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 — 0 acceptances / 4 submissions · 0%

Total: 2 / 17 · 12%

A few that stung in particular:

  • A two-round major revision at Nature Communications on the dmPFC/dlPFC restless bandit paper, ultimately rejected. The appeal documenting goalpost-shifting is on file. The science survived: a reframe around dmPFC high-gamma tracking environmental richness (slow state variable) vs. theta carrying trial-by-trial PE/RV/RU has since become the cleaner version of the story.
  • The hippocampal polysemanticity paper went through several null-model rewrites before I caught that the regularity null was producing 98% spurious significance. Painful, necessary, not a rejection but a near-miss.

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.

What I’ve stopped doing

  1. Reading rejections the same day they arrive. Overnight, my next-morning self is much better at separating “this critique is right” from “this critique is loud.”
  2. Treating Reviewer 3 as a person. Reviewer 3 is a role — the role of the reviewer who didn’t read carefully. Sometimes Reviewer 3 is in slot 1. Once Reviewer 3 was the editor.
  3. Counting acceptances. The count I track now is submissions per year. Acceptances arrive when they arrive.

The hard part isn’t the rejection. The hard part is staying interested in the question after the rejection.

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