Hi again,

Typically, in my blogs I try to promote my business, or bring attention to a service that I offer through Alpha Ethics. But this time I wanted to change it up a little and discuss a topic that has come up multiple times through email communication with students, and personal day to day experiences within the academic world.

I while back I talked about academic success, and how a student becomes successful in academia. I received a lot of feedback from readers saying that most of the time they feel like they are at their breaking point by the time they make it to the end of the semester. **Unfortunately, that’s normal within the university environment. Doesn’t make it healthy…. ** I wanted to write a follow up blog post to hopefully clear up some worry that many of you may have.

One student contacted me after finishing an exam absolutely devastated by their performance. I set up a meeting with them and I decided to have a talk about failure and rejection within academia. They were shocked. They had this perception in their minds that since they had done horrible on their exam, that they were now unable to go to graduate school. I sat down with them and reviewed their studying habits and their notes and set up a plan for the next exam. I then told them personal academic failures and explained to them that its going to happen. But its not going to decide their entire fate if they adjust and learn from the setback.

For this blog post, I want to talk about how it is ok to receive rejection, and to fail sometimes. This doesn’t necessarily have to be academic related either. Its life in general. We all experience failure and rejection.

The reality is that even the most successful people in this world have failed… many times. And without that failure they probably wouldn’t have grown to be the successful people we see today. It is the resilience after failing or receiving the rejection that helps the individual grow to be successful.

What do I mean by failure?

Well, failure can be you failing an assignment or an exam during one of your classes… (Hello History of Psychology final… you will haunt me till I die.) Or it could be moving across the world to another country to complete a PhD and realizing you made a reeaaaalllllyyyyy bad decision and it is going to end horribly (believe me… it was epic for all the wrong reasons.) Either way, these are failures, both big and small.

If you hadn’t noticed, both of those were personal academic failures on my part. One not so life changing, the other… life altering to say the least. People around me who believed in me knew I failed. However, I took that experience and I ran with it.

Go to the most successful person you know and ask them how many times they failed before they got where they are. I bet that they have a story that re-routed their path, or they had setbacks where they needed to re-evaluate their situation.

The point is… Its not the end of the world. I think of it as a reality check, a grounding moment in time, a moment to shake your head and look around.

We all experience rejection…

See the thing about rejection is that its going to happen. The way that you take that rejection essentially makes or breaks you within academia. We submit manuscripts to big journals, and reviewer two tells us “this is the absolute worst designed experiment I have seen this year”, and you’re told to resubmit to another journal… which also rejects the paper… so on and so on…. But then you receive an award of excellence for the same project the following year. Taking the feedback will make you better for the next submission.

When I was applying for funding for my Master’s, I was told to submit the application even though I was most likely not going to get it… ‘but its good practice to take the critique after submitting the grant’. Well! They were right, I did not get the funding that year… or the next. I however took that grant proposal and developed a project that in years coming gave me a handful of conferences and publications. Those rejections and failures lead to other successes in other places.

My point is that even the most successful people you know will doubt themselves and experience rejection. They have also failed many times in some aspect before making it to where they are today. Some of them may still be striding to grow and do better. So, its ok to fail sometimes, and you will be rejected multiple times… and that’s ok.