i-shadow*

It’s been quite a while since I posted here. Last time was just after my mum passed away. Since then, I’ve had to get used to a whole new world without my longest-standing ally and confidante. Mum even followed my blog, bless her.

It’s been tough, there’s no doubt about it. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t shed a tear. I miss her enormously. But life goes on, as my dear old mum would say. Now I can even laugh when I think of her, and how she would be whooping it up this weekend, dancing a jig and waving her Tigers scarf to celebrate the Richmond AFL Grand Final win after 37 years. And I can recognise how incredibly lucky I was to have such a remarkable person and amazing role model in my life and on my side.

Her story is inspirational to me. It’s all the more incredible knowing what mum went through, and the personal sacrifices she made, to achieve her number one goal: providing a safe and supportive home for her family. She succeeded against the odds. She never gave up, despite many, many disappointments. She picked herself up, dusted herself off, and tried and tried again every time life knocked her down. Seeing her tenacity, her persistence and determination to learn from failures was a lesson in itself. I couldn’t have carved my own path without understanding that aiming high will always lead to disappointment, and that for the most part no-one else sees those failures. Importantly, the lessons learned from trying and failing can provide a springboard to future success.

And so it is that I come to the topic of this post. My own shadow CV – the CV of failures and rejections (see a summary of others here). Scientific studies generating positive results are more likely to be published, and negative results are hardly ever published – giving rise to publication bias that skews science and its progress. It’s the same with CVs – reporting only positive outcomes skews the perception of what it takes to progress in academia.

So without further ado, I submit for your appraisal some of the many lowlights and sidelights of my shadow CV – an i-shadow* you might say:

• As an undergraduate I was accepted into a BPharm degree, but my CV doesn’t say that I was rejected from Vet Sci and Medicine (x2). Yep, BPharm was my fourth choice.

• As a postgraduate, I was awarded a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Science Research Scholarship, but my CV doesn’t record that I was rejected from dozens of other schemes before that one was awarded, including the Rhodes and Kobe Scholarships.

• As a postdoctoral scientist I was accepted into Rockefeller University as a Research Fellow, but only after I was retrenched from my first postdoctoral position barely six months after starting at Bond University. So ashamed of this episode was I, that I didn’t include it in my CV for many years.

• After returning to Australia from Rockefeller University, I set up my independent lab at the University of Queensland, with my salary funded by an ARC Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship. What my CV doesn’t indicate is that I was on the reserve list for that Fellowship, and only got through because someone else did not accept their award. I often wonder who that was, why they didn’t take it up, where they ended up….whoever you are, thank you!

• Yes, I was fortunate to be awarded that Fellowship, but not so fortunate with my first grant. Rejection, rejection, rejection. Not recorded in my CV.

• Without funding for anyone but myself, I was the only person working in my lab. It was a group of one! That detail is not recorded in my CV. Research outcomes were slow and papers even slower. It took two years for the first paper to be published from my independent lab.

• Speaking of papers, my highlight CV records that a  paper from my lab was recently published in Nature Communications. Yay. What is not documented is that the process from first submission to publication took over two years, including rejections from three other journals, and an initial editorial rejection from this journal. (Yes, I know, I need to start submitting preprints).

• Then there are the award nominations that never got anywhere. Too many to mention. But what I will mention is the three last year for which I was a finalist, but not the eventual winner when the envelope was opened. So close, but no chocolate cigar (I don’t smoke). What to do when this happens? Join in the fun and celebrate with the winner; life is too short to spend it being miserable.

And as my dear old mum would always say, if it weren’t for the bad times, the good times would not feel nearly as good.

 

*Turns out this title was somewhat prophetic. I came up with the title and began writing the post a few weeks ago whilst on holidays. The day after I started, I suffered a detached retina – a medical emergency – that was evident as a shadow descending across the vision of my left eye.

I had a genuine eye “shadow”

Life, eh…..