I have to admit I got pretty excited after my latest post "Rejection - a part of life", when I saw that Drugmonkey (!) not only retweeted it but also did a post of his own where he quoted a portion of my post and linked back here! Thank you so much!
First time I had a more than 150 views of a post in one day :)
I guess there is a lot of feelings about rejection and review, especially now in grant writing days.
Here's to hoping my next posts resonates with someone and might generate a comment or two.... (as usual, one gets greedy and wants more).
2 comments:
Rejection is an integral part of academic science. It is, one might observe, the major point of peer review. You can't have critique without disapproval now and again. So yeah, it resonates with people! What I don't know how to do as a mentor is to help people become more resilient to this reality. And it makes me concerned that we select for a certain personality type and against another type if we do not balance rejection and approval.
thank you!
I do think that one part of "helping" as a mentor is to try and repeat that "critique is a source for improvement" - even if it might be hard to hear/read it. (sometimes it's BS though, but you need to learn to separate the good from the bad - the only way to do that is to ponder/work through it and see differences in how to deliver it yourself).
It might be 'easier' to handle disapproval if one has something else that you are vested in? Or that you have a healthy balance between
"good people who critique from a good place" and "unknown people who might be coming from a bad place"?
I personally learnt a lot from having a lab environment where critique was mostly toward the science and not the person - and extra cushioned with approval on the side for something else when the harsh critique came. "good and bad"
By and large though, I would agree with you that it's hard to find a good way to 'teach this'.
Post a Comment