CV (of successes)

CV (of failures)

A newly minted postdoc looking back on their grad career might see, alongside some minor accomplishments, a long string of failures: Projects crashing catastrophically; projects dying quiet deaths; detrimental bugs you wrote into your own damned code; missed opportunities; flat out rejection after rejection after rejection; the list goes on...

With failure (and its potential for the future) prominently on my mind I started a shadow CV (a "CV of failures") upon becoming a postdoc. It's something you hear academics joke about from time to time, but some actually keep score. I decided to keep score because, one, it provides a buffer against discouragement when the real CV isn't growing at the desired speed – the shadow CV is witness to many hours of hard work and lessons learned, that passed without a quantifiable outcome. And two, to create some level of transparency that might ultimately help others to not get discouraged. Failure is an integral part of academia, and many failures can hide behind a single line on a real CV. It's what most of us go through time and time again. And while postdocs might enjoy quietly musing the downsides of their self-chosen fate (often with some humor, like here), a trove of "teachable moments" end up never broadcasted.

Minding goal two in particular, I plan on publishing my CV of failures here once I am a famous researcher (or, if I'm drinking, maybe next week). The aim is to demonstrate the depths of failure underlying a successful (or average, if I'm lucky) career in science.