Waiting for scholarship's applications decisions is the worst.

[adel9216]

I believe it is the same feeling for professors who apply for grants. I should know by the end of the day if my university nominates me to the national competition of this very prestigious scholarship. The waiting is quite stressful.

[wwwdotcom]

Think of it as another learning experience where you can develop and practices skills needed to appropriately handle such stress.  Much of the academic life is waiting on decisions (funding, manuscripts, conference abstracts, job applications, promotion/tenure materials, etc.).

[Caracal]

I believe it is the same feeling for professors who apply for grants. I should know by the end of the day if my university nominates me to the national competition of this very prestigious scholarship. The waiting is quite stressful.

I always have just assumed that I wouldn't get anything that I applied for. Any good news is just a pleasant surprise.

[Puget]

I believe it is the same feeling for professors who apply for grants. I should know by the end of the day if my university nominates me to the national competition of this very prestigious scholarship. The waiting is quite stressful.

I always have just assumed that I wouldn't get anything that I applied for. Any good news is just a pleasant surprise.

Yes, this is called "defensive pessimism" and can be a good strategy, so long as you don't let it interfere with applying in the first place.

[adel9216]

My university nominated me !!!! So happy! It's the first step :)

[namazu]

Congratulations and good luck!

[adel9216]

Congratulations and good luck!

Thanks !

[Parasaurolophus]

Yup. That's why you have to learn how to forget about the competition entirely, and let the results come as a happy surprise in the middle of other, more engrossing work. It's a hard skill to acquire, but it makes a huge difference to one's quality of life.

But congratulations on making it through the first hurdle!

[Kron3007]

I believe it is the same feeling for professors who apply for grants. I should know by the end of the day if my university nominates me to the national competition of this very prestigious scholarship. The waiting is quite stressful.

I always have just assumed that I wouldn't get anything that I applied for. Any good news is just a pleasant surprise.

I have a hard time convincing myself that I won't get things so while I try to do this it has never really worked.  I find the best strategy is to always have many things in the pipeline so you don't dwell on any particular outcome and when you get a negative response you have other things to look toward.

PS congrats and good luck

[adel9216]

I believe it is the same feeling for professors who apply for grants. I should know by the end of the day if my university nominates me to the national competition of this very prestigious scholarship. The waiting is quite stressful.

I always have just assumed that I wouldn't get anything that I applied for. Any good news is just a pleasant surprise.

I have a hard time convincing myself that I won't get things so while I try to do this it has never really worked.  I find the best strategy is to always have many things in the pipeline so you don't dwell on any particular outcome and when you get a negative response you have other things to look toward.

PS congrats and good luck

Yes, it's a good strategy that I am trying more and more, and it does help when you're too busy to think about those applications.

Thank you!

[polly_mer]

For the readers at home:

Applying for many things is a good strategy under a combination of specific conditions, only some of which are under the individual's control.

* A good strategy involves being competitive in the pool for most cases.  Applying a lot for things for which one is not competitive will not make up for being uncompetitive in that particular type of pool.  That's true for TT positions at teaching-only institutions when one has a fabulous research record and no experience with non-elite institutions as well as the most elite of the elite research institutions when one has effectively zero publications relative to the norm, no name recognition (whatever that means in a particular field), no recognized pedigree (whatever that means in a particular field), and no teaching experience at a comparable institution.  That's true for scholarship/fellowship competitions in which "the rich get richer" so those who most need a win won't have the background and experience of even the average in the pool.  That's true for open-call funding in which previous work is the biggest factor so that again, the rich get richer and the outsider with a possibly good idea won't be deemed to have the ability to deliver on that idea.

* A good strategy involves being able to display all the expected norms instead of trying to figure out the norms from the instructions.  Sometimes, the expected norms bear little resemblance to the instructions.  I remember more than one story among my newly hired colleagues about the help they received to prepare proposals that were along the lines of "You have no section 4.3.  You absolutely need to address <whatever section 4.3 is>.  Oh, that's not in the instructions?  Huh.  We've had to send in a section 4.3 for 10 years so those publicly available instructions must be out of date.  Don't worry about the page limit as long as you're not more than two pages over the total".  Sometimes, the norms are such a strict adherence to the instructions that using 12-point font instead of 10-point font or submitting 510 words instead of 500 words for a section is an auto-reject.

* A good strategy involves knowing the current trends and being able to demonstrate an excellent fit with the understood-by-"everyone who matters"-but-possibly-unstated criteria.  I've been the reviewer to point out that the technique is out-of-date by decades or that the question has already been satisfactorily answered at length in the literature so any new proposal has to explain in detail why the literature has a gap or needs to be revisited using a different technique that addresses a new angle.  Being the latest to jump on the buzz word band-wagon, but using the appropriate jargon wrong is also a kiss of death.  For example, machine learning is indeed a hot topic at the moment with a lot of funding; repackaging any old computer algorithm as machine learning tends to be laughed about as we read the proposals, especially when solid machine learning proposals are already in the pool.

* A good strategy involves being focused enough to spend sufficient time/effort on each item to be competitive, but also being focused enough to ignore a lot of possibilities to preserve time and effort for the other parts of the job.   This is a case where self-imposed urgent can really hurt externally important items.  I've seen students who shot themselves in the foot by doing all kinds of things other than the research they were supposed to be doing or even really knocking the coursework out of the park to set a background for future teaching/research.  I can think of more than one person who got to the end of a start-up year and all that person had to show was N unsuccessful proposals with zero research productivity, nothing set up along the lines of a physical lab, no student/postdoc/technician group hired, or in anything else on the list of job duties.

