Getting used to rejection
The sooner you realize that rejections are a large part of doing PhD-level research and not direct measures of your skill or potential, the happier you’ll be. You’ll probably improve faster as a scientist too.
I remember feeling like an utter failure my first few years of grad school. I’m not exaggerating. I was confused in lab meetings and struggled to understand papers. I went from earning A’s and compliments in undergrad to writing proposal drafts that would be returned smothered with red marks. My first manuscript submission was rejected. If I converted the percentage of experiences that were “fine as is” vs “needs extensive work” to a grade, I’d optimistically have given myself a 20%, which sure feels like a F.
But I wasn’t crazy to think I had a long way to go. Research is hard and people are appropriately skeptical of new ideas. It takes a long time to understand where a field is and what it takes to contribute knowledge to it. A PhD takes years for that reason. Even as a professor, I’m constantly training myself in new skills, which means I’m spending time being bad at things and trying to be less bad. Many top scientists routinely get several rejections before acceptance of a manuscript or grant application. Research takes a long time because we don’t totally know what we’re doing and make many mistakes getting to an answer.
The real mistake is in thinking that because there’s a long way to go, you should give up, you’ll never make it, you should beat yourself up, or you shouldn’t be here in the first place. The mistake is adding suffering to the inevitable pain of doing hard things. I wasted so much time worrying whether I was good enough rather than plowing ahead and just doing the work to improve. I took rejections personally rather than recognizing there’s plenty of stochasticity involved, and that, for instance, my analysis could be framed better to increase uptake in a subset of readers. I thought because I couldn’t figure out how to make continuous progress on a research problem, I was a bad researcher.
I’ve heard that people with a background in sales are often the best entrepreneurs and business leaders because they must rapidly learn to tolerate a >95% rejection rate from potential customers. They also need to do it without (visible) loss of enthusiasm. We have more leeway in academia, e.g., most academics I know give themselves a day to be in a funk after a manuscript rejection. But it’s important to recognize that this is the nature of the job, and it’s not personal*. With time, I hope you can see that even with the rejections**, it’s not a bad job. It’s just a hard one, but it’s a good and special kind of hard. I’ve come to appreciate the skepticism and candor that underlie the rejections, since they really help advance the science and me as a scientist. And good research problems usually exist because they have been too hard for others to solve.
*If you’re worried you’re not performing well, then it would make sense to meet with your advisor and straight-up ask what they think about your performance and how it could improve.
** I’ll make an exception for the high rejection rate of federal grant applications. Many high-quality ones don’t get funded, which is a huge inefficiency and appropriately frustrating.