Hacking Academia

Rejection *always* sucks... but how it sucks evolves...

After a brutal start to the year in terms of rejection after rejection, I wanted to post a Hacking Academia video on the nature of rejection, and how it can evolve, in a professional academic and research career. 

In the video, I cover the transition from rejection feeling very personal early in your career, to rejection generating concern over the wellfare and reactions of those in your team involved in the rejected initiative, especially junior and early career researchers and academics.

I cover how rejection, to a certain extent, is a sign that you're setting your sights and aspirations at about the right level.

I touch on the broader perspective you gain later in your career, where you have enough data points to know that something you're confident is good value work has a good chance of *eventually* getting over the line, but that the short-term volatility can be brutal. Of course, knowing that rationally, and feeling fine about it emotively, is a whole different matter...

Finally I cover what can be a somewhat confronting concept - that sustained rejection can be a useful signal that you are no longer competitive in a certain area that formed your core identity earlier in your career - confronting, but by no means career ending: just a signal that can help you continue to evolve your career over time. This situation can occur for a wide variety of ways: most typically simply that what you were 110% dedicated to early on is now just a part-time component of your role, especially in ultra-competitive fields where you can't really part-time it.

And yes - that's a clear clickbait thumbnail for the video - am experimenting, I'm sure some people will hate it, but let's see what the various algorithms do... 

🖥️ YouTube: https://youtu.be/GqK9cTFNPlg

#rejection #HackingAcademia #careers #research #university #PhD #papers #publishing #conference #journal #writing #grants #fellowships #applications #proposal #funding #careeradvice #mentoring

A #PhD can be an amazing journey for many, but it's also inevitably a time of significant struggle(s). What that struggle is can take a near-infinite variety of forms, from health issues to relationship breakups, and from home sickness to mental health.

But beyond these relatively well known challenges, there are other types of struggles that affect a significant proportion of PhD candidates, at least in my experience supervising dozens of students and informally advising many hundreds more - these are the topic of today's #HackingAcademia video, "Struggling During Your PhD".

For those who come to a PhD early in their life, it is often the largest and most substantive professional project they have embarked on. Grasping the scale can be challenging to get your head around, especially when previous projects - like a final year undergraduate project - have been completed in just 6 or 12 months, and only part-time.

Related to the scale challenge is the lack of structure problem: moving from a structured course with timestamped milestones and definitive assessment to an unstructured research environment, where the outcomes are uncertain and unknown, can be be quite confronting.

Whether you come to a PhD as a fresh grad, or after a successful professional career (just two of many potential pathways in life to a PhD), starting back at a level where you're fumbling around and not very good at many things can be humbling. Before embarking on this journey, you need to "prepare to suck, for a bit" and have the humility and patience with yourself to get better. This can be especially challenging when you're transitioning from a former role where you were highly accomplished.

How can you step up to these challenges successfully? Good due diligence before you start the PhD, both by yourself and in terms of briefing by your prospective supervisor, can help prepare you.

But beyond yourself, probably the most important element will be the people around you.

These fall into three main categories:

1) your cheerleaders (often family, friends, partner), who are unwaveringly positive, 

2) the compatriots, your fellow PhD student living similar experiences with whom you can vent and learn, and

3) your supervisory team, who are there to support and guide you, but also to nudge you in the right direction every now and then with constructive criticism as appropriate.

A PhD can be a wonderful part of your career, but having a clear eyed understanding of the potential challenges before you embark on one, and appropriate support mechanisms in place to better deal with them along the way, will radically improve the chances of a happy and successful journey.

💻 YouTube link: https://lnkd.in/ejuqBSCb

#careeradvice #PhD #gradstudent #graduatestudies #research #university #academia #careers #advice #mentoring #stress #challenges #struggles #struggling #support #network #supportnetwork #humility

It's Friday afternoon, #CVPR2025 rebuttals are almost done thanks to amazing colleagues, and I have a massive backlog of #HackingAcademia topics to get to, both requested and from my own list.

So the first 2025 Hacking Academia video (and the 44th overall) is on:

The Importance of Timing ⏱️ ‼️ 

"Timing is everything" they say, and timing and cycles can play a key role in professional university research careers, from the individual to the organizational to the global.

In this video I go through some common examples across the spectrum, what impact they may have, and some ways to find out where in the timing cycle you are and what you can do (or not do) about it.

Some examples I go over include:

💠 Confused about the polar opposite responses of two colleagues to an invitation to collaborate on a grant proposal, one enthusiastic, one cynical and uninterested? You may have struck them at different stages of the ebb and flow of career success and grant applications.

