Tag: RESILIENCE

Bouncing Back: Coping Effectively with  Academic Setbacks by Vineet Arora

ADMIN

I remember the first time a journal editor rejected my article. I sat staring at the email, feeling like someone had just deflated my academic “balloon”. I had poured my heart and soul into that manuscript, and here it was, marked with a big red “no.” It felt like being in school all over again, where the teacher hands back your paper covered in corrections. 

During my time as a sessional academic working in higher education, I have experienced many more rejections. While many of these have been challenging and disappointing, I have reached a point where I accept them and try to learn from the experiences. As I explain in this blog, I believe that developing my psychological resources and utilizing coping strategies has enabled me to handle these rejections constructively. In the next sections, I discuss how my self-efficacy as well as resilience, courage, and spirituality have helped me on my journey. I also share the importance of maintaining my wellbeing during stressful times and learning from my supervisors to help me cope with rejections.

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Building Resilience by Zoë J. Ayres

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When we are at the frontier of research, the foray into the unknown can be exciting. What will we discover? What contributions can we make to our field? What unique perspective can we bring? This thirst for knowledge can, however, come at a cost. Approximately 1 in 2 researchers embarking on their PhD will experience mental health concerns during their PhD, with pre-existing issues often compounded, as well as people experiencing mental health difficulties for the first time. The causes of this rise in mental health issues are varied, from impostor syndrome, to lack of support, through to abuse of power and discrimination. Unfortunately, the mental health toll does not stop there, with precarity of postdoc contracts, the competitive nature of academic positions, institutional racism, and ‘work overload’ as researchers progress up the academic ladder. In order to ‘make it’ in academia, individuals have to overcome a complex set of hurdles, and many will never be able to make the jump.

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