, two years of experience, a full tenure clock, and a fantastic batch of new faculty.

9. Is there something we can all do to improve how failure affects others in academia?

Talk about it openly. There are a number of forces that resist this; these include general societal, and academic, tendencies to put on a happy face and push failure under the rug; and rejection of work that we don’t feel we can yet publicly discuss. I find the increasing interest in this conversation quite encouraging. We need to normalize failure and rejection, and destigmatize reaching out for help.

One of the most helpful things I read as a first-year assistant professor was Matt Might’s article on how to get tenure, particularly this quote:

“My first year as a tenure-track professor cannot be described as anything other than an abject failure. I was so desperate to publish and raise funds that I began thin-slicing my research and submitting lots of poor quality papers and grant proposals.”

Having this high-impact professor, who I greatly respect, write that he had a terrible first year helped me realize that maybe there was hope for me too. We need more writing like that. We need to get the message out that there will be down times, both during and after grad school, and that your first year as a faculty member will probably be pretty bad.

Increased efforts on promoting diversity in the academy – and with it, the compassion and empathy that are needed to ensure that people with a wide range of experiences and needs can succeed – help drive some of this, I think. Having people who ‘make it’ tear down the curtain may help reduce impostor syndrome and related effects in their peers. Promoting a culture where it’s OK to fail, get rejected, and generally not be OK makes it easier for people to reach out and get the help that they need.

The movie Wreck-It Ralph has a great scene where a group of video game villains are attending a Bads Anonymous meeting and say the group affirmation “I’m bad, and that’s good. I will never be good, and that’s not bad. There’s no one I’d rather be, than me.” We might need something like that for academics. “Things are bad, and that’s ok. They won’t always be good, and that’s not bad.”

I think we also need to find ways to talk about these things with those who aren’t yet in research academia, such as undergraduate students who may (or may not) be thinking about graduate school.

10. What is the best piece of advice you could give to your past self?

Don’t rush things. If a problem is interesting and important, keep thinking about it from time to time, and eventually you may crack it. There’s a thorny issue in recommender system evaluation that I’ve been thinking about, and talking about, for at least 5 years now; in the last year or so, a path forward finally clicked and turned into a grant proposal, a forthcoming paper, and at least one more paper in progress.

But with that, make sure there are things that you can move forward on even while big ideas are in the slow cooker. I’ve been working the last couple of years to keep my research pipeline flowing, and would have benefited from thinking strategically about it earlier in my career. Some things aren’t primarily a pipeline problem, but maintaining a steady stream of research output is.

***

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For this post of How I Fail I’m interviewing Ellie Mackin, an ancient historian studying archaic and classical Greek religion, and blogging and vlogging about research, planning and PhD issues. You can find also find her on Twitter.

1. Thanks for joining the How I Fail series! Please introduce yourself. Do you have any “notable failures” you would like to share?

I am Ellie, a Teaching Fellow in Ancient History at the University of Leicester. Sometimes I feel like my whole career has been a notable failure – but actually, I think my failures are mainly notable by the fact I have overcome them (in a variety of different ways). I’m currently waiting for my book to be rejected (or, I hope, not!) and starting to think about trying to find myself a permanent academic job.

2. Do you keep track of your failures (rejected papers, grants, job applications…)?

Yes and no. I keep a list of job applications and outcomes, so that is kind of a defacto failure list. I don’t specifically keep track of publication failures, because I don’t necessarily view a rejection as a failure on that front – there is always another chance

3. What do you think about sharing failures online?

I personally don’t like it. I think it reeks of privilege and doesn’t really talk to the person I want to hear about – a person who genuinely wanted to achieve something, didn’t, and moved on to something else and is happy and successful. And how they managed that. I have recently blogged about this issue, too.

4. What do you do when you receive a rejection?

Cry, in a weird and uncontrollable way, into my pillow, and sing myself sad songs. And then, I try and remember that it’s not personal (usually doesn’t help), and that there are loads of talented, wonderful, brilliant people around who are in the same boat as me (also doesn’t help, sometimes makes me feel worse). And then I beat myself up for a while about how silly I am being, and then one day I just wake up and it’s okay. It still hurts – but not in a really bad way.