💠 Proposing a grant in an application domain that is widely perceived to be on the downturn and dying as a sector? You may want to reconsider your timing, or topic. And timing also applies to whether the momentum is currently in the university research sector or in the startup and industry sector...

💠 Enquiring about a faculty job at a specific university? Your prospects will be vastly different "out of round" versus at the start of a major hiring initiative (positions can be created ad hoc but it's typically much rarer)

💠 Wondering why your university is specializing in a narrow number of topics whilst the one just down the road is expanding and generalizing? Sometimes it's not that either uni is inherently different to the other, but rather that they're just at a different point in the cycles that dominate academia... 

💠 Looking for funding support from your organisation? Your chances may go up substantially if it's near the end of their financial year and they've unexpectedly got unspent funds (and you have a compelling suggestion!)

💠 Or seeking funding from the government, for an exciting initiative? Your prospects may change drastically depending on whether they're at the beginning or end of their term, or in caretaker mode leading up to an election.

💠 And finally, I talk about how deliberately proceeding even when the timing is bad can be worthwhile: to get your name, ideas and interest out there, so that when in future the timing "turns good", you're the first person that comes to mind...

The first 15 minutes of the video is in this post, but you can see the full video on YouTube, and listen to the full audio on the podcast:

💻 Video: https://lnkd.in/d7WMMnAQ

#academia #academic #university #career #careeradvice #cycles #strategy #tactics #jobs #promotion #grants #fellowships #funding #government #politics #research #disciplines #fields #sectors #domains #downturn #boom

All #PhD recruitment approaches vary by professor, but there are some common themes that are fairly typical throughout.

In my newest #HackingAcademia video I shed some light on the #PhD candidate shortlisting and interview process we currently use, in the hope to demystify it for potential PhD candidates.

Some key points I cover include:

⭐ that what we're looking for is just as much about fit and match to research in our group as it is to the particular individual involved, and we're always appreciative of the time candidates put in

⭐ the huge number of applications we (and any lab with an international profile) get per year, and the practical necessities that forces upon us to be able to effectively manage them and shortlist - we do look at and consider just about every single applicant

⭐ what CVs etc... look like to us at a 30,000 ft view, and the irony that increasing professionalism means it's harder to distinguish the best fit candidates from CVs alone (not that you should ever do that anyway!)

⭐ our two stage interview process for shortlisted candidates (including the occasional referee check, not mentioned in the video), consisting of

⭐ interview 1: "getting to know you" - tell us a bit about your background, what drew you to considering a PhD, what motivated you to apply to our lab specifically, what you understand the PhD process to be, and any questions you have about PhD life, and then

⭐ interview 2: technical knowledge and understanding, covering aspects of coding, computer vision, data structures, mathematics, combined with a "first year of your PhD crammed into 20 mins" mini-research study (in our topic area of Visual Place Recognition)

⭐ in the tech interview, you're not expected to know everything, we provide extra support and scaffolding as needed (our aim is not to stress you out).

⭐ we're particularly interested in you communicating what you're thinking as you work through some of the questions and challenges, even if you don't get it out at the end - in part, because this mimicks the whole student-supervisor dynamic in a PhD, which is so important

⭐ practicalities: interview processes are just as much about risk mitigation (in both directions) - not just about finding the absolute best candidate, although that's also the aim - just not the sole one.

⭐ practicalities: we know good talent will likely apply to lots of labs, and have multiple options

As mentioned in the video, we're constantly tinkering at our shortlisting and interview process - this is some of what we do currently, but it's a continually evolving process.

Thanks especially to Tobias Fischer and Janet Danaher - we've tag teamed developing and refining the whole shortlisting and interview process.

Apologies for the jerky selfie cam - I'd been meaning to shoot this for months but there's no time like the present.

🖥️ YouTube video link: https://youtu.be/_IWrpSu3hIE

#academic #research #jobs #phds #graduate #hiring #jobinterview #careers #careeradvice #university #undergraduate #HDR

Last week at the 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (#IROS2024) in Abu Dhabi, Cyrill Stachniss and I were invited to give a tutorial on "Writing Papers People Love to Read" by Julie Stephany Berrio Perez on behalf of the IEEE Young Professionals.

Now, to give a proper, comprehensive treatment of all the ins and outs of paper writing really requires something more like a full day workshop, and it's something that researchers in our teams get exposed to gradually over a period of years.

On this occasion, Cyrill and I had around 20-25 minutes each, so we focused on some of the key concepts, techniques, tips, tricks and pitfalls, followed by some great discussion and Q&A with a great turnout for the final formal event on day 2 of the conference.

