As I scroll from social network to social network at the end of the year, I see a lot of retrospectives from 2023. I see grants obtained, jobs landed, prizes, accolades, competitions won. What I see is that our successes define us. And these determine whether our year is worth talking about. Our successes are public while our failures are swept under the rug.
Those who fail to get a job, grants or an end-of-year bonus avoid bragging about it. During this festive period, I only hear about the successes of my peers, both on social media and in parties of Christmas. Being confronted only with the successes of others while we constantly experience failures makes us competitive and inevitably unhappy.
This is why I decided to list and make public my professional setbacks in a “CV of failures”, following the example of Melanie I. Stefan from the University of Edinburgh who wrote her own “CV of failures » in 2010. To date, I have 17 rejected manuscripts, 15 unsuccessful grants, and 13 rejected applications for positions.
Keeping track of my failures helps me gain perspective on my successes, but also on those of others, which I overestimated. According to social media, others consistently succeeded where I failed. I only saw the successes of others in comparison to my personal failures. All this according to the scale that I had constructed for myself by looking at other people’s lawns. I had become a “neoliberal subject,” the French philosophers Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval would say, a competing entity obliged to maximize my results.
Other people’s success seemed to me to come from their hard work, so I had to work harder. Work more, always more. “ Publish or Perish “, say the academics. But sometimes (often!), working more will not bring us happiness or success.
The truth is that the professional world can be random, employers sometimes have a pre-selected candidate, and evaluation committees are arbitrary. You can also have a few bad months or write a bad job application. This does not mean that we are less “deserving”.
In 2019, I failed the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellowship competition. Two years in a row, I failed to obtain a postdoctoral scholarship from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture. For one of these competitions, I came in 33e and a good friend of mine arrived 31e out of 128 applications. They gave 32 scholarships. I was one step away from getting the $90,000 awarded. But I failed. In 2020, I was questioning my worth as an aspiring scholar.
Then, within a few months, the Banting competition and SSHRC both awarded me postdoctoral fellowships and the University of Ottawa hired me for a tenure-track position. Obviously, these honors are in bold letters on my CV. While many unsuccessful candidates also deserved funding or a position.
Reading my chess resume next to my actual resume, I realize that I don’t deserve more or less praise today than I did before. Sometimes I was offered money and jobs, sometimes not. Sometimes for the same project.
Chance
In addition to the economic situation, a significant part of my success can also be attributed to luck. Going into political science after my bachelor’s degree in journalism, I didn’t know that I would meet mentors who would trust a student who had never borrowed a book from the library. I am fortunate that the committees that evaluated my applications in 2020 were interested in my research on multilateral inequality. This apparently was not the case in 2019.
Success also comes from our life journey and our privileges. Where we come from, our identity and our parents’ educational qualifications influence our educational choices, our level of material and psychological anxiety, and the respect that others show us.
During my doctorate, I lived on a meager annual funding of $15,000, barely enough for room and board in Toronto. Even without asking, I knew my family would help me if I needed money to make ends meet. This security has definitely helped my mental health. Although I experienced hardships as a French-speaking woman in Toronto, the first in my family to pursue higher education, financial concerns did not prevent me from completing my doctorate. And although I am a second generation immigrant, I was able to study at the University of Toronto because I was born in Canada. An unfair advantage compared to my Malagasy cousins.
Writing a CV of failures is not an injunction to downplay our achievements. But at the end of this year full of good resolutions, I call on us to put the success of others into perspective in relation to our own, to criticize this toxic culture of comparison and to change the way in which we evaluate candidates for a job or for a bourse. I therefore invite you to talk about (and share on social media!) your failures as well as your successes.