Obviously that’s the extreme – because there are some rejections that are really positive. I have an article that is imminently due out that was rejected by two other journals first. In both cases, the feedback was really positive and both those experiences made the article much stronger. I wish I knew who the reviewers were in both cases so I could have thanked them properly in the article.

I think I am starting to get to the point where the process is changing. I don’t really care about not getting shortlisted for long-shot jobs anymore. I do the best that I can with the applications, but I also know that in most cases it’s actually not personal. I might not be what they are looking for, but there is something else that is looking for someone like me.

I think the biggest change has actually been my general attitude. I am not interested in being anyone other than who I am now, so if people don’t like that – if that’s not what they want – then oh well.

5. What about when you receive good news?

In some ways I struggle even more with good news than bad. It’s really difficult with jobs especially, when you know a handful of people who have gone for the same job. I tend to keep things to myself until they naturally come out – though obviously I tell close family.

I like to celebrate things, though – usually just quietly with my partner. When I got my job he bought a bottle of Bollinger (my favorite champagne) and we drank it on the couch in our PJs. That was perfect. After my PhD graduation my partner and my parents went out to a super fancy restaurant. That’s the kind of stuff I like to do, spend good time with the people that I love.

Actually, that’s what I like to do after a rejection too!

6. If you would have a CV of failures, how would it compare to others in your field?

Rational Ellie: I probably have around the same number of and kind of failures as other people in my field, at my career stage. I’ve had some successes and some failures – though, by virtue of the fact I have an academic position, I think I’ve been pretty lucky. I certainly don’t take my successes for granted, but I also don’t over-personalise my failure.

Emotional Ellie, Often Directly After Failure: I am the worst and everyone is much smarter than me.

I have been extremely fortunate in my position. I had some time up my sleeve after finishing my PhD and that gave me the breathing space to sort myself out, get my book proposals in, get some other experience. It also gave me a lot more time to spend on my job applications. This fact alone has been a massive influence.

However, I have my fair share of hard stuff too. I finished my PhD as a single parent. I have type 1 bipolar. I’ve been fortunate in some ways but very disadvantaged in others.

7. Can you share some examples of failures which hurt the most, and why that was?

There are two. The first was not getting a 2 year research postdoc that I really, really wanted and I felt my interview went really well. I think the reason that was so difficult is because I had spent a lot of time evaluating myself and my work in preparation for that job, and I grew as a researcher quite a lot though the process of even applying and preparing for it.

The second was getting to the final shortlist of a major national postdoc and not getting it. So many people congratulated me on getting so far, and that felt like a slap in the face. I knew that getting that far really was a great achievement, but it didn’t seem to help me right then.

8. Are there any opportunities you didn’t take that you wish you had?

Honestly, no. I have tried to do everything, apply for everything I felt would be good. I didn’t waste time applying for things I knew I had no chance for (like Oxbridge JRFs, I applied for a few early on, but realized that it was a lost cause!). I’ve worked really hard, I’ve done everything I can. If I haven’t taken opportunities it’s because I couldn’t – physically, mentally, emotionally. I don’t beat myself up for making those judgement calls.

9. Can you think of something you accomplished that felt like a success, but you wouldn’t normally add to a CV?

Having my daughter, in the middle of my PhD. Certainly it’s not something I would ever recommend, but I am so proud of what I achieved both in raising her and in finishing my PhD.

10. Is there something we can all do to improve how failure affects others in academia?

Talk about it. That’s it. Realise that failing doesn’t make YOU a failure. We all fail, we’re not all failures.

11. What is the best piece of advice you could give to your past self?

Keep going. You’re doing great. (Also for present and future self).

***

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For this post of How I Fail I’m interviewing Noeska Smit, an associate professor at the University of Bergen. She blogs (and her blog has motivated me to start my own!) and you can also find her on Twitter.

1. Thanks for joining the How I Fail series! Please introduce yourself.

After working as a radiographer for three years, I studied Computer Science (Media and Knowledge Engineering track) at the TU Delft. From April 2012 I worked as a PhD candidate in the field of medical visualization at the TU Delft in collaboration with the Anatomy and Embryology department at the LUMC in Leiden. I am currently employed as an associate professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. I am a contributor at medvis.org, the blog on all things medical visualization and also have my own blog.

