Dealing with hard times (paper rejection)

Last Tuesday I was thinking: What should I write about? Should I write about the English exam and all the paperwork related to it? And suddenly I received an email telling me that the paper of my thesis was not accepted (paper rejection!).

My first reaction was read the email again and then turn off the computer.

If you have passed by this situation you know what I mean. You are so disappointed, not just because it is a rejection, but because it is your whole work rejected: all those hours in the lab, writing the paper trying to put all your ideas together (and the ideas of other authors).

So, I tried to stay calm (for an hour I think) and then, I searched in google: “how to deal with paper rejection” (very original) and I found around 61,100,000 results. More than 61 million! And I thought: Wow! I am not alone!

I read some websites and what I can conclude is that you should keep trying. You (and I) will deal with a lot of rejection in our career. For example, if you are applying for jobs or postdocs as a non-UK/EU citizen, you will get a lot of that… but it does not mean that you cannot find what you are looking for, it is just more complicate. You just must be patience.

Maybe the idea of Brad Pitt being rejected eighty-four consecutives times at the beginning of his career made me feel better (Come on guys! If he could do it, even with all those no, we can do it too).

The other thing that I can conclude (very important too) is that you should be your own supporter, you need to keep cheering up yourself, looking for information or things that help you to cope with this kind of situation, because with all the competition and the disappointments that we have to face, you must learn to stand on your own feet (also, you should try to help someone else when is passing by these circumstances, it is easier if we cheer each other up).

Finally, if you want to laugh for a while about this topic I leave you the next link (excellent work, very funny and it is where I read about the story of Brad Pitt).

Rebuffs and rebuttals II: take me back!

Saludos!

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