Receive, don’t resist: Part 2 - Resaerch Rejection

The dreaded Grant Applications List in ERA Commons, the government platform where you can view the graveyard of ALL your scholarly rejections. Just logging in sends shivers down my spine and puts knots in my stomach.

Any scientist will tell you that research is mostly rejection. At the start of our science journeys, we apply to graduate programs and, even at this early step, the competition for admission is steep. A small fraction of applicants to biomedical science training programs are admitted. Those seeking faculty positions face even more difficulty, as a single posting may receive hundreds of qualified applicants. And the rejection hurdles do not end once we get our foot in the door. Once we have overcome bottlenecks and barriers to entry, we face rejection daily as we conduct our experiments. Carefully laid plans months in the making may need to be modified on the fly when a critical reagent is not available, when controls fail, when instrumentation suddenly doesn’t work, when people make mistakes… the list of challenges goes on and on. And so we must continually overcome these ‘rejections’ to our scientific progress. Even when everything goes according to plan, we may spend countless hours conducting experiments, oftentimes only to yield non-significant results that don’t support our hypothesis. When we are able to ‘reject the null hypothesis’, we still have to earn the approval of expert scholars through the peer review of our findings and anyone who has ever submitted a grant proposal or a manuscript dreads what the infamous ‘Reviewer 2’ has to say. Research is a lot of rejection, and it can really get to you if you let you it.

Doing statistics and grant writing together with infant.

I have definitely had my struggles with scientific rejection. Perhaps the most difficult experience I had was when I learned that my first big NIH grant proposal, one that I felt was absolutely perfect, wasn’t selected for funding. I still remember the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach while sitting at my computer mouth gapping, starring at the dreaded words ‘not discussed’*. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t pipette for days I was so distraught. I convinced myself that the anonymous reviewers gathered in a room hundreds of miles away talking about me were simply fools for failing to appreciate my brilliance. As one does, I played out full blown confrontations with each of them in my mind so that I would be ready to own them intellectually should I ever learn their true identities and cross paths with them at a scientific meeting**. Ending these fantasy fights with a good hip check was not off the table.

** peer review of grants is typically done single blind, meaning that reviewers know my identity but I do not know theirs

Grant writing with toddler

But I have come to learn with a lot of time and as I cheekily put it ‘professional rejection experience’, that rejection should be received and not resisted, absorbed but not internalized.

First off, rejection in science means you are challenging yourself. Writing my first big NIH grant was an incredibly difficult task. I stopped my research activities and locked myself away for hours on end, devoting myself entirely to my writing. I agonized over how to conceptualize my ideas, design rigorous experiments, and package them, not only writing in accordance with NIH guidelines, but more importantly, in a way that reviewers would respond to favorably. I shutter to think of how many times I read through that proposal, tinkering with a word here and tweaking a comma there, all in pursuit of the (illusive) perfect proposal. And, to my supreme disappointment, my first attempt at that bat, my ideas were rejected by the review panel (in the grants business, we refer to this as being ‘triaged’, or rather that your proposal was scored in the bottom half of those reviewed in that meeting). I had failed miserably and I was devastated.

But without that rejection, I would not have learned a critical lesson, a lesson that would arm me with a shield of resilience that I would need to sustain a long career of such disappointments.

In writing that grant proposal, I was entirely focused on the outcome of getting funded and by that benchmark I was not successful. But funding success was the wrong outcome. That’s because a large part of that outcome was entirely out of my control. Instead, it was in the hands of a panel of strangers hundreds of miles away. In focusing on what I hadn’t achieved, I lost sight of what I was able to control, I failed to appreciate what a challenge I had taken on, I neglected to recognize what I had to overcome in composing a grant application from scratch for the first time, and I forgot to take pride in what I put out. It took time to reframe my perspective from seeing the whole experience as a failure of funding into a success of submission. Today, I try to view all of my grant applications as accomplishments to be proud of at the stage where my control ends. This means that no matter the outcome, I can always fall back on the knowledge that I did my best and any funding that comes my way is a bonus.

But the scientific rejection process doesn’t simply end with the ‘no’. Those strangers gathered together in a room hundreds of miles away judging me didn’t just decide yay or nay on my work and that’s it. Rejection in science is also almost always accompanied by new information. And it is this information that helps you decide what to do next.

Serving as a review is a big responsibility. After disclosing any conflicts of interest, reviewers assess the merits of each proposal, considering scientific and technical merit while ensuring that the research proposed adheres to the highest of ethical standards and addresses all key review criteria. They provide proposals a score backed up by evidence. They oftentimes present the proposal to the review committee and must defend their scoring decisions. This process is meant to identify and fund the most innovative projects with the highest likelihood of success, put forth by the most qualified scholars. For the proposals not selected for funded, reviewers then have a duty to provide investigators with constructive, concrete advice for how their proposals did not meet those standards. What you do with this feedback (revise and resubmit, start from scratch and try again fresh, or scrap the idea entirely) depends on a number of factors. But at the end of the day, this feedback is a central tenant of the scientific process and is an integral part of the grants submission.

Grant writing at the lake.

In spite of these benefits, it doesn’t make it easy to receive this feedback. After my first big proposal rejection, I couldn’t even bring myself to look at reviewer’s comments for a full week after they were released. Even when I finally looked, reading the feedback was painful and I greeted those comments with anger. The first few reads I couldn’t manage more than a few remarks before I would slam my laptop shut in frustration.

How could Reviewer 1 not understand the rationale for those experiments?

Reviewer 2 say I didn’t adequately explain my methods???! Any fool can see I explained it all right there!

And Reviewer 3, well they just clearly lack the necessary expertise to review this because they don’t know what they are talking about.

But in greeting that feedback with anger and defensiveness, I was cheating myself out of a genuine opportunity to improve. When I was finally able to let down my walls and really see my application for what it was, I came to appreciate what the reviewers were trying to convey. They were actually right, my main points were buried, my arguments were not coherent, my justifications not well articulated, I was the one who lacked some relevant expertise. But in critically evaluating my work, they had handed me the tools I needed to move this work forward.

Celebrating a hard-fought grant win!

Finally, rejection in science is also not meant to be a destination but a pit-stop. I revised and submitted that application twice more, incorporating the new feedback with each round and taking pride each time with how much my work had improved. At long last, after two years, my proposal earned a fundable score. Even still to this day there are some rejections that sting.  Sometimes, there is simply no other path forward, no way to improve. In these cases, rejection is  only of this idea, this grant, this paper. A wise mentor of mine said often that if we only have one great scientific idea, we won’t be in science very long. And so rejection often really just means that it’s time to move on to your next great idea.

Rejection in research is a constant; how you respond is the critical variable. In receiving and not resisting, accepting not internalizing, these many rejections, I hope to have a very long scientific career indeed, for sure full of many future rejections.