2. Do you keep track of your failures?

I do not, at least not explicitly. I do keep track of all things happening throughout the day through a virtual lab journal in Evernote. I start every day by writing down three tasks I want to accomplish for the day. Then throughout the day I take short notes of what I am doing. I try not to focus on failures explicitly, as I think this would be demotivating for me personally. I prefer to keep track of both successes and failures in the same way, through my lab journal.

3. What do you think about sharing failures online?

I have to say this concept of a CV of Failures is not for me. It reminds me of dwelling on the negative. When something gets rejected, I prefer to just give myself a day or two to be cranky about it, learn what I can from it, and then move on.

4. What do you do when you receive a rejection?

See above. This process has not changed throughout my career, though I do get far less emotional about it now. I took my first paper rejection too personally, but by now I just process them in a more neutral way. Rejections are not targeted at me personally, or even at my work, but just evaluate and try to offer suggestions to improve one particular piece of output, which is not a big thing in the grand scheme of things.

5. What about when you receive good news?

Yea, I definitely believe it is important to celebrate success to maintain motivation. I share it typically with family, co-workers, and also friends that are in same field.

6. If you would have a CV of failures, how would it compare to others in your field?

I don’t know, I really don’t think about my work in terms of failures at all. Not because I’m perfect, but even if things get rejected, this is not a failure to me, rather an opportunity to learn and improve for the next attempt. The only failure to me would be not trying, which is harder to quantify.

7. Can you share some examples of failures which hurt the most, and why that was?

I have a paper which was rejected three times, and ended up as a short paper. Later I got comments on how novel, and interesting the work was, and then I’m like, why were you not reviewing this? After a certain amount of rejections on the same piece of work, frustration simply sets in. Especially when the reviewers offer conflicting suggestions in every rejection round.

8. Can you think of something you accomplished that felt like a success, but you wouldn’t normally add to a CV?

I try to frame work-related activities so that they do fit on a CV. For instance, I think that academic blogging can be an appropriate CV item. I can’t really think of any successes that would not fit, maybe having achieved perfect work-life balance :)?

9. Is there something we can all do to improve how failure affects others in academia?

As supervisors, talk to (especially new) PhDs and explain that rejection is something that can be expected and not the end of the world, nor a personal attack. Also, talk about rejections to peers and friends to vent and normalize them. As reviewers, try to find the good in every paper, and criticize points of improvement in a constructive and helpful way.

10. What is the best piece of advice you could give to your past self?

Spend less time worrying, and more time kicking ass.

***

That’s a great piece of advice – something I should definitely keep in mind myself! Thanks again Noeska for joining the series! 

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For this post of How I Fail I’m interviewing Hal Daumé IIIwho is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science department and Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. He has an awesome website and is on Twitter @haldaume3.

1. Thanks for joining the How I Fail series! Please introduce yourself. Do you already have any “failure statistics” you would like to share?

I am currently an Associate Professor in the Computer Science department and Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. I started here as an Assistant Prof back in 2010, after having been an Assistant Prof in the School of Computing at the University of Utah for four years. Before that I was a grad student (at the University of Southern California, working at the Information Sciences Institute from 2001 to 2006), with a stint as a a summer intern at Microsoft Research in Seattle in 2003. Before that, I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon in math (1998-2001), and spend the last half of my undergrad time working at the Language Technologies Institute. Before that I was in high school!

All of that sounds pretty good, though basically every transition had a number of “failures” that were notable at least to me :). Going chronologically….

