Success and Rejection Rates in Academia - An Informal, Personal Account

𝐆𝐞𝐭 𝐚 𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐤 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐚!!! 👀📚

The concept of success rates (and by extension, rejection rates) is something that comes up a lot in research and academia. 🎓

Grant schemes and publication venues have typical success rates that you can easily find online, but these numbers can obscure how success rates can play out at an individual level. 📉📈 

Likewise, social media is disproportionately filled with tales of success, as well as epic stories of people succeeding after unusually long streaks of rejection. 🌟💔

And other activities, like landing tech jobs 🖥️👔, or collaborating with industry 🏭🤝, don't always have clear success rate statistics associated with them. 📊❓

Today's video is an attempt to address that - I go through the approximate (estimated) success rates I've had in my career in publishing, grant funding, collaboration and job opportunity endeavours. 🎥🔍

The full half hour vid can be watched on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JnD01tA7Hdo

I also recount some particular anecdotes:

💠 a number of schemes where I still (yay) have a zero percent success rate (even now as a well established academic),

💠 a horrendous ICRA2015 where we got 1 out of 7 (14%!!!) of papers accepted,

💠 a paper (SeqSLAM) that was utterly slammed and destroyed by the computer vision community that, unchanged, won best vision paper awards and nominations in the robotics community, and now has over 1000 citations 🚫🏆🤖, and

💠 that rare, rare situation where you submit a proposal that you are 100% happy with. 🎉

I'd never claim that these numbers are "typical" - I've worked hard, but much of this is luck, having good people around you, survivorship bias, and the privilege of having the opportunity in the first place.

Nevertheless, with appropriate context, I think there is value to a) talking about them b) showing the huge variation in numbers even well into your career c) and showing the value of persistence (sometimes) if you're in a situation to keep trying. 💬📊✨

And finally a note about rejection: some people have a tendency to mythologize repeated rejection and eventual success: the challenging reality is, of course, that repeated rejection isn't always abuse - sometimes there's valuable signal in it: experience, and the advice of experienced others, is how you help differentiate between the two situations. 🧭👥.

There are lots of ways you can be successful, contribute, and leave an impact - sometimes rejection is a useful data point in determining what is best for you, rather than a challenge to overcome at all costs. 🌟🔍💡

#Academia #SuccessRates #ResearchLife #AcademicChallenges #Persistence #Publishing #GrantFunding #CareerDevelopment #AcademicJourney #SocialMediaReality