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Dealing with failure as a PhD student

PhD students are extremely prone to experiencing failure. All academics are much more likely to experience failure (repeatedly) in contrast to other professions. But there are strategies to learn how to better deal with ‘academic failure’.

Dealing with failure in academia

What counts as ‘academic failure’, #1. understand that all academics encounter failure, #2. celebrate your courage to take risks, #3. openly share and discuss your failures, #4. give yourself time to grieve, #5. find a good academic mentor.

Failure in academia is so omnipresent that there are even academic articles about ‘academic failure’. How can PhD students better deal with failure?

PhD students can deal with failure more constructively by realizing that failures are an inevitable part of academic work.

Additionally, the following strategies help to deal with failure and build lasting resilience:

• shifting one’s mindset by celebrating the courage to take risks
• honestly sharing (and hence normalising) experiences of failure
• taking the proper time to grief when something is not working out as planned
• Find a good mentor whose opinion you respect.

In 2018, Marissa S. Edwards and Neal M. Ashkanasy published an article in the Journal of Management & Organization with the title: Emotions and failure in academic life: Normalising the experience and building resilience.

In this article, the authors address failure as something that is not in line with desired or expected results. This definition draws attention to the emotions and individual experiences of failures. What constitutes a failure for one person, might not be considered a failure by another.

Experiencing failure as a PhD student is extremely tough. Think of a rejected manuscript, a failed grant proposal, or unsuccessful job applications. Over time, more senior academics often get used to these kinds of setbacks.

The highly subjective character of perceiving failure also provides hope. While rejections and negative feedback are never pleasant, we can learn to redefine what we see as a failure and build resilience.

According to Marissa S. Edwards and Neal M. Ashkanasy (2018), academics experience failure frequently because their work is regularly scrutinized. In addition, academic work is scrutinized from many different sources. Some examples:

Every manuscript submitted to a journal is scrutinized. While there is a proper way to provide feedback in a peer review , in reality, reviews can be extremely harsh.

Academics also regularly apply for grants and project funding. Competition for many grants and scholarships is extremely high. The acceptance rate of many grants lies below 5%!

Then there is teaching. Regular student evaluations are a reality for many academics. They are important sources for development, but can also lead to high-stress levels and anxiety among teaching staff. And students can be harsh too.

Understanding the nature of academic work means understanding that there is not a single academic who never experiences failure.

Celebrating successes is great. However, when it comes to long-term resilience building, it draws attention to the wrong outcome. Instead of (only) celebrating your successes, start celebrating your courage to take risks.

These risks can include (though are not limited to)

• submitting your work to a new journal after being rejected elsewhere,
• completing a grant application,
• writing a project proposal,
• applying to a new position,
• standing in front of a class teaching something difficult.

Emphasizing your courage to do these things will shift your mindset. When you accomplished one of these things, develop a habit: Make it a habit to treat yourself to your favourite meal. Or have a dinner party with friends. Or anything that makes you happy.

Not everything will work out. Heck, a lot will not work out. Failures are inevitable. But only when you dare to subject yourself to scrutiny over and over again, do you have the chance of succeeding. Therefore, trying should be celebrated.

In 2016, Professor Johannes Haushofer from Princeton University went viral with what he called his “CV of failures” . Instead of listing his successes, he compiled an honest resumé that included everything he tried to achieve but failed to do so. It included job applications, research funding applications and paper rejections.

Understanding that even accomplished professors experienced numerous setbacks is comforting for PhD students. And for any other academic for that matter. It helps to normalize failure in academia.

As a PhD student, be open about your failures. Talking about them with your peers. Share how they make you feel. Share how you struggle. Being open yourself often means that others are more open with you too.

Knowing that you are not alone in this and that everyone fails once in a while, helps enormously. And similarly to celebrating your courage, celebrating your colleagues’ milestones. Praise ‘trying’ over ‘succeeding’.

So far so good. In theory. But if something unexpectedly goes wrong, or something does not work out as you hoped for, it still sucks. And it is okay to suck. Give yourself some proper time to experience frustration, sadness, anger or grief.

Chances are high that you heard about the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When it comes to academic failures, the hope is of course not to get stuck in one of these stages and move to acceptance as fast as possible.

At the same time, there is some truth to it. Just because you consciously know that failures are part of academic life, are normal and will ultimately help you to grow as an academic, you still need to take the proper time to allow for emotional processing.