• When I applied to undergraduate programs, I really wanted to go to Stanford. Many of my friends would be going there, it would keep in in California (I grew up in LA), and I just really liked the place. I didn’t get in. My second choice was UCSD; I also didn’t get in there. This was very clearly my failure: I just wasn’t a very good student in high school. The fact that I got into CMU was, to me, a minor miracle, and it was by far the best college I was admitted to (I still sometimes wonder how that happened).
• As an undergrad, during the summer before my last year, I really wanted to participate in the Johns Hopkins summer workshop, to which I applied and was not accepted.
• When I applied to graduate school, I applied to precisely three places: CMU computer science, USC computer science and Stanford linguistics. I had had a really difficult time deciding whether to apply to Stanford linguistics or Stanford CS, and in the end I made the decision to apply to linguistics for a stupid reason: Stanford CS quals terrified me. I did not get in to Stanford (probably largely because I had very little linguistics at the time, and my statement was likely garbage). I was really upset about this at the time, but in retrospect I’m actually pretty glad they rejected me. If I had gotten in, I would have gone, and I’m pretty sure I’m happier having gone to a CS program than a linguistics program.
• I’m not sure if this counts as “notable” but it was a big deal for me. I submitted my first real paper in grad school to ACL 2001 on “document compression.” I wrote the first draft on my own before giving it to my advisor (Daniel Marcu). I considered myself a pretty good writer: it was something I had always enjoyed and I took some creative writing courses in college (I originally wanted to double major in creative writing). A day or two later, Daniel gave me back a marked up copy of my draft; one would have had a hard time finding a square centimeter on the page that did not contain red ink. I was so upset, I left the office, plopped down on my bed and cried a bit.
• I’ve had plenty of papers (and now grant proposals) rejected; for papers, I don’t really remember which ones, with a few exceptions. In 2003, I started getting really interested in machine learning, and I started trying to learn as much as I could. (All of my previous work was in natural language processing.) This was relatively soon after the original latent Dirichlet allocation paper, but before “topic models” were really a “thing.” I had developed a very of LDA that generalized to n-grams rather than unigrams, and I wrote it up and submitted it to NIPS. Neither I nor any of my close colleagues had every submitted to NIPS, so I didn’t have much guidance here. The paper didn’t only get rejected, but got solidly walloped by the reviewers.
• The other notable paper rejection for me was the paper that made up the majority of my dissertation: the paper on the “Searn” algorithm, which eventually was published in the Machine Learning Journal. This was probably the most frustrating publication experience I have ever had. I can’t even remember in what order we submitted it, but we submitted it to (at least) two NIPS, one ICML and one AIStats starting in 2006, and it was roundly rejected from all of them. Eventually we gave up and submitted to MLJ, where it got in after (I think) one round of revisions in 2009.
• I applied for both faculty positions and industry research positions when I was finishing my Ph.D. in 2006. The biggest disappointment for me at the time was getting an interview at CMU but not getting an offer. The second biggest was not getting an interview at Microsoft Research in Seattle.

2. Do you keep track of your failures (rejected papers, grants, job applications…)? Why/why not?

Only in my head :). Until recently, I’d never really thought of keeping an explicit list of failures. I still elect not to do it. All of the things I listed in the previous section were really hard for me to deal with at the time; I take rejection to heart, deeply. This has always been something that I’ve struggled with as an academic: positive reward is pretty rare (and often very delayed), and negative reward is pretty frequent. Yet, I am really happy with where I’ve gotten: I’m at a really great university with a great group of colleagues (yay CLIP!), I live in DC which I love, and I have a ton of flexibility in what I work on, how I work and when I work (and when I don’t!). I don’t plan on starting to keep track of failures, explicitly: I guess I prefer to focus on the positives.

3. What do you think about sharing failures online? Are there disadvantages for researchers who do it?

I have mixed feelings about it. I think if everyone did it, that would be one thing and could be useful. But in most cases, when I see a CV of failures, it can read a bit like a humble brag. Probably the list I provided reads this way in parts. If someone has produced a CV of failures that I actually look at, that person has probably “made it” in some sense, and so a CV of failures can often look kind of like “despite all this adversity, I still managed to be successful!”

I think it’s worthwhile that students and junior researchers know that everyone gets rejected and everyone struggles and everyone wants to quit at some point. Because if we all can acknowledge that openly, and get rid of as much posturing as possible, I think that opens the door to providing better support for our colleagues and friends, and making the research community a more welcoming space in which I, at least, would be happier to belong. I don’t currently plan on keeping a CV of failures, though honestly I’ll be really interested to read more arguments in favor in other entries in this series: maybe I’ll change my mind.

4. What do you do when you receive a rejection?

My general strategy is: avoidance :). When I get a paper or grant rejected, I just don’t read the reviews for at least a few days, maybe a few weeks in the case of grants (and course evaluations). Of course eventually I do, and in the beginning I’d just get really sad and defensive. Over time I’ve developed the following strategy: I try to think honestly and seriously about on which points I agree with the reviewers and on which points I disagree. On the points where I disagree, I try to put into words why I disagree. And then I go for a hike or a walk or go to yoga or something mind-clearing.

