“SURVIVOR: THE AMERICAN COLLEGE PROFESSOR ON TODAY’S CAMPUS!” Symptoms

SYMPTOMS OF CUTS
How have the departmental cuts and changes affected you? How are you feeling the pinch? What’s changed in your daily modus operandi?

Do you feel like

• your comfort zone has been disrupted?
• you experience more disappointments and rejections than usual?
• there are delays in your timetable that throw off your “to-do” list?
• you are under more stress and pressure than before?
• there are challenges to your character with new temptations?

How are you responding to these hits and difficulties? You have a choice in your response: either “negative and destructive” OR “positive and constructive.”

How do you want to leave this island when the rescue team arrives? Better or worse for the experience than when you entered? Or like the end of Lost, totally confused!

Whether you have experienced this professional drought or these limitations previously or any of these metaphors is irrelevant; it’s how you respond to this one that matters. You can be a role model for your colleagues and set a positive example OR drag them down with you. It’s YOUR CHOICE! Consider your options in my next blog. You can weigh the negative responses against the positive ones and then decide your course.

COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

SHOULD YOU REVISE A MANUSCRIPT IF YOU’RE GOING TO SUBMIT ELSEWHERE?

1ST BLOG FROM TAIWAN: This blog is being posted from Taipei. Time-wise, they're a bit ahead of Eastern U.S. time. In fact, it's almost Christmas here. The lights are going up as I type. Haha. After a 27-hr flight, I'm slightly punchy. Anyway, it's blog time. Back to rejection!

TWO TYPES OF REJECTION DECISIONS
If the editor’s decision is: “the manuscript is inappropriate for the journal,” which may occur before the review process, he or she may suggest other journals that are more appropriate. This decision usually occurs very quickly. Over the past 6 months, I’ve received those rejections within 24 hours of submission thanks to the miracle of “electronic rejection.”

If the manuscript is sent out for review, the editor may decide: "rejected without the option to resubmit." In this case, a thoughtful editor or reviewer may also suggest other journals if they find merit in the paper and expect you will revise it.

A VISIT TO TOTAL REJECTION-LAND!
Now what do you do? You have a manuscript that’s been whacked as inappropriate or with buckets of changes to be made.

You have several choices available. Pick one of the following:

A. Send the manuscript to your recycle bin
B. Send out the manuscript to a “more appropriate” journal without any changes
C. Revise the manuscript based on the editor’s and/or reviewers’ feedback and then send it out to another journal
D. Put it on the backburner and refocus on a different manuscript
E. Refill your prescription meds quickly
F. All of the above

Most frequently, I will choose “B” or “C,” depending on the manuscript, and “E.” (A little pharmaceutical humor.) On only one occasion did I elect “D,” to rewrite a manuscript a year later after rejection and do not resubmit. It was finally published.

CONSIDER REVISION
If you can correct the flaws that one set of reviewers found, you’ll be one up on the next band of reviewers from the next journal. Unless the comments were totally inappropriate or unfounded, think about them carefully and decide which ones suggest the need for legitimate changes. Then make them.

If you don’t try to improve the quality of your manuscript before submitting elsewhere, you may end up with many of the same criticisms and rejection again. You’re back at square one. You haven’t progressed and the manuscript is still inadequate for publication. Use all of the FREE feedback you get from editors and reviewers. Their comments on the quality of your work will improve your writing and the meaningfulness of your contributions.

COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

TO REVISE OR NOT TO REVISE A JOURNAL MANUSCRIPT: IS IT WORTH IT?

WHY REJECTION?
You’re probably wondering why I write and speak about disappointment, rejection, and failure so often. Or, maybe not. The fact is: Writing productivity is proportional to writing rejection. Since my last blog, I've received 3 manuscript rejections. The more I submit to peer-reviewed journals, the more I get rejected. At least, that’s been my formula for rejection throughout my academic career. Even in retirement from JHU, I’ve been figuratively smacked all over the place by editors several times a month. Those manuscripts that have been published are not produced without significant scarring. It is a continuously humbling experience.

EDITORIAL DECISION OPTIONS
Anyway, the issue is what to do when you get whacked by a journal editor. The rejection menu usually consists of the following:

• Unconditional Acceptance, which means: "We love you!"
• Conditional Acceptance with Minor Revisions, which means: "We like you, kinda!"
• Rejection with Major Revision to Resubmit, which means: "You’re a moron!"
• Rejection, Do Not Resubmit Anywhere in the Universe, including British journals, which means: "Consider another career or stay in your lab and don’t come out!"

YOUR RESPONSE: When you receive 2 or 3 reviewers’ comments, which may be as short as 1 page or as long as 3 pages single-spaced, what do you do?
A. Cry
B. Drink alcohol
C. Take a controlled substance
D. Put out a contract on the editor
E. Torture the editor using Jack Bauer’s techniques on 24 until he or she reveals the names of the reviewers
F. All of the above

Did you get it right? After you've recovered from one of these initial reactions and had time to calm down and put your chainsaw back in the garage, do you revise or not?

