Rejection, Resilience, and the Long Game

Science doesn’t prepare you for how personal rejection feels when you’re the one building the thing from nothing. We talk about paylines, impact scores, and funding climates like they’re abstract forces but when the emails come in, it’s not abstract. It’s your ideas, your time, your lab, your people. Last year, I submitted 12 grants. Twelve. I got two. One of those was internal. This past R01 cycle, my final shot under early stage investigator status, a resubmission where I addressed every single reviewer critique, I was competitive but not discussed. Not even triaged with a score. Just…not discussed. That one hits different.

Since December, I’ve been submitting one grant per month. Foundation, federal…it doesn’t matter. You just keep writing. Keep refining. Keep trying to convince a system that your ideas are worth betting on. And in the meantime, every Notice of Award I see on social media, every celebratory post…it just doesn’t inspire me. Sometimes it makes me question everything: What am I missing? Am I doing something wrong? Am I…broken? That’s the part we don’t say out loud enough.

But this isn’t new. Rejection has been part of the path from the beginning. When I applied to graduate school, I submitted 14 applications. I got two interviews. Two acceptances. That was it. At the time, it felt like failure. Now, it just looks like the start. And that’s the thing, behind every acceptance post, every success story, there are dozens of silent outcomes that don’t get shared. Right now, as students celebrate getting into programs, there are just as many, if not more, sitting with disappointment, questioning their path, their ability, their future.

Life is hard. This career is hard. The system is imperfect, and sometimes it feels indifferent. You can do everything “right” and still come up short. But resilience isn’t blind optimism. It’s not pretending things don’t hurt. It’s acknowledging the reality that this is difficult, that rejection is part of the process, and choosing to keep going anyway. Because the alternative is to stop. And if you stop, the answer is guaranteed. So keep writing. Keep submitting. Keep building. Not because it’s easy. Not because success is guaranteed. But because the work matters. The questions matter. The people we train and mentor matter. And maybe, just maybe, the next one hits. Until then, we stay in the fight.