Writing for the PhD - Handling feedback and rejection

How do you handle it all? Plus, the Music Highlight

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

If you’re in a PhD program, you’ve probably already learned from your peers and supervisors that feedback and rejection are inevitable - especially the latter. Whether it’s a journal article rejection, harsh peer review, or a dissertation chapter returned with more criticism than you thought possible, dealing with it is part of the academic process. However, knowing this does not make it any easier.

In this newsletter, I want to share my own experiences with handling feedback and a lot of rejection (not dramatizing things or bringing negativity into the conversation, you know by now I am not that type of person), but academia is full of it and most of the time it is to help us become better. Depending on the way it is given, of course. I always say as an educator, feedback is like a pencil. It can help you write, but if you don’t use it properly, it can injure people. It is different if I say to a student, “There are some tiny little issues with your use of past tenses, but we will fix them together - don’t worry!” And it’s different if I say (which you can imagine I have never done), “You are so terrible at using the past tense! Don’t you know by now how to use it?” The second way can be so demotivating, it can potentially derail a person’s progress. And no, I don’t believe in tough love at all.

Feedback from your supervisor(s):

• Make sure, before you start working with your supervisors, that you ask every little detail about them. And yes, how they interact with their students and how they give feedback.

• Not only how often they do it, which is important, but the actual feedback they give: are they kind? Do they do it with your best interests in mind? It is so important! (It is my experience with two amazing supervisors - they give me feedback, a lot of it, it is always kindly given and they show that they care both about me and my research.)

• Even if it is a lot, on a paper or article or anything, don’t be upset and think you are a failure. Take some time away from the feedback and come back to it the next day. It always helps and you can see that they are interested in you and they want you to do well.

Feedback from journal reviewers:

• There has been so much talk and memes and even jokes about (poor) Reviewer 2 : ) Usually the feedback from them is a bit tougher, and I have also seen this - sometimes.

• Again, even if the article comes back full of corrections, take them one by one and see how they write the comments. If the comments are unkind, you probably don’t want your article to be published in a journal employing such people.

• Be on the lookout for patterns. If multiple reviewers mention the same issue, it’s probably something to address.

• My supervisors always tell me this: many successful publications started as rejected papers!

Tips for handling criticism and rejection:

• Have a support system in place. Surround yourself with mentors, peers, or online communities who can offer perspective and encouragement. You can find a lot of PhDs using social media to find people like you!

• Keep a positive outlook - literally. Save positive feedback (I print out positive messages and feedback and stick them in my bullet journal!) and successes to remind yourself of your progress and great work on challenging days.

• Remember: Rejections and revisions mean you are really doing okay. Every rejection is proof that you are actively participating in academia.

Have you received particularly tough feedback or a rejection recently? How did you handle it? Let’s discuss in the comments, if you feel comfortable sharing.

The Music Highlight

As I wrote above, rejections and feedback mean that you are actually doing a PhD and it is (unfortunately, regarding the rejections) part and parcel of being in academia - and it is not an accident that you are in it! There’s...something about you and it’s something really really good!