Failure Chronicle
A public ledger of rejections, failed experiments, and unfunded grants.
Success without extreme pain and desperation is not stable, and is a fairy tale.
I keep this page because I genuinely cannot remember, in the moment, whether the work is good. The chronicle is a memory aid: this has happened before, you have been wrong about what reviewers will say before, the field has changed its mind before.
Paper rejections
By year
- 2023 — 1 acceptance / 7 submissions · 14%
- 2024 — 1 acceptance / 6 submissions · 17%
- 2025 to date — 1 acceptances / 7 submissions · 14%
Total: 3 / 20 · 15%
A few that stung in particular:
- A two-round major revision at Nature Communications on the dmPFC/dlPFC restless bandit paper, ultimately rejected. (response to the reviewers goes up 170 pages)
Grant applications
To be filled in as the trail lengthens.
Job applications
2022 postdoc cycle — 1 offer / 10 applications.
Failed experiments
3 published / 9 succeeded / 5 failed.
The 5 that didn’t work taught me more about the recording rig and the analysis pipeline than the 9 that did.