What is a CV of Failure ?
The best possible explanation of what is a CV of Failure is not mine, but the one from the original article by Melanie Stefan. If you’re too lazy to read it, the gist of it is that CV and our public presence on social medias is typically centered around our successes, while a lot of our work is about failures. It’s good to embrace the feeling of stupidity that comes with research, but a field with obvious and public success metrics but obscure and private selection system is a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of insecurities. The CV of Failure tries to balance the score, to show that people that “perform” more than you might have also failed more than you.
The word failure is quite strong. Some of them can be closer to setbacks, where the bulk of failed applications can be reused for successes. A lot of failures also happen before a formal rejection: would you consider this idea that you played around and explored for a bit a failure ? What level of maturity does a project need before dying to be considered a fail ? Failure is as arbitrary of a definition as success is, and the CV of Failure is a good way to see it.
Why start it now ?
I am currently a PhD Student. In all honesty, I do not have much to say about both successes and failures at that stage. But an advantage of starting it while my career barely started is that I can keep track of most failures. Someone who is already a professor likely applied to an untraceable amount of things, or it would be a much more painful process to dig back archives of texts scattered around a dusty hard drive. This is quite visible looking at examples online: failures at early stages are typically not visible, expect the ones that scarred them the most. In a way, this might give to other junior researcher a closer idea of what this can look like at that stage. Sparser, but closer to their own situation. Obviously, this argument is true only if I continue to update it, which is quite the assumption.
An immediate benefit though, outside of another venue for procrastination, was not as expected but still welcomed: failures become somehow a good way to track a form of progress. In academia, you reap what you sow at a very slow pace. Sure, contemporary publishing system is pushing to get a faster and faster publishing cycle. Even more so with the LLM-craze, pushing even a pre-publishing platform like arXiv to adress it. But nonetheless science is slow. I am a firm believer that it should be slower, even ! It takes a lot of time to find a good idea, to explore it, and to see if results are noteworthy. This is before even writing an article, and talking about the whole publishing process can take longer than everything else in this blog post. When starting your career, a lot of foundations you are building are not really obvious to notice. Not only this is frustrating, but also is somewhat anxiety-inducing, as the quality of those foundations seem to be mostly visible a posteriori. But with failures, there is something reassuring in accumulation. Something is happening. It might not be good, or what I wanted, but it is better than limbo. Spending time, effort, and hope for something to get turned down is not nice, but might as well try to give my brain a little dopamine shot by making a list longer. Will it have the same effect for you ? Maybe if you have the same kind of neurosis, maybe not.
I would encourage everyone to try the exercise of writing your CV of Failure. You don’t have to keep it exhaustive or to make it public, but it is another perspective on what you have done, whatever the reception of it was.
On transparency in selection processes
Another thing I want to mention and that I have been frustrated with recently is the lack of transparency in selection processes in academia. When applying for a summer school, a conference, a grant, you typically have a set of rules online. They can be more or less precise, but also more or less respected. I can think of quite a few grant applications that are “for everyone” or “on topics that are for the good of humanity” that somehow still end up having very similar profiles in the end. Once you applied, you go through different stages. A lot of them can reject you without any form of feedback. Giving constructive feedback, especially to bad applications, takes time from experts, and I understand that it might not be feasible (even more so with the LLM-craze, a suffix I could add to many sentences). But even when you are going to some final stages and get rejected, the feedback you have can be sometimes completely useless! In one case, I asked for feedback after getting rejected in the final round of an application, and the answer I received was “Well apples and oranges, we could have also chosen you.”. I understand that if you have equally good profiles but a single position, you somehow have to make a choice that can be hard to put into words to give an explanation. This is still a frustrating experience where it is really hard to learn anything from. What can happen is that if you’re lucky enough, you are surrounded by people with insider knowledge. They know how the selection process go behind the scenes, or they have witnessed the output of enough of them to retro-engineer winning features. They can help you to tailor your application to satisfy unspoken rules. I think I don’t need to argue why this is unfair and reinforce existing inequalities.
One conclusion to take away from my limited experience, and from the CV of Failure, is that while academia is extremely competitive, there is a strong element of luck in it from the start. Actually, there is more luck at the start than later on! It is easier to compare between more senior profiles, after all expectations are more clear and there are enough data points that there is a less of a bet to make on the potential of someone. This is important to stress, and not only when someone fail: failing because of bad luck but succeeding because of your talent is not a better understanding of the system, it’s just a pat in the back.
Another take-away for me is that part of this luck is because of the lack of transparency. Luck is a good placeholder for “anything you do not have control on”, but it can also give this fatalistic sense of a neutral stochasticity whereas sometimes it is about systemic biases or unspoken political choices. At best, you know the profiles of the people that got selected, but it does not tell you anything about their application, and who was not selected. Obviously, asking for all of this information can give rise to privacy issues. But if I give voluntarily access to my applications and what the outcome was, maybe this can give a complete picture, both negative and positive, about some selection processes. I am still figuring out how to do this without it being too cumbersome for me. In the meanwhile, if you are interested in anything I applied for, whether I got accepted or not, contact me and I will happily give you my applications.