A good mentor is a person with whom you can have a good working relationship, but also be open about your feelings, concerns and worries. A mentor should be a person who not only coaches you in terms of research but in navigating academia as a whole.

Ideally, your PhD supervisor is your academic mentor. However, quite some PhD students don’t necessarily get along too well with their supervisor/s. If that is the case, try to find an academic mentor elsewhere. It can be someone more senior from your department, or a different university altogether.

If you experience failure, you should talk to your academic mentor. Explain how you feel. How crushed you are. If you respect the opinion of your mentor, you will also believe their honest assessment of the quality of your work.

After experiencing failure, such as a rejected manuscript, listening to your mentor can help enormously. And it can reinstate your confidence. Being way past my PhD times, I still call my mentor every time I get rejected. And I always feel better after talking about it.

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• CAREER FEATURE
• 13 July 2022

How to bounce back from a PhD-project failure

• Nikki Forrester 0

Nikki Forrester is a science journalist based in West Virginia.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Failure is an integral part of science. Research projects get scooped, protocols prove unsuccessful or funding limitations restrict data collection, delaying progress and sending scientists back to the drawing board. These setbacks plague researchers of all career stages, but they can feel particularly acute for PhD candidates who are racing against time to earn their degrees. Nature talked to five scientists about the hurdles they faced in their PhD research, how they successfully switched projects midway through and what advice they have for others in a similar situation.

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Nature 607 , 407-409 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01900-y

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

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Final Shape Launch Vital Info. and Known Issues

Jun 3, 2024 - destiny player support.

Before the first day of The Final Shape begins, we want players to be aware of certain information and issues we are already investigating:

Players progressing through The Final Shape campaign in a fireteam should avoid joining missions in-progress or swapping characters during the campaign to ensure progress is correctly recorded.

PC players with 3D audio enabled will not get any audio output from the game.

• As a temporary workaround, players with Windows Sonic for Headphones, Dolby Atmos, or any other 3D audio setting enabled in their Windows Spatial Sound settings should switch the setting to Off when playing the game.

The " Leaving The Final Shape Campaign " pop-up is displaying placeholder art.

Activating Prismatic Hunter's Blink Dagger super while mid-Grapple causes the player to fall.

The Solar Hunter’s “Knock ‘Em Down” aspect does not increase the number of Blade Barrage projectiles.

The ability description for the Hunter Arc Staff super does not mention that the three-attack combo or ground slam attack applies Blind.

The description for the Deconstruct perk does not reflect the recent change made in Update 8.0.0.1. Deconstruct now refills ammo from reserves.

Vestiges won't auto-convert into a Memory item if another Memory item is in your inventory. Players must obtain another Vestige after the Memory is used for Vestiges to convert into another Memory. 

Some old seasonal currencies and items from Seasons 20-23 will not be automatically removed.

Khvostov 7G 0X 's trait "Eyes Up, Guardian" incorrectly states that the ricochet shots deal more damage.

Players who were tracking Triumphs that were vaulted with the launch of The Final Shape cannot untrack them.

During The Final Shape campaign, if players do not open the final chest in The Blooming Deep Lost Sector before the cutscene plays, the loot will be lost.

When Warlocks pick up a Stasis Shard with the Glacial Harvest aspect equipped , they will not be granted healing.

The Berserker’s Bladefury super does not consistently apply Woven Mail to allies on super cast when combined with Into The Fray aspect.

This article will not be updated after The Final Shape launches tomorrow (view our timeline for launch information); instead, we will be updating our Top Issues article (when it's live) as issues arise.

As always, we will be monitoring player reports on our Help Forum , so please let us know of any issues you may hit during the campaign and post-campaign.

Google AI said to put glue in pizza — so I made a pizza with glue and ate it

Katie Notopoulos , Senior Correspondent covering technology and culture

• Google's AI search results said you could put glue in pizza sauce to keep the cheese from sliding off.
• Google had obviously ingested a Reddit comment that was meant as a joke — but the AI didn't get it.
• I still went ahead and made a pizza with 1/8 of a cup of glue. What's this all mean for the future?

Google launched its AI search results last week, and people have been noticing it's been giving some wildly wrong results . It's said that, yes, a dog has played in the NHL, that running with scissors has health benefits, and that 17 US presidents attended the University of Wisconsin.