5. What about when you receive good news?

Mostly I share the news with my partner, unless it’s something significant enough to be considered “news worthy” (like a funded project or award or something) in which case I share with the CLIP lab and the UMD PR team. The nice thing about sharing with the lab is that you then typically get back about 25 congratulations emails :). Sometimes celebration might include wine, though naturally after going home.

6. If you would have a CV of failures, do you think it would show more or less failures than others in your field? What factors do you think influence this?

I imagine the specifics would differ, but the scope would be similar. The biggest differences I can imagine would be based more on what people choose to go after rather than what they’re rejected for. For instance, I’ve never had a paper rejected from Nature, but that’s because it wouldn’t really occur to me to submit a paper there. In terms of factors that correlate with failures, I’d expect them to be basically the same as factors that correlate with successes, and that you’d see a “rich get richer” effect in general, and would probably see similar correlations with demographics as in other areas of academia.

7. Can you share some examples of failures which hurt the most, and why that was?

I already kind of answered this above, but probably not getting an offer at CMU was the most difficult thing for me. At the time, I personally cared a lot about recognition and prestige, and if I had gotten an offer I would have accepted almost immediately (despite the fact that when I was an undergrad at CMU I was rather unhappy). Add to that the fact that I knew, from working at LTI as an undergrad, all of the people involved, the rejection felt far more personal than rejections from other places. (I know now that I shouldn’t have felt that way, but that didn’t help me 10 years ago.) More generally that job search season was difficult for me: I ended up with three offers that I was really happy with, but I went into the hiring seasons a bit arrogant and when I didn’t get as many interviews, or offers, as I was hoping for.

8. Are there any opportunities you didn’t take that you wish you had (so you could add them to either your “success” or your “failure” CV)?

Not really, though there’s probably choice-supportive bias going on there. The closest was when I applied for the position at UMD that I have now. UMD was hiring “off cycle” and so when I applied here, it was the only place I applied. In retrospect, I probably should have applied more broadly. There’s a good chance I would have chosen to come here anyway (in terms of a balance between being a great place to do NLP, and a city that I love living in, there are very few places that I would rank higher).

9. Can you think of something you accomplished that felt like a success, but you wouldn’t normally add to a CV?

I don’t put “declined” things (i.e., I was offered something but I turned it down) on my CV, and there are a few of those, which I suppose would count. I’m also not going to list them here—sorry! More broadly, the things that come to mind here are personal anecdotes that come ever so often in the form of emails or stories from former students (grad or undergrad) that say nice things, or when I recently found out that someone in our community learned about NLP from my blog while in high school. That’s the sort of positive, long-term reward that’s great, but doesn’t really make up a CV item.

10. Is there something we can all do to improve how failure affects others in academia?

I think we can try our best to de-personalize things. I talked about this on my blog a while ago, but I try to avoid using the word “you” in reviews. I try to talk about the work or the paper or the presentation or the research, not about the authors thereof. I think we as a community should also acknowledge that academia—like basically everything else in life—is not a meritocracy, and to recognize than when we as individuals fail, it’s not necessarily a reflection on our value as researchers. And I think that we need to have institutionalized mechanisms for “on boarding” new members of the community, so as to minimize as much as possible an in-group and out-group mentality.

10. What is the best piece of advice you could give to your past self?

There’s more to life than your publication and citation count.

***

Thanks again for joining the How I Fail series! If you – the readers — have any suggestions regarding this series, please leave a comment below. You can also join the weekly newsletter if you want to make sure you won’t miss any posts!

For this post of How I Fail I’m profiling Steven Shaw, an associate professor who blogs at ResearchToPractice and tweets at @Shawpsych.

1. Please tell us a little bit about yourself. What are you doing now, what did you before to get here?

I’m an associate professor in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at McGill University in Montreal, director of the Connections Lab and Graduate Program Director of the School/Applied Child Psychology program.I got my Ph.D. in School Psychology from the University of Florida in 1991. Before entering academia, I had 17 years of experience as a school psychologist in school, university, hospital, medical school, and independent practice. My research interests include pediatric school psychology, improving education of children with rare genetic disorders and autism, advancing concepts in evidence-based practice, and development of resilience skills in children at risk for academic failure.

The picture is pretty much what I look like most days. In my basement, at a standing desk, looking grouchy, and editing.

2. Do you keep track of your failures (rejected papers, grants, job applications…)? Why/why not?

I started to do it, but have recently stopped. I’m now to the point where I don’t really think of these things as failures. Rejections and unfunded grant proposals are simply part of the progress that moves toward success.

