On rejections

Sure enough, just days after I publicly declared the Summer of Submission, I got my first rejection of the summer as well. ScienceGirl had asked how I dealt with rejections in the comments and I wonder how this post would be different if I were still 'awaiting final decision'...


Anyway, this first rejection is a reject with an invitation to resubmit. So it could be worse. My advisor and others faculty are really excited about this response. They are treating it more like a provisional acceptance, despite the fact that the editor specifically wrote 'this is not a provisional acceptance.' I don't have much experience with publishing and the finer nuances and implications of 'reject and resubmit' vs 'revise and resubmit' are lost on me. Basically, we will be re-reviewed after resubmission whereas a 'revise and resubmit' would just be looked over by the editor and not the reviewers. Please feel free to clarify or elaborate in the comments!


My handling of the paper at this stage all depends on the reviews themselves. In this case, they are helpful, positive and easily addressed. The most difficult aspect will be responding to all within the word limit of the paper. With reviews like these, I am eager to fix the paper and get it back out asap. With bad reviews- those that are nonconstructive and, unfortunately, mean- I have a tendency to sit on them and put off dealing with them as long as possible. My worst review was capped with 'the authors should think deeply about what they might be able to salvage from this work.' That one hurt. It took me a year to return to the paper, but eventually I did and it is in review at a different journal right now.


My rosy outlook on reviews stems from learning more about the process and others' experiences. First, I have now been a reviewer myself. From the other side of the review, you can appreciate the time and effort that (hopefully) goes into the reviews and respect that effort more in your revisions. Second, as it turns out- (almost) everyone gets rejected! My advisor gets rejected. The famous scientist that I idolize and get nervous just thinking about talking to? Yeah- gets rejected! The amazing writer who my lab relies on for a lot of editing? Gets rejected! Knowing this makes it much easier to avoid falling into the anxiety ridden hole where poor reviews are judgements of your ability as a scientist or worth as a person. Finally, I am slowly learning that reviews really do make a paper better and that if you stick to it, you will improve the paper and it will get published. It might have taken 18 months to resubmit that paper after the horrible review but the important part is that it got done. If it gets rejected again, well, I will resubmit again. I recently congratulated a fantastic, well respected young faculty member on her most recent paper. It was an interesting, well written and novel piece of science. She told me she had submitted it 5 times before it got accepted. Persistence will pay off eventually.

writing in public

My labmate and I are at writing date. Working on our laptops. There are 2 other young women also working on laptops. There is also a group behind us ranting on and on and on about people using computers all the time. Forget computer viruses- "Computers ARE the virus."
Sometimes, working in public is not so good because you have to deal with the public and the public is pretty annoying as a whole.


In better news, I voted! Yay me!

Back to writing date....

One project complete

My Big Grant was submitted on Friday (My Nov 15th date was an optimistic- done early- deadline. Ha!). After much stress, strife and problems with it (no, I never saw the "font advisory." thank you submission lady for emailing it to me with 4 hours till the deadline). I am not pleased. It sort if sucks. Not that I can really judge, but it was too rushed at the end to ever really feel good about it. It is unlikely that it would be in 4% that gets funded even if I did feel good about it though, right?

But, since I am a good, serious, adult-like person, I am trying to focus on what I've learned from the experience. This was difficult for me to write and there were major setbacks in my ability to communicate the broad theoretical framework of this research. I was paralyzed by the Bigness of the grant, the Bigness of the organization and Bigness of my own ideas. This took time to work though and resolve, which ended up leaving me with very little time for outside reviewers to give me comments. They did as much as they could and I appreciate all of them for looking it over. Associated with the time crunch is teaching. Whole days that were meant to be spent writing were spent with students prepping for their exam (a whole different story of course). In the end, I will know next time to plan a bit better, say no to other commitments, put limits on student meetings and double the time I think it will take to write it.
The second biggest setback I felt was the lack of guidance. It seems to be that no other students in my department have applied for this before. Like, ever. This left me with very few resources to rely on so it was like reinventing the wheel. My advisor (who I tried to bother as little as possible due to my being one of 4 students all doing Very Important Things right now) really had no advice for me. At all. He wouldn't even format his CV properly. Well, la-te-da. I mean, the granting agency specifically asked for certain information but thanks for lessening my chances because you don't feel it is important. Arrggggghhhh! We have a professional skills class here that all students are required to take. In that class, I learned none of the skills needed in order to write this grant. That would have been helpful. Again, I appreciate those folks who did try to help me out but next time, I don't know. I made it clear to my advisor that I felt like I needed more help and got none. Perhaps looking for more outside help would be better.

Overall, I learned a lot about what is really involved in major grant writing and think I will feel more comfortable with it next time. Until then, though, I've got assignments and exams to grade, and 7,000 more words to write for InaDWriMo!! Woo!