Academia is a competitive place, regardless of where you work. The level and intensity of competition depends on the stage of your career (early, mid, late), on your tenure status, and also on who you are (gender, ‘race’, nationality, social class) and what you bring to academia. Academic Twitter has many stories that point explicitly and implicitly to the nature of competition in academia, especially around grants, publications and promotions/tenure. The explicit posts call out the more toxic sides of competition and how bad it can make people feel (and how exhausting the hamster wheel can feel). The implicit ones, for me, are the ones that publish all the successes (I published 8 papers this year! I have won my 3rd grant! I got into grad school!). I love seeing people succeed and I am certainly not begrudging anyone this success. But it does highlight all the things we need to be doing to stay relevant and get ahead in academia – so many grant proposals and papers and applications and interviews. It can make you wonder: for all of those wins, how many losses are hidden behind the scenes?

More specifically, in light of my current focus on making academia kinder, more open, more just, more accessible to different kinds of researchers and students, what would it mean to share these losses alongside the wins, to expose the more toxic sides of the academic hamster wheel and call it out? What would happen if we share and normalise failure? How powerful would it be for really successful academics to do this – what kind of environment would that create for emerging scholars, for whom the intense competition can feel really alienating and overwhelming?

In recent years, I have seen more established academics sharing not only their wins but also their losses along the way. This is sometimes called the ‘shadow CV’ – a kind of ghost CV written underneath the visible one. A recent paper by two MIT students – The need to normalize failure – shares the hidden fails behind all the triumphs. In other words, “I got into a prestigious PhD programme, but was rejected by 8 programmes before I got a yes”. Or, “I started this amazing job in June, but this was the fourth one I applied for and the first three never made it past the application stage”. My shadow CV might include, as examples, noting that I did publish two papers from my thesis, but the first one was rejected by two journals and was completely rewritten before the 3rd journal published it; I did win a postdoctoral fellowship but was rejected for two others I applied for; I have my dream job now but I applied for and did not get four other similar roles. There are many more shadowy fails I can include here.

Too often, we look at our successful peers and reckon that they must be sailing through academic life while we are plodding, tripping and falling, struggling to get up again. This kind of comparison can make us feel worse if we are the ones struggling and if we already feel like frauds. Making failure shameful and something to hide can also work against creating more collegial, collaborative research environments and cultures that nurture all researchers, but especially emerging scholars. If more senior and outwardly successful researchers are brave enough to start sharing the jobs they didn’t get, the grants they didn’t win, the papers that were not published, alongside the wins and successes, how much less intimidating would their success seem, and how much more achievable? I reflect back on being an early career scholar now and how intimidating so many of my academic heroes were because they were (are) SO successful and I felt like I was failing left and right by comparison. One thing that helped me was hearing my supervisor (definitely a hero of mine) talk about how one of her most cited papers was rejected by 4 different high-profile journals and pretty much rewritten before the 5th journal published it. It made me feel like I could actually be like her – I could be a successful, published academic, too. It was so encouraging.

I am not naïve enough to think that if we all become brave enough to talk about our fails as well as our successes academia will magically become less competitive and we’ll all feel less pressured and less like frauds. In any environment in which you are surrounded by high achievers (hello, academia!), you are going to feel competition, pressure, occasional feelings of ‘what the hell am I doing here’? But, I do believe that if we are brave enough to normalize our failures and look for opportunities to encourage, support and mentor others, we can shift the dial. This, I believe, is especially so if those being brave are in positions that include a mentoring role, like supervisors, senior researchers, or doctoral students nearing the end of your studies. Sharing the whole of our journey – triumphs and low points – is also important because we need to challenge homogenising or one-size definitions of success that privilege particular ways of being over others. We need to be actively conscious of how different academia can be for different students – for women, scholars from minoritised groups, Indigneous scholars, scholars from poor and working-class backgrounds, students with caring responsibilities, self-funded students, students with visible and invisible disabilities, and more.

Academia can be fairer, more just, kinder, but it is on us – all of us – to make it so, especially those of us in positions of relative power and influence who have a platform of some kind from which to speak (and/or write). Small actions can sometimes feel a bit futile but every small action, if we are all taking them, creates forward momentum and change. That’s what gets me out of bed, anyway 🙂