Learning to Sit With Rejection in Graduate School
Author: Vanessa Parise
Rejection is one of the least discussed but arguably one of the most defining experiences of graduate school (and academia in general). We’ve all been scrolling through LinkedIn, wondering why our projects weren’t “good enough” compared to our peers to win funding or why our manuscript was not accepted for publication. For many graduate students, these experiences accumulate quietly, and are often interpreted as evidence of personal inadequacy rather than a fact of academic life.
Rejection in graduate school is not a sign that you don’t belong or are “not good enough,” it is quite literally part of the experience. Let’s dive a little deeper into what rejection looks like in graduate school, the neuroscience behind why it hurts so much (and why it’s adaptive!), its effects on mental health, and tips and tricks to sit with rejection when it occurs.
Rejection is Normal!
Rejection is empirically etched into the academic system. In a perspective piece by Jaremka and colleagues (2020), it was argued that repeated rejection is not uncommon in academic life but instead a defining characteristic of it. Rejection was found to be closely intertwined with the imposter feelings and burnout reported not only by trainees, but by senior scholars as well. Looking at the statistics, acceptance rates for some of the top journals usually fall below 10% (Nature Neuroscience Editorial, 2005). This means that even strong work is far more likely to be rejected than accepted. Abstract submissions to large, high-impact conferences and applications to medium to large grants are also rejected about 90% of the time (von Elm et al., 2003).
It’s extremely important to note that early-career setbacks are not necessarily predictors of long-term career failure. A study by Wang et al (2019) found that applicants who narrowly missed early funding success went on to produce higher-impact research than those who narrowly succeeded, suggesting that early rejection may be adaptive in fostering academic resilience and persistence.
Rejection and Graduate Student Mental Health
Research has unsurprisingly found that graduate students experience elevated rates of symptoms of anxiety, depression, and burnout compared to age-matched peers, with academic stress playing a central role in these increases (Li et al., 2025; Bergvall et al., 2025). Rejection, especially when it’s chronic and not dealt with properly, can become a cumulative stressor leading to feelings of hopelessness and subsequent functional disengagement (Liu & Alloy, 2011).
This idea highlights the need to reframe rejection as a probabilistic outcome of a competitive system and not as a personal failure. Believing that you are solely responsiblefor your rejection can lead to erosion of motivation, self-efficacy, and well-being (Day, 2011). This can be especially destabilizing for neuroscience graduate students, because we often work in long experimental cycles where our feedback and the celebration of our work can be significantly delayed.
Why Rejection Hurts So Much
We now know that rejection is normal and can have quite an effect on our mental health and behaviour, but why does it hurt so much and how is this pain adaptive?
Academic rejection can be conceived of as a subset of social rejection. Our brain sometimes tells us that we have not measured up to our peers and puts us in the “excluded” group. However, your peers have not actually excluded you; this feeling is usually self-generated.
Sitting with Rejection As It Comes
Graduate school culture often encourages us to take note of any feedback given and to bounce back quickly from the initial rejection. While maintaining motivation and forward momentum is important, research (and my own lived experience) suggests that heightened attention to negative emotions without deeper processing is associated with longer-lasting distress (Vives et al., 2021). Skipping the crucial step of emotionally processing rejection to “move past it” may therefore prolong distress and allow it to spill into other areas of functioning.
Remember, sitting with your feelings after rejection does not mean wallowing in your self-pity. It means allowing space for the emotional response before attempting to problem-solve and move forward. Qualitative work with PhD students has also found that adaptive coping involves discussing reviews with collaborators, doing a major revision to improve the work, shortening the work, and seeing rejection as a positive learning experience (Agarwal et al., 2020).
How might you sit with rejection then? Here are some strategies that you can try:
- Normalize the experience by sharing rejections with trusted peers and mentors. You will not believe how many people are in the exact same boat as you are!
- Separate your identity from the outcome of rejection. Remind yourself that rejection evaluates your work, not your worth.
- Reframe getting feedback as a positive (informative not criticism).
- Apply for small conferences and abstracts (such as McMaster-based conferences) alongside your larger, higher-impact applications. The acceptance rates are higher and this can help boost your confidence and will still give you the opportunity to share your work with experts and peers.
References
1. Agarwal, S., Latif, S., & Beck, F. (2020). How Visualization PhD Students Cope with Paper Rejections. ArXiv, arXiv:2009.00406v5.
2. Bergvall, S., Fernström, C., Ranehill, E., & Sandberg, A. (2025). The impact of PhD studies on mental health-a longitudinal population study. Journal of Health Economics, 104, 103070. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2025.103070
3. Day, N. E. (2011). The silent majority: Manuscript rejection and its impact on scholars. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10(4), 704–718. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2010.0027
4. Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). The neural bases of social pain: Evidence for shared representations with physical pain. Psychosomatic Medicine, 74(2), 126–135. https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0b013e3182464dd1
5. Eisenberger, N. I., & Lieberman, M. D. (2004). Why rejection hurts: A common neural alarm system for physical and social pain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(7), 294–300. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.05.010
6. Expanding Nature Neuroscience. (2005). Nature Neuroscience, 8(1), 1–1. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0105-1
7. Jaremka, L. M., Ackerman, J. M., Gawronski, B., Rule, N. O., Sweeny, K., Tropp, L. R., Metz, M. A., Molina, L., Ryan, W. S., & Vick, S. B. (2020). Common Academic Experiences No One Talks About: Repeated Rejection, Impostor Syndrome, and Burnout. Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 15(3), 519–543. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619898848
8. Li, T., Guan, J., Huang, Y., & Jin, X. (2025). The Effect of Stress on Depression in Postgraduate Students: Mediating Role of Research Self-Efficacy and Moderating Role of Growth Mindset. Behavioral Sciences, 15(3), 266. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15030266
9. Liu, R. T., & Alloy, L. B. (2010). Stress generation in depression: A systematic review of the empirical literature and recommendations for future study. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(5), 582–593. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.04.010
10 .von Elm, E., Costanza, M. C., Walder, B., & Tramèr, M. R. (2003). More insight into the fate of biomedical meeting abstracts: a systematic review. BMC medical research methodology, 3, 12. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-3-12
11. Wang, Y., Jones, B. F., & Wang, D. (2019). Early-career setback and future career impact. Nature Communications, 10(1), 4331. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12189-3