So, do you suck it in, buck up, hunker down, and make the revisions or try to dream up other colloquialisms for this sentence?

My next blog will answer this question and suggest strategies to attack reviewers’ comments before you undertake any revision. Let me know your pub experiences. I hope you've had a higher hit rate than me.

COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

How Can You OVERCOME PROCRASTINATION? Part I

Causes of Procrastination

What are the most common causes of procrastination? Fear of failure is frequently the primary cause. Tasks that seem difficult or overwhelming can be the objects of this fear. Rather than trying to tackle them, you just push them aside and avoid them altogether. Once this procrastination begins with one task, such as writing an article, it can become a cycle that’s repeated with other similar tasks, such as writing reports, grants, etc. It will be increasingly difficult to break this cycle. In writing, for example, “writer’s block” becomes the rationalization or justification for procrastination in any writing project. It legitimizes the procrastination.

In addition to failure, the literature identifies other possible causes:



• Fear of rejection, responsibility, criticism, disappointing others, imperfection, making a mistake, change, inadequacy, or success


• Feeling overwhelmed


• Desire for attention


• Boring or difficult tasks


• Resentment


• Unclear goals



7 Steps to Overcome Procrastination

The challenge is how to regain control and conquer the tasks that produced your procrastination. Here are seven steps you can try:


1. Identify the source of the problem


2. Break down your tasks into subtasks


3. Apply the “Swiss Cheese Method”


4. Focus on the outcomes and deadlines


5. Review your daily, weekly, and semester schedules regularly


6. Find an accountability partner


7. Reward yourself for small and large victories



My next blog will describe these 7 steps. I hope this is helpful to you or a friend who could use a bit of guidance to snap out of a procrastination rut. Let me know your thoughts. Have you tried any techniques not listed above that have worked? Please share.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC & Coventry Press

Rejection and Failure in Academe: How Do You Deal?

As academicians, it seems as though we are gluttons for punishment. We feast on rejection. We are the Hannibal Lecters of disappointment and failure. It comes with our territory. I would guess that only performers (actors, singers, dancers, and stand-up comedians) encounter more rejection than we do. Consider the number of opportunities for rejection:

1. Articles, book chapters, and books submitted for review
(Personal Note: During my first couple of years at Johns Hopkins, I accumulated enough rejections from journal editors to wallpaper my office. About 22 years later, my 1st book on humor in teaching--Professors Are from Mars, Students Are from Snickers--garnered 30 publisher rejections. My acceptances have been disproportionately small compared to my rejections.)
2. Proposals for research funding
(Personal Note: With an 80-90% rejection rate for federal RFP submissions, how can one not experience a life of rejection in a research university?)
3. Promotion and tenure review
(Personal Note: It doesn't get any more demeaning than the promotion process. Even for an overachiever like me, when you're promoted, it's anti-climactic. I will never forget the day the committee met to review my credentials for "professor." No one ever called to tell me the decision. I finally called at the end of the day to find out what happened.)
4. Teaching
(Personal Note: Getting whacked by your students on end-of-course evaluations is not a pretty sight. When you put an enormous effort into your teaching and receive personal attacks by a few students, it always hurts. Peer observation can also be a humbling experience.)
5. Miscellaneous
(Personal Note: There are so many other ways our bosses (chairs, associate deans, and deans) can undermine our spirit and demoralize us in the way they treat us; there are too many to count. Academe has found so many ways to discourage their best and brightest faculty and devour their newbies. It should be ashamed.)

If none of the above applies to you, consider yourself blessed beyond description. For those of you to whom one or more of those forms of rejection apply, how do you respond? Just buck up, shrug it off, and keep on moving? That's easier said than done.

Obviously, perseverance is involved. I'd like to pass on an inspirational quote that I present in my keynotes on stress management that's in DVD form. It's from one of America's most creative screenwriters and actors: Sylvester Stallone. The context is Rocky Balboa talking to his son, who is discouraged, hates his job, and blames his dad for his predicament. Here's the quote:

Rocky Balboa (2006):

“I don’t care how tough you are.
It [life] will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
You, me, or nobody is going to hit as hard as life.

But it ain’t about how hard you hit;
it’s about how hard you can get hit,
and keep movin’ forward.
How much you can take and keep movin’ forward.
That’s how winning is done.

Now if you know what you’re worth,
now go out and get what you’re worth.
But you gotta be willing to take the hits and not pointin’ fingers, sayin’ you’re not where you wanna be because of him or her or anybody.
Cowards do that and that ain’t you.
You’re better than that.”

This quote is such an eloquent expression of what to consider when we face disappointments, rejection, and failure inside academe as well as outside. I hope it will touch your mind and heart as it did mine. Stay focused, honor your commitments, and "keep movin' forward."

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC