Reframing rejection

• Rejection is an unavoidable part of the research journey.
• Find connection and healing through community; share your feelings with others and take advantage of the support on offer.
• Using the feedback you have been given, reflect on your submission and see if you can come up with a strategy to move it forward.

Read time: 8 min

Literally everyone, in academia and beyond, has experienced rejection, but there is almost nothing about that fact that’s comforting when it’s your turn to walk through it. Getting rejected from a journal, grant application or conference abstract, especially in the early years, has the unique ability to sting and make you question yourself or your academic career path – especially when it feels like your future depends on it (and sometimes, it really does).

The good news is that eventually, it becomes as normal as research itself; you can’t go much further without it. Ambition and rejection are part of the same pendulum, so it’s helpful to know that the more you swing up, the more falls you’ll have. Although that stress comes with the territory of an academic career, there are ways to shift your mindset to make it easier to sustain.

The fact that rejection in academia is normal doesn’t stop it from hurting, but understanding that is the first step to depersonalising the pain. In such a competitive field, there really is a waiting line for recognition. For Associate Professor Ben Fulcher, who won a 2025 ARC Future Fellowship on investigating complex systems methods for sleep research, his winning proposal was years in the making.

“There was incessant rejection for ages, and that is an important part of being an academic,” he says. “And when you're going up against things that are in sometimes single digit percentage success rates, that's part of the game.” The fact that the rejection feels personal is why it stings. “You put your papers in and they get ripped apart and you put a lot of yourself and your own creativity into it,” says Dr Fulcher.

As he “put in grants every year and I think it was maybe four or five years of nothing”, rejection became an intrinsic part of the landscape, which is what eventually happens to most of us. Feeling the pain of it is part of the process, and allowing yourself that space is essential for your mental health. Take a moment to feel sorry for yourself, get angry, cry if you need to – and find comfort in the fact that there are many others who are feeling it, too.

When you’re rejected, you can tend to feel like the only one who’s ever experienced that loss; that is, until you talk to pretty much anyone. Associate Professor Tanya Latty, who is an entomologist and 2025 ARC Future Fellow who researches insect behaviour and ecology, says community was instrumental in helping her cope with early rejections.

“Back in Canada, there was this grant that basically everybody got,” reflects Dr Latty. “And I opened the letter and there was this whole graph they included that charted how much I failed. It was so distressing. I went home, I cried and I was like, well, there was no point in doing a PhD, that's not good enough for this. But when I started talking to my colleagues and my peers, it turned out a lot of people had gotten rejected. And we were all at home by ourselves feeling miserable about failure.”

There is healing power in sharing your experiences, and nothing bonds you to others like knowing you are not alone. “You do need to lean on your peers because everybody gets rejected all the time with alarming regularity,” says Dr Latty. “As misery loves company, it's nice to share that with people.”

With the odds of success for many grants so low, you can’t possibly succeed all the time; that’s pure mathematics. But it can take time to distinguish yourself from your work, and it is often a process that involves effort at disentangling worth from recognition. When it comes to winning a grant or having a paper accepted, “at the end of the day, when you don't get it, I don't think it's a comment on how good a scientist you are,” says Dr Latty. “And at the same time, if you do get it, it also doesn't mean you're the best.”

Dr Fulcher says a strong self-concept is essential in navigating the ups and downs of academia. “It's important to have your own sense of what's important to you so that you're not flung around emotionally by setbacks,” he says. “It's dangerous if you tie yourself too much to these metrics of success that are very anxiety producing because you don't have control over them.” Remembering that you are in a field with plenty of capable candidates can also help to depersonalise rejection. “You have to think that 99 percent of them are going to be good, fundable projects, right?” suggests Dr Latty. “You don't get to that point without already being a fairly decent applicant. And then it comes down to, do you connect with the people who are assessing it?”

The process can involve a lot of luck – and finding a balance between knowing that and reflecting on your submission and the feedback. For both Dr Fulcher and Dr Latty, this process included learning how to speak the language that the assessors wanted to hear.

When you can look at your unsuccessful funding application without it causing undue distress, it might be time to revisit the project to see if it has legs – perhaps from another angle. Neither Dr Fulcher nor Dr Latty could have been successful in their submission if they had given up after the first try, and their funded projects would have ceased to exist. Dr Fulcher’s reflection on his unsuccessful submissions deepened his understanding of the funding landscape. He began to see his proposal through the eyes of non-specialists who may not know his field, as is the case in Australia, where the assessors can be quite removed from the field of knowledge.

“In my case, I did change strategy quite a lot,” he says. “I reflected that, actually, there's a clear signal here. The general assessors [often not disciplinary experts] didn't like it. I needed to tailor it to the people outside my field so that they got it; this is going to have a high impact, this could change the field, I'm the right person to do it, and now's the time to do it.”

To appeal to those without specialist knowledge, Dr Fulcher worked on simplifying his message and communicating it with the most influence, which included graphic cartoons and a strong emphasis on storytelling. “I made sure that the message was really clear to someone who's a non-expert,” he says. “I paid more attention to the communication the simplest distillation of the strongest parts of my idea and ran with that. You have to turn things into slogans and think about the reality of how you get a message across and communicate effectively. Sometimes doing the perfect thing can be quite dry and dull and no one really appreciates or can engage with it.”

If you are lucky enough to find yourself in an environment that is rooting for your success, make the most of it. Here at the University, there are plenty of resources that can help you with your application, and people who are willing to help. Dr Latty says she often uses the University’s support from the library, media office and her peers for her papers and grant applications. “It's preparation, starting with enough time that you can run it by other colleagues to see what works and what doesn't,” she says.

Dr Fulcher credits his mentors with not just professional support, but with also establishing his realistic approach to the field. “My mentors have been very generous with their time but very strong with their opinions,” he says. “The reality of like eight to twelve percent success schemes, you're just constantly assuming you're in the 90 per cent.”

Beyond peers and mentors, the Research Portfolio’s Pipeline and Pre-Award team can provide strategic advice on funding applications, including how to rework (or set aside!) an unsuccessful application.

Nothing can be achieved by obsessing over what you can’t control – and it’s important to look beyond your role as a researcher and see the greater picture. Looking back on the early years, Dr Latty says she would give her younger self the advice to have another focus. “If I could go back, I’d tell myself to go take a walk,” she says. “Go hang with friends. You're not helping anybody by just hyper focusing on this grant that realistically you don't have a great chance of getting.”

Although resilience comes simply because rejection happens “with such alarming regularity”, it is important to focus on other areas of your life. “Academics tend to get really focused on this one thing, but other hobbies are great,” says Dr Latty. “Having some space where nobody really actually cares if you get the grant or not, who has no idea what a grant even is, can be a nice way to disconnect from everything.”

Chances are, you know what’s ahead of you, but you are driven by something deeper. Keeping this awareness as you encounter the challenges of rejection and insecurity will help keep you in the field and allow you to support those who come after you.

Such passion for research is what has kept Dr Fulcher invested in his own projects. “For me, I was always happy what I was achieving in my research, and the fact that I wasn't getting grants didn't seem relevant to that,” he says. In a game with winners and losers, the most important thing is whether or not you love to play.