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CV of Failures: Princeton Professor Publishes Resume of His Career Lows (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Guardian report: A professor at Princeton University has published a CV listing his career failures (PDF), in an attempt to "balance the record" and encourage others to keep trying in the face of disappointment. Johannes Haushofer, who is an assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at the university in New Jersey, posted his unusual CV on Twitter last week. The document contains sections titled Degree programs I did not get into , Research funding I did not get and Paper rejections from academic journals. Haushofer writes: Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me. As a result, they are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days. This CV of Failures is an attempt to balance the record and provide some perspective. He added another section called "Meta-Failures" to his resume, writing, "This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work."
I like it!
It is an interesting thing that successes get more memory than failure, and hence you get an inaccurate impression of successful people just moving from one success to another. Remarking on the failures would give a somewhat more balanced view.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I can respect what this professor is saying. However, there are plenty of industries/careers/endeavors that have it far worse.
Take safety, for example. You can have thousands of successes, but then everything goes in smoke after an failure or two. The recent happenings with Dole and Blue Bell ice cream are good examples. Same for law enforcement. You can have a department that employs hundreds or thousands of officers who daily have positive interactions with the community and uphold the law. Then one or two officers do something stupid or malicious and all of it is called into question. There are so many ongoing examples of this that I don't think I even need to bring any up (being that nearly all are very racially charged and that isn't the point here). Military/Intelligence is the same thing as well. Foil 1000 terrorist plots and the public will never know. Let one slip through and all of a sudden ... well you get the idea.
What the professor is describing is the human tendency to focus on the parts of things that we like. Ironically, the attention generated by his "failure CV" is a result of the fact that many of us understand the failing he is describing and can identify with it because we do the same thing and perhaps somewhat wish the world was a little different, more balanced.
I understand learning from career lows, but it sure seems like failure often isn't related to the strength of a paper or a proposal.
In my field, it seems like a lot of positions are written for individual people. They really don't have an intention of hiring the best person. That really bugs me because there's supposed to be transparency and fairness I'm the process.
I've seen it too often with proposal and journal reviews, too. I've seen what appears to be conflicts of interest with manuscript reviews. You can tell who is reviewing your paper many times because of what they ask you to cite. I'm pretty sure I've had reviewers hold up manuscripts of mine so their stuff would get published first.
It really seems like if you're not part of certain circles, you'll have a hard time in academia and research regardless of the quality of your work.
Sometimes there a lot to learn from failure. But so often, it's also political. And that's a shame.