Why Being Good at Science Makes Career Uncertainty Harder for you

In research, effort translates into outcomes. You put more time into your experiments, improve the protocol, learn, and solve problems faster. Logic and experience tells you that when you work harder, you produce more.

In careers, that equation breaks. And when it breaks, you end up blaming yourself. Unfortunately this starts before you ever send an application. It starts the first time you imagine being rejected and decide not to try.

If you talk to friends and colleagues who are job hunting right now, you'll notice that many of them are experiencing the search as something painful. Because you can do everything right and still get rejected or ghosted.

But there are so many variables that are not in your control when you are in that process, and that you tend to forget like:

• Someone with slightly more relevant experience (by far the most common reason).
• An internal candidate who was always going to get it.
• Timing, the least considered, most often deciding factor.
• Salary expectations that didn't match.
• The number of applicants. (There have never been so many people competing for the same roles.)
• Or simply that another person was a better fit for that particular role.

And then there are the what I call “annoying variables”:

• The role was already filled. It was posted for HR-policy reasons only, nobody really had a chance.
• The budget got frozen mid-process. You heard nothing and assumed it was you.
• The job description was a wish list written by three departments. No real human matches it.
• You were the benchmark candidate. They already had a favourite and you were interviewed for comparison.
• Your application arrived on day 12. They had shortlisted by day 5 and nobody read it.
• A software filter removed you over a keyword or a file format, before any human saw your name.

None of those rejections have anything to do with you.

And still, your brain will try to make them mean something. Rejected = not good enough. That's what years of scientific training do, teaching you that outcomes reflect competence, that results are data about your method.

Psychologists have a name for this. It's called attributional style or

the story you tell yourself about why something went wrong.

Abramson and Seligman showed in the late seventies that the damage isn't done by the bad event. But it's mainly done by the explanation. And the most costly explanation follows this thought process

1) it's me

2) it will always be like this

3) it applies to everything.

An example of this is when a candidate thinks: “this role went to someone with two more years in regulatory affairs” VS “I'm not employable.”

Same rejection but with two completely different styles to interpret what happened.

There's a study I like to quote about Crocker and her colleagues who followed graduate school applicants for two months, tracking their self-esteem every time an answer came in. The rejections only did real damage to the students who had staked their sense of worth on academic competence.

I support and help scientists telling a different story in the moment they can not see the alternative.

If you have spent ten years being the smart one, this is not a flaw in you.

A rejection is information. It tells you something about a role, a market, a moment. It tells you nothing about whether you're good.

Careers don't behave like experiments.

Abramson, Seligman & Teasdale (1978)

Crocker, Sommers & Luhtanen (2002)