I was a happy kid growing up in a warm, loving family, and my childhood was fortunately not affected by serious health issues or financial stress. And even if such factors were present in my early life, my wild imagination would have prevented me from noticing them. Any childhood hospital stay or visit, for example, felt like an amazing adventure to me. And furthermore, I did not need much more than some cardboard, crayons, empty toilet paper rolls, and glue to build the coolest castles which helped me to create imaginary realities that completely absorbed me.
I checked this with my mother, but I really did not ask for much as a child, particularly not during the December holidays. I probably knew subconsciously that the bearded guy in white and red clothes would not bring me stuff like go-karts, bikes, and gaming consoles, which he did bring along for some of my friends at primary school. At an early age, I had learned to ask for small things to increase my chances of success. Because after all, if you do not ask for things you will not get, you can only be surprised and will hardly ever be disappointed.
Another thing that made my life as a kid quite easy is the fact that I am the second child having a big brother who is three years older than me. I looked up to him a lot, and I was actually honored to wear his old clothes. I was probably even disappointed that I experienced some growth retardation (thanks to corticosteroids which were handed out to minors much more easily than these days) and that I would never be tall enough to wear all of his clothes. Lucky for me, however, one of my brother’s best friends was not that tall either, and wearing his old clothes may me feel somewhat special as well.
I do not know much about psychology, but I guess that me asking for little was partly an expression of innate and partly an expression of learned behavior. Simple things like empty toilet paper rolls really did make little Franky happy. While on the other hand, asking the bearded guy for small presents like a bouncy ball or a yo-yo may well have been an act of avoidance, as it decreased the probability of getting disappointed. Such avoidance has actually become part of my character and, for example, affected my search for love after seeing my chances of experiencing puppy love fading at high school. (In short, a twelve-year old boy fell in love with a classmate; she did not love him back; he expressed his affection for her two more times in the following six years; she kept seeing him as ‘just a friend’; they never saw each other again after high school; things turned out great for the boy; things probably turned out great for her as well)
Avoiding disappointment may work well in some cases, yet it is likely incompatible with holding a position in academic research, at least based on my experiences. The quality of scientific publications, for example, is assessed, assured, and augmented through a system called ‘peer review’. This system involves the evaluation of scientific work by other scientists who have expertise in the same field of research. These scientists assess the work critically and indicate whether they find it worth publishing (“accept as it is”), potentially publishable while only after changes are made (“minor/major revisions required”), or not good enough to justify its publication (“rejection”). But even if you perform experiments and report findings according to the highest standards, you may still encounter reviewers who are not enthused by your work and who advise the editorial board of a scientific journal to reject it. From a personal perspective, I adopted an attitude of acceptance towards rejections being part of the game, and do not regard them as personal attacks. It is not that rejection notifications leave me untouched, but after receiving more than a dozen of them in the past three years, they do not make me lose a minute of sleep anymore.
With regard to my rejections, a few of them of them were actually anticipated and left me untouched, accordingly. For the corresponding papers I purposely proposed to my supervisors to submit them to rather prestigious scientific journals that have very strict selection criteria for sending out works for peer review and even stricter criteria for accepting them. Let me be absolutely clear on this matter, I truly believed that the quality of our work and the importance of our findings were worthwhile publishing in a top journal. However, I was also aware of a phenomenon called the ‘chaperone effect’ (source), which roughly means that a person who wants to get a first publication in a top journal needs to include a coauthor who already has one or several previous publications in this journal. There are obviously more pieces that need to fall in place for a paper to get published in a top journal, yet knowing that none of my collaborators could chaperone our paper for the selected journals made me adopt an anticipatory attitude in order to reduce the impact of potential (and eventual) rejections.
A trivial characteristic of a paper rejection is that its impact is actually rather small. If you truly believe in the quality of your work, you can always resubmit it directly to a different journal which hopefully leads to a better outcome. In most occasions, however, you will first try to incorporate the feedback you received together with the rejection notification and subsequently submit an improved version of your work elsewhere. The bottom line here is that you will eventually be able to get your work published in most cases, hence the effective success rate of paper publications is quite high. This is unfortunately not true for grant applications for which success rates are low, competition is fierce, and outcomes can pretty much determine whether you can continue pursuing an academic career.
Looking back on my track record, I can proudly say that I managed to get a prestigious personal grant from the European Committee. Nonetheless, I did not get any of the five other personal grants I applied for nor did I manage to secure two top-up grants based on which I wanted to add an extra dimension to the research projects of two Master’s students I had the pleasure of supervising. Taking my first personal grant application as an example, this specific grant allows young scientists to gain experience at an academic institute abroad. Moreover, it needs to be submitted within twelve months after you received your PhD diploma, and you are only allowed to submit a proposal once in your life. When I received the news about my fifth place knowing that only the top four applicants would receive funding, I courageously stated that I would not lose a second of sleep over it. Well, I did. And even two years later, I still make jokes about that I should have added a North pole-component to my proposal, as in my round, grants were awarded to projects studying Arctic sea creatures, Arctic mammals, and Arctic ecosystems. When looking at this behavior, it could be that I am using humor as defense mechanism against the corresponding disappointment, yet I mostly seem to be in denial over the fact that my project was simply not good enough to convince the panel of reviewers to fund it. Anyway, I guess it is time to forget about this experience and repress any negative feeling associated with it.
Important to note here is that I do not hold any grudges whatsoever with regard to any of my failed attempts of getting a research grant. The nice thing when it comes to these prestigious applications is that I have no doubt that my fellow applicants are all great scientist whose projects are worth funding. There are simply too few funds to fund everyone’s projects, and this is, again, part of the game. An import insight in this regard was obtained when I applied repeatedly for a specific function a couple of years ago for which I knew that I had a truly unique and perfectly fitting CV. Many experts in the corresponding field told me that they had never seen such a CV before and that they were sure that I would be a welcome addition to the field. Still, I scored zero out of six, with one final-round elimination, one second-round elimination, one first-round elimination, and three direct (pre-interview) eliminations. Obviously, I did not like these rejections, yet I also realized that the other candidates were great as well and that there is more beyond a good CV. Such intellectualisation is probably my favorite way of dealing with disappointments, and through emotional detachment and by more often attempting to take neutral views on a situation my life has become a lot easier than it used to be. Still, let me be honest and realistic here. Emotional characteristics will likely always remain a part of me, and I am confident that I will be acting out once in a while, for example by drumming along to a heavy metal song or by taking out my frustrations on the track during a fast one-mile time trial.
At last, none of the individual defense mechanisms I addressed in this text, namely avoidance, acceptance, anticipation, humor, denial, repression, intellectualisation, and acting out, define me as person, and no single coping strategy works best for me in every situation. All I know is that my rejections in science have my made both my professional and personal life considerably easier and much more comfortable. I thus hope to continue receiving rejection notifications in the future, albeit in moderation, as I find it easier to learn from negative experiences than from positive experiences. And boy, I do like learning.
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