Is Fear of Rejection Holding You Back from Pursuing Your Ph.D?

[saphyni]

Hi,
My situation is just like someone who is running on a treadmill. He is running without getting anywhere!
A couple of years ago I got my masters in physics (condensed matter) working on Density Functional Theory and simulation. My masters thesis ended with two papers which I submited one of them to IOP and got rejected and I was really depressed to submit it elsewhere and the other I submitted to physica E and they returned it to me saying I have to change some formats.
I didn't try to submit my papers again because I was afraid of the heavy feeling of rejection and I must add that my supervisor couldn't help me that much because he is not up to date AT ALL.
Now I am left, I study every paper which is related to my field and I have kept myself very update and I'm still working on simulation. Having the ambition to get my Ph.D, I have taken my GRE test which I am waiting for its result.
I know that it is hard to get admissions from US universities these days and I am afraid not getting to it. I don't want to repeat the experience I had in my country and continuing Ph.D with such supervisors.
Anyone can give me a hint what I can do? Is it better that I start working much harder on a paper alone or I should try to find a uni to cling to a Ph.D program?

 

[Mapes]

Hi saphyni, welcome to PF.

Rejection is part of publishing, and publishing (more broadly, communicating your results) is part of research. It hurts to have your work criticized and rejected. At the same time, however, referee reports are a great gift that provide raw feedback from the perspective of an expert reader and thus help you do better next time.

If you're not interested in publishing your existing work, you should not pursue a PhD. PhD work necessarily includes regular failure (because you're working at the forefront of human knowledge), harsh criticism from your advisor, committee members, and colleagues (to improve your skills), and publishing (to justify to the funding agency that you're doing valid work). If you're so worried about presenting your work to the field, you're not going to make it through a PhD.

Moreover, a record of publishing will make it much more likely that a university will accept you. So turn your nervousness into energy to get your papers out there. Study the referee reports carefully, address the weaknesses, and try another journal.

 

[G01]

My group currently has three papers in the works. None were accepted right off the bat. We changed things based on reviewer comments and submitted to other journals when we were rejected.

It's part of the process and doesn't mean your work is worthless. If your considering doing a Ph.D., coming to terms with this fact of academic life is important.

 

[AlephZero]

Study the referee reports carefully, address the weaknesses, and try another journal.

If the only problem was "changing some formats", fix them and send it back to the same journal, not a different one. They probably expected you would do that within a couple of weeks. If they thought it wasn't worth publishing, they wouldn't have asked you to waste more of their time when you resubmitted it.

 

[Choppy]

It sounds to me like you have two seperate, but parallel goals.

The first is to complete the papers that came out of your master's project. It's very important to keep in mind that papers are vitually NEVER accepted without revision on the first try. I once went to a talk given by the chief editor of a major journal in my field and in it he said that during his watch (which I believe is at least a decade) there has been a SINGLE case where both referees and the associate editor accepted the paper without revision. Also, when a paper is outright rejected, it can be because you've simply submitted it to the wrong journal and the topic is not appropriate. Obviously papers are rejected due to poor science all the time, but I think it's important to keep these points in mind. Also, you said your second paper was rejected because of a formatting issue? How much time is it going to take you to reformat the thing?

Secondly, being afraid to apply is no reason not to do it. Everyone fears rejection. It hurts when it happens, but you get over it. If you really want to earn a PhD, apply to the programs you're interested in. If you are rejected by all of them and aren't competative enough to get in, you either spend more time improving yourself, or move on. Remaining in limbo because of rejection that 'might' happen is no way to live. It's just like asking out someone you're interested in romantically. Either you go for it and deal with the consequences or you sit on the fence and watch as someone else eventually does it.

 

[lurky]

Awww, you totally missed out on getting published! If all they were worried about was formatting, then that was essentially a "yes, but..." kind of situation. That is to say, they probably accepted the paper but just wanted a few changes, first.

I have a paper out there, and I'm definitely in the "did not get immediately accepted" boat. I was really lucky, though - I had an awesome supervisor who told me to expect this type of thing, and to not react emotionally.

 

[twofish-quant]

Everyone fears rejection. It hurts when it happens, but you get over it.

Also, one thing that I learned from telemarketers and salesmen, is that you need to learn to get rejected. After you get rejected many, many times, you stop caring about rejection. It doesn't matter how many people say no, as long as one person says yes.

One thing about the academic system is that it encourages fear of rejection. Most people have lived their lives since age four, getting to the top of the class, and the possibility of getting send to the principal's office is frightening. The problem is that this fear becomes dysfunctional once you get to the Ph.D. level, because at that point rejection is a practical certainty.

Remaining in limbo because of rejection that 'might' happen is no way to live.

Something that helps a lot is to make rejection a certainty. If you apply to eight graduate schools, it is extremely certain that you will get rejected by a good number of them. Post-docs and research professor positions are even worse.

So what?