I always said I'd never be a salesman. I dreaded rejection as a kid: selling Girl Scout cookies, wincing through school fundraisers, navigating new friendships -- all of it stressed me out. Lately, though, I have been thinking that salesmanship is a significant part of job; it's just that I'm selling ideas.
I sell my students, mostly successfully, on the idea that the material in my classes is interesting and useful and manageable. I sell editors, somewhat less successfully, on the ideas in my papers. I just submitted my second sales pitch of the year to a grant funding committee, after the first proposal was rejected.
Rejection is part of sales, whether you're selling vacuum cleaners or ideas. But nobody in my world talks about it.
I could tell you a story in which I sound like a successful pre-tenure faculty member: I had two papers published in the spring semester, and I'm optimistic about getting two more published before the end of the year. I could tell you a different story, too: I had two other papers rejected in the spring semester, and I spent the summer afraid to write a third paper because I know it's likely to get rejected on its first airing. It's my first qualitative paper; it's in a subfield where I have more training as a clinician than an academic. It's probably going to take a couple of iterations to get it in shape.
People tend to treat that iterative process as a badge of shame. I resolved, when I got the letter from the grant funding committee, to be more transparent about it.
Maybe the worst part of impostor syndrome is the certainty that everybody else has it together except you. Nobody else is so nervous pushing "submit"; nobody else ever flinches, remembering the joke that fell utterly flat.
I know, on the one hand, that this is preposterous. At the same time, that sneering inner voice is persistent.
This afternoon I was invited to the dean's office as part of a panel, to talk to a group of first-year faculty about the first-year experience. I said, "If I could give one piece of advice to my first-year self, I would tell her to be more patient with herself as a learner. To remember that there's a reason nobody goes up for tenure in her second year, just like nobody gets a PhD in a year." I talked about the anxiety that consumed me during my first year in the classroom-- how much it had gnawed at me initially, how completely it had receded. And then I felt like a DORK for the next three hours. It's all well and good to talk about being transparent, but maybe IN FRONT OF THE DEAN isn't the place, said my regretful self. I tried to tell myself to settle down, that they hadn't wanted panelists to talk about how effortlessly they'd sailed through the first year, but this attempt met with mixed success.
Two weeks ago my grant rejection letter came in the mail, just an hour before my friend K and I had our monthly meeting for coffee and goal-setting. "Do you ever feel like a rejection is a referendum?" I asked her.
"Like it means everything I'm doing is worthless and stupid and I should just resign before they deny me tenure? Oh, no," she said sarcastically, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
So. I think it's valuable to be transparent, to say, "I am going to hit my quota, but I am hearing a fair amount of NOPE along the way." But it's a lot easier to pretend otherwise.
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