3. What do you think about sharing failures online? Are there disadvantages for researchers who do it?

I think it can be instructive for many people. It can be an effective tool. Like most of these sorts of activities, if it is useful for you and your students, then it is worthwhile. If not, then I do not think this is a requirement. We certainly need to get rid of the idea that rejections and unfunded proposals are embarrassing or a sign of failure. I have no difficulty with any of my rejections being made public.

4. What do you do when you receive a rejection?

I don’t really think of most rejections as failures. It is just a method of improving the quality of my work. Given that the majority of submissions are rejected or unfunded, a rejection should not come as a surprise. The hardest part is to help students understand this. I usually read reviews and decision letters immediately. And then I let it sit for at least two days. I estimate how much time it will take to address the concerns of reviewers and either put that in my schedule or delegate those tasks to co-authors. The only part of the process that has changed is that I don’t really get upset and there is not an emotional component to the process. Sometimes rejection used to make me upset.

5. What about when you receive good news?

Nothing really changes. I just move on to the next project. However, if the paper is in large part due to student work, then I make sure that the lab celebrates their collective success. I am much more excited about the development of new ideas and data support for new findings. That is when we celebrate. Whether a paper is accepted or a grant funded is not something that we have full control of.

6. If you would have a CV of failures, how would it compare to others in your field?

I have no idea. I really don’t think about what other people in my field do. I really just focus on my work and making it better. If the activities that I engage in are valued, then I will have a job. If not, then I will find something else to do with my time and energy.

7. Can you share some examples of failures which hurt the most, and why that was?

There is some frustration when I have tried my hardest and done the best work of which I’m capable and that is still not good enough. That is usually the time that I know I need to develop a new skill set, seek out mentoring, or make changes in my process. The failures that hurt me the most are when students do not have success. When students fail or receive an unsatisfactory evaluation from me, then that is a failure on my part and a failure that hurts very much.

8. Are there any opportunities you didn’t take that you wish you had (so you could add them to either your normal or your regular CV)?

I am sure that there are, but I can’t think of anything specific. Things generally work out as they should. My success as a scholar and value I provide to my field are only minimally related to my CV.

9. Can you think of something you accomplished that felt like a success, but you wouldn’t normally add to a CV?

Probably media interviews. I’m frequently asked to be on television and radio for interviews and been interviewed by newspapers related to parenting and education. Those activities probably reach more people and have made more of a positive difference than anything I’ve published in a refereed publication.

10. Is there something we can all do to improve how failure affects others in academia?

I like to use neutral language when writing editorial decision letters. For example, I never
write the word “reject.” I will say that “the paper is not currently ready for publication.” Take the emotion out of failure experiences and use productive feedback to continuously improve.

11. What is the best piece of advice you could give to your past self?

There are a few things. First, smile and laugh a lot more. Second, I have learned that the work is not about me, the process is about the work and how it can affect others.

***

If you have any feedback regarding this series, please leave a comment below. You can also join the weekly newsletter if you want to make sure you won’t miss any posts!

For the first post of How I Fail I’m profiling Eva Lantsoght, who inspired me to do this series with the “How I Work” series on her blog.

1. Please tell us a little bit about yourself. What are you doing now, what did you before to get here? What do you like to do in your free time?

I’m a Full Professor and Researcher in Civil Engineering at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, and a part-time postdoctoral researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. I’m originally from Belgium, and did my M.Sc. in Civil Engineering at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. Then I went to the United States for a M.S. in Structural Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. I returned to Europe for my PhD in the Concrete Structures research group of Delft University of Technology. In my free time I run a blog for PhD students and academics, PhD Talk, I play music (cello and vocals), and I do crossfit and yoga.

2. Do you keep track of your failures (rejected papers, grants, job applications…)? Why/why not?

I keep track of my rejected journal papers. I have a Google spreadsheet that I use to have a quick overview of the status of my different papers (in progress, in review, …) and ideas for future papers, and in that spreadsheet I use a color code. One of the colors is for “rejected paper but submitted elsewhere”, and another color is for “rejected paper, need to take action.” Since I’m never deleting any paper from this list, I simply keep the “failures” in there. I don’t do the same for rejected abstracts for conferences, perhaps because an abstract feels much smaller than a complete paper.

