#adademia

[stuartphoto]

David’s Fear. David’s face is tense as his hand grips the sling he will use to take down Goliath. https://www.photohunter.co/-/galleries/roma/michelangelo-s-david/-/medias/0195450b-ec1f-7f4a-857c-857184154267-david-s-fear

[the-saucy-wave-equation]

So I've recently been thinking about academic publishing and failure, or, more specifically, the prevalence of paper rejection. I submitted two papers about a month or so ago, and recently both of them came back rejected- one with the opportunity for re-submission and the other just flat-out rejected. And what I've found very interesting is that I'm never emotionally impacted by this in the way people seem to expect. Everyone I tell gives me dramatic condolences and solicitously asks how I'm doing. But I really am never put out by it! It could be because every paper I've submitted so far has initially been rejected, but then gone on to be published in a high impact journal regardless, or maybe I internalized all the advice about not taking paper rejections personally that I've read online, but I really am never upset, and I almost always find the reviews to be very helpful in honing the paper further and getting it published on the next round. I have had some unnecessarily nasty reviews in the past, but again, it's never bothered me.

Anyways, all this rambling is essentially to say- never take paper rejections personally. It's simply a step in the process, and frankly, it makes papers better, I think, because it highlights the weak spots and gives you ideas about how to fix them. For multiple of my papers, the reviewers noted problems that I didn't think of, and my considering them the paper was really made much stronger.

[3s-are-green]

A list of my top ten favorite things my research advisor has said to me, presented here with zero context.

“Let the data SIIIING to you!!!!”

“Well that’s not good. Oh no that’s really bad. *pause*  But we learned something so therefore it’s progress!!”

“I’m a theorist so I can justify ANYTHING! I mean it Liz, A-NY-THING!!!”

“Never assume anyone is right, especially if they seem reeeaally sure that they are.”

“Don’t trust other scientists, especially engineers.”

“I don’t have the organizational capacity for this, but I sure hope you do.”

“I’m not going to ask for funding until ~redacted name~ takes over as department head. For.... political reasons.”

“We technically aren’t allowed to let people borrow these really accurate scales because apparently they’re used in the drug trade. **hands me the scale** So just make sure you return this as soon as you get back to campus. And uh... don’t sell drugs.”

“Oh OH OH!! Liz look here at your data that’s exciting!!!” **minutes later** “Ugh this data doesn’t make sense, this is why I’m a theorist.”

“I hate looking at numbers”

[mysunfreckle]

@freehugsbear​: #my question is #how many coworkers does it take to have 127 office plants? #like #are we talking 127 coworkers and 1 plant each? #are we talking 42 coworkers with 3 plants each? #one coworker who's just wild about plants? #what's the distribution here?

You had to go and use the word “distribution” on my husband, didn’t ya

Ahem:

Note: outdated data, current number of plants: 174

[academic-misconduct]

the hardest task ive had to do in like. a week is trying to think of a captivating opening sentence for my research

[harrison-abbott]

If you were to go back 120 years in the UK, there were only around 20 000 university students across the entire nation. I.e., it was only a very small number of young people that had the chance to study in higher education. Today there are over 2 million students currently studying in Britain.

[sosorrydad]

As soon as I’m done with my LLB and my LLM around the soon approaching year of 2025, I’m never picking up another book again. PeriodT!

[antonym]

The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small

Henry Kissinger