Cyrill went first, providing a bunch of tips and suggestions on paper structures, what should go into each part of the paper, nailing your contributions, grabbing and keeping the reader engaged and general todos and not to dos. You can check out Cyrill's talk here: https://lnkd.in/dywR5rjp

I then followed up with a tutorial on how to think about the art of paper writing, with a number of high level concepts - including the "must dos" and the "field and audience-specific factors", explicit ways to think about and categorize your paper in order to enhance your writing, presentation and a paper writing superpower - multi-step anticipation - where you repeatedly anticipate and pre-emptively respond to the likely questions or thoughts what will occur to your reader (again, best done with an experienced writer and researcher).

Common to both of our talks was the incredible value of "pair writing" early in your career with an experienced writer, where you sit side by side and write (type) together - the learning rate is phenomenal when you get this right, far far better than at-arms-length feedback via "marked up draft" or general comments in an e-mail or slack channel.

In Cyrill's case, with Wolfram Burgard, and in my case, with Gordon Wyeth. As well as the general theme of respecting your reader's precious and sometimes not-entirely-focused time and energy, and all the things you can do to maximize their enjoyment and clarity whilst reading your paper, and minimize their confusion and aggravation.

Again, these are high level tastings of what are a bunch of concepts that can go much deeper and into more detail.

Thanks to Julie Stephany Berrio Perez for very nicely filming and editing this together.

🖥️ YouTube link to my full talk here: https://lnkd.in/dPSvjjUs

#paperwriting #robotics #research #conference #academic #publishing #papers #communication #writing #comms #university #PhD #postdoc #academia #IROS

In academic and research careers, so much can feel so far out of your control.

But there's one way I've found very useful, both for myself and those I mentor, to pull back a little bit more control of your fate, and that is the concept of:

𝐂𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞

And that's the topic of today's Hacking Academia video and podcast - the 40th in the series!!! 🎉🎉🎉

When you apply for a grant, fellowship, project, award, job or promotion, you face a number of choices that are mostly within your control:

❓ how closely should I pitch this project to the work I'm already doing?
❓ how grand or narrow in scope a project should I propose?
❓ how incremental or impossibly blue sky should the proposed research be?
❓ how strongly should I make the claims about contributions relating to a prize or promotion application?
❓ where on the underselling to overselling spectrum do I want to pitch this research?

Your answers to these questions are shaped of course by the guidelines of the scheme you're engaged in - for example some grant schemes being risk averse, whilst others are deliberately "blue sky" (risky fundamental basic research).

But they're also shaped by something within your control - your ability to significant bias *how* your application would be rejected - if it is at all.

So why would you do this?

Because it has the beneficial effect of 𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘢𝘭 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘦𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘥.

It also has the beneficial effect of making you deliberately think about how you want to pitch whatever it is you're submitting - which can also improve the overall clarity and quality of the submission.

🖥️ Youtube link: https://lnkd.in/dHJqfg9U

It's Friday, and, given my life currently, it's a great time to talk about pushing to, and beyond, your limits, and managing as best you can the associated risk of burnout.

For a while now, and likely for a while into the future, my professional career has been largely focused on two amazing, potentially once-in-a-lifetime opportunities: one in the strategic research space, and one in the global impact tech translation space. 

So if it appears I've been slacking off and not doing much, I haven't! It's just that the majority of what I've been focusing on for a while now hasn't been in the public domain much, if at all. 

In my new Hacking Academia video, I talk about:

✨ those periods in your life when you deliberately and consciously choose to go all in on an amazing opportunity, that has a statistically very low likelihood of coming off - and all the pschological, time and energy burden that entails, both for you and your collaborators / team members. This is a different situation to the ad-hoc challenges that life and careers periodically throw up.

✨ the conditions under which this is even feasible, professionally and personally: a relatively stable situation in both, supportive and understanding professional peers and family and friends, ability to delegate and offload to some extent. And the need to be aware that if any of that changes you may need to stop.

✨ that some risk mitigation and burnout risk management can and should be done, but ultimately, growth is pushing beyond your boundaries and with that comes risk, highs and lows, and unpredictability.

✨ unless you're all in, the tension and compromise involved in maintaining some of your core activities and having some sort of fallback position

✨ the exhilaration of chasing something really amazing, and the joy of getting "into the zone" and becoming incredibly prolific 

✨ the analogy to peaking in sporting endeavours: as a planned, deliberate activity, it's possible to peak for a sustained, but not indefinite, period of time

✨ the downsides: hyperfocus can make context-switching difficult, especially for those