But the most ridiculous of all was someone who noticed on X that if you asked Google about "cheese not sticking to pizza," (don't you hate it when that happens?) artificial intelligence would give you a helpful answer. Adding glue to the pizza sauce:

https://t.co/W09ssjvOkJ pic.twitter.com/6ALCbz6EjK — SG-r01 (@heavenrend) May 22, 2024

I knew my assignment: I had to make the Google glue pizza. ( Don't try this at home! I risked myself for the sake of the story, but you shouldn't!)

I did use Google to make sure that "nontoxic" glue was indeed semisafe to eat. Google's AI answer said that small quantities might lead to an upset stomach but not, say, death. That's good enough for me.

(Since I know you're wondering, yes, I did eat paste as a kid. I loved it. It was minty. I stopped only because of shame from the other first graders. But now I'm an adult and can't be shamed for eating glue pizza.)

I assembled my ingredients from my local grocery store: shredded cheese, marinara sauce, a ball of pizza dough, and, of course, nontoxic school glue (which I already had at home).

OBVIOUS WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. DO NOT EAT GLUE. SERIOUSLY.

And to anyone who feels compelled to point out I shouldn't have used jarred sauce or preshredded cheese: Please … keep in mind I'm eating glue here.

I spread out the dough, now to mix the sauce and glue.

Google said to use 1/8 cup of glue, but not how much sauce. I eyeballed that the pizza would need about 1/2 cup of red sauce.

I had imagined the amount would be more like a "light drizzle" of glue. But 1/8 of a cup is 2 tablespoons, and it looked like quite a bit more than I'd expected.

It came out a nice orange color, like vodka sauce. As I mixed and spread, I didn't notice a significant change in the consistency of the sauce.

Now for the cheese and some fresh basil. Ready for the oven!

I baked it at 450 degrees for 12 minutes, which turned out to be a little too long — it was lightly burned.

Related stories

When I opened the oven door, I was hit with a blast of steam and fumes, and I momentarily freaked out. I remember that when "NyQuil chicken" was a viral meme , doctors warned that the real danger was lung damage from toxic fumes.

By heating up the chemicals in the glue, would I create some kind of toxic gas?

Well, let's hope not! Here we go!

Finally, the taste test:

pic.twitter.com/HkS0HftQfW — Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) May 24, 2024

My verdict: This wasn't the best homemade pizza I'd had — I couldn't necessarily tell whether the glue was the problem or that the cheap jarred sauce could've used a little more seasoning. (In the marinara's defense, it's hard to complain about taste when you add glue.)

But also … it was kind of OK? I had only a few bites because I was afraid of poisoning myself.

Most importantly: Did the glue keep the cheese from sliding off? You bet it did:

Happy to report NO movement or sliding of the cheese pic.twitter.com/DKdCa6LUap — Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) May 24, 2024

What does this all mean? For me personally, this means that I'm an idiot who eats glue. But what does it mean for Google and the future of AI-powered search?

These goofy AI answers are funny but apparently rare. A Google spokesperson told Business Insider: "The examples we've seen are generally very uncommon queries and aren't representative of most people's experiences. The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high-quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web."

But still: Google AI spits out wild answers often enough that it's reasonable to say that there's a user mistrust of AI-powered answers (for now). The pizza-glue controversy is silly — no one with three brain cells would actually do this — but we can assume that AI also gives answers that are less obviously wrong but still wrong.

It appears that the origin of the pizza glue was a joke made on Reddit 11 years ago about adding glue to sauce. That Google's AI search answers are based on Reddit should largely be a good thing: Reddit is full of useful answers for how to do things and other common quandaries. But Google's AI failed to decipher that this Reddit answer was clearly a joke.

What will this mean for the general public's trust in Google and AI? I'm not sure! This week's OpenAI-Scarlett Johansson debacle probably had a much bigger effect on worries about whether the companies behind AI are operating ethically, regardless of what actually went down.

Presumably, Google AI search results will improve, and these weird flukes of bad results will become increasingly rare. There's a very reasonable concern among a lot of people that "let Google do the Googling for you" will have a very bad effect on the web as we know it. Depriving clicks to the websites that actually provide the information that powers AI results will probably have some unfortunate long-term effects.

If you'd like to hear some more smart thoughts on this, I recommend the most recent episode of the "Search Engine" podcast on this topic. It would be great to listen to as you cook up your own homemade, nonglue pizza.

Lastly, I have to say, once again: DO NOT TRY THIS YOURSELF. DO NOT EAT GLUE PIZZA.

On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.

Watch: How Domino's makes 1 billion pizzas a year amid labor shortages

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