For grants and job applications, I don’t keep track of failures, but I must admit that I haven’t had rejections in those yet (but I’ve only applied to very small research grants at my university).

3. What do you think about sharing failures online? Are there disadvantages for researchers who do it?

The first time I tweeted that I received a paper rejection, I had a discussion with my husband. He thought it made me look bad. I think it is just part of life in academia, and that if I only write and tweet about the things that go well, I am not authentic. I can see both sides of the discussion though, so I think that, given the incredibly high expectations and standards in academia, it is uncommon to talk about failure or share these online. It shouldn’t be – we should be more open about how hard some steps in an academic career can be, but at this moment, we aren’t; and the odd ducks that speak up may be eyed with suspicion by some.

4. What do you do when you receive a rejection? Do you have some process/ritual of dealing with failure?

Not really. If it’s a rejection of a journal paper, I look at the comments of the reviewers, make changes to the paper, and submit it elsewhere.

5. Did you know about the amount of rejection in academia before you started your PhD or your current job? Did this knowledge influence your career decisions?

I learned about it when I applied for universities in the United States for my second Master’s and for scholarships. That was the first time I became aware of the small chance of me getting funding, and getting into a university. It didn’t influence my subsequent career decision though – I guess the research virus had already taken a good grip of my body by then.

6. Do you think there is such a thing as a “fair” amount of rejection? Do you think you have been rejected more or less than others in your field? What factors do you think influence this?

In my field, the rejection rate for journal articles is about 66%, and for graduate school applications, the number sits between 66% – 85%. I’m not sure if 66% is a fair number, but that’s what I have as a reference. I’ve been rejected less than the average for my journal papers – just calculated it as 23%. Part of it must have been a stroke of luck with the reviewers, and part of it is that I’ve worked very hard on my writing over the past few years.

One important element for this relative success, I think, is that we have been doing unique experimental research in Delft over the past few years, and that it is “attractive” work to publish. I’ve noticed that it is harder to publish about my new research topic (field testing), as the majority of the reviewers need to be convinced that what we are doing is not “standard industry practice”. Similarly, it has been more difficult for me to publish from smaller research projects that I carry out at USFQ; the results simply are not that spectacular and we lack resources to bring experimental support to desk research or theoretical studies.

7. Can you share some examples of failures which hurt the most, and why that was?

The first two times a journal paper got rejected! For the first rejection, one of the reviewers was really sour, and I guessed between the lines he/she had some conflict with my supervisor. The second rejection came from an additional reviewer after I had resubmitted a fully revised a manuscript. I thought I had made the reviewers happy, but then the additional reviewer came in and completely broke down my work – by misinterpreting my results. I really wanted to shout at my screen: “Noooo, my paper is not about Failure Mode X but about Failure Mode Y!!”

8. Can you share some failures which, in retrospect, were useful learning experiences?

I guess you learn from each failure? Ever paper rejection is an opportunity to submit an improved version elsewhere.

9. Are there any opportunities that you regret not taking because you were afraid of failure?

No, I’ve never been held back by failure. I’ve always tried, and had a plan B in case plan A does not work. But to my surprise. Plan A has worked in a good number of occasions.

10. Can you think of something you accomplished that felt like a success, but you wouldn’t normally add to a CV?

When one of the BSc students who graduated under my supervision gets admitted to graduate school, I feel so proud. I feel proud of the student, of course, but also a bit of myself, as I’m actively helping our students to continue their studies abroad. Similarly, I sometimes receive mails from readers of my blog that a certain post I wrote really helped them get through a difficult time in their PhD – something like that makes my day/week/month.

11. Is there something we can all do to improve how failure affects others in academia?

Ease up a bit and be more supportive of each other. Be more open about failure rates. Stop thinking everybody else is out there to come and compete against you, and that you need to stop them in their tracks before they get “better” than you.

12. If you could time travel, what is the best piece of advice you could give to your past self?

My past self that just started in academia? To worry less (and imposter-syndrome less, if that’s a verb). To my much younger self: spend more time with your family and friends – you’ll miss them sorely when you start living all over the world.

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I’m very happy that Eva agreed to be interviewed for How I Fail, as well as a few others I have contacted so far. If you don’t want to miss any posts, please sign up for my weekly newsletter in the menu on the left!