* A good strategy involves a mix of applications/proposals/submissions.  This is related to the previous point on succeeding at all parts of the job.  Having a ton of funding in several different areas, but no one to do the work during a short turnaround is bad; I have a colleague who was unexpectedly successful this way and is scrambling to have enough people on each of 10 brand-new projects and get the work done in time.  Ending up with 6 fellowships for the next year, but no publications and no conference presentations can be a problem long term since an individual can only accept the one fellowship and the CV then only has the one line for this year's work.  Doing a bazillion bitsy things that have low probability of acceptance like unsolicited book reviews or panel proposals may be taking time from something that matters more, even though any one submission is only a few hours.

In summary, yes, each individual item hurts less when it's one of the ongoing possibilities.  However, focusing on this one activity when other activities are important to your success can be problematic.  Since this is an academic forum, I will point out that some folks stay in certain undesirable conditions for years because those individuals focus so hard on applications for which they are uncompetitive instead of going with the mix of different types of possibilities for the next step.  Indeed, occasionally, people lose their current positions because they put so much effort into applications that they didn't do the rest of the current job.

[adel9216]

Thank you for all this thoughtful advice, I know you are speaking more generally, but just as a clarification point, I am not focusing solely on applications and forgetting about the rest that I have to do. Again, I am totally capable of multi-tasking and deliver. I had this specific application in my mind, because it was the day that I would know the outcome...

[polly_mer]

Thank you for all this thoughtful advice, I know you are speaking more generally

Here is as good a place as any to do the regular reminder that the person who starts the thread doesn't own the thread and cannot direct how other people use the thread.

These fora exist in the fora in which they do because public threads serve many purposes, only one of which is directly responding to the person who starts the thread.  Another purpose is addressing lurkers (current and future) browsing to learn about general issues as background information.  Thus, when I wrote "For the readers at home", I was thinking of those lurkers and broadening the discussion based on almost 2 decades of experience reading these fora along with all my first-hand observations throughout my adult life.

Since we are responding directly one-on-one, I will also state here that all that personal experience with students and colleagues (face-to-face and virtual interactions) means I have heard/read assertions that an individual is fine more times than I care to remember.  Sometimes it's true and sometimes it's an individual who assumes it to be true now because it always has been true, but this situation is different enough that the individual doesn't know what the individual doesn't know.  Only time will tell which is true in any given case.

As someone who has lived a life that no one would plan, but has been pretty good, I encourage you to keep being you and explore possibilities.  However, as someone who has ended up in situations way over her head by not knowing what she didn't know, I will also encourage you to not be so quick to assert that you know what you're doing when you're in a situation new enough that you are asking a lot of questions on other aspects of the situation.  Past performance is no guarantee of future success and everyone who dares to try enough new things will have an occasional spectacular failure that needs a course correction. If you haven't had that failure yet, then it's in your future.  These types of failures tend to be worse emotionally the older one is when the spectacular-for-the-time failure occurs.

[adel9216]

Thank you for all this thoughtful advice, I know you are speaking more generally

Here is as good a place as any to do the regular reminder that the person who starts the thread doesn't own the thread and cannot direct how other people use the thread.

These fora exist in the fora in which they do because public threads serve many purposes, only one of which is directly responding to the person who starts the thread.  Another purpose is addressing lurkers (current and future) browsing to learn about general issues as background information.  Thus, when I wrote "For the readers at home", I was thinking of those lurkers and broadening the discussion based on almost 2 decades of experience reading these fora along with all my first-hand observations throughout my adult life.

Since we are responding directly one-on-one, I will also state here that all that personal experience with students and colleagues (face-to-face and virtual interactions) means I have heard/read assertions that an individual is fine more times than I care to remember.  Sometimes it's true and sometimes it's an individual who assumes it to be true now because it always has been true, but this situation is different enough that the individual doesn't know what the individual doesn't know.  Only time will tell which is true in any given case.

As someone who has lived a life that no one would plan, but has been pretty good, I encourage you to keep being you and explore possibilities.  However, as someone who has ended up in situations way over her head by not knowing what she didn't know, I will also encourage you to not be so quick to assert that you know what you're doing when you're in a situation new enough that you are asking a lot of questions on other aspects of the situation.  Past performance is no guarantee of future success and everyone who dares to try enough new things will have an occasional spectacular failure that needs a course correction. If you haven't had that failure yet, then it's in your future.  These types of failures tend to be worse emotionally the older one is when the spectacular-for-the-time failure occurs.

I have never said I take success for granted. I have never said that I own the thread as well. You are again entirely misinterpreting who I am, my stance and how I lead my life. You are putting words in my mouth. I am just going to avoid you on this forum from now on.

[polly_mer]

To stay on thread topic, in academia (as in most parts of life), waiting for the decision is not the worst.  Higher on the list include:

* Not having people agree with you when you're clearly right

* Having people tell you that you're wrong when those folks are clearly bozos (have I mentioned my fabulous red hair with the biggest white girl afro possible?)

* Having people tell you that you're wrong in a category in which you weren't even competing

* Losing something you dearly wanted, even if it was one of several perfectly fine options

* Losing something you didn't even know you valued until it was taken away

* Only winning the competitions that don't matter

* Finding out one was playing the wrong game and that win is not at all worth the cost

For those readers at home, I will mention that the people I've seen fail the hardest are those who insist that any objective pattern of reality doesn't apply to them, especially for new endeavors, and then set fire to the bridge with the experienced people who explain the objective pattern of reality.  A better solution, if anyone finds themselves in that situation, is to quietly ignore or to state something along the lines of "I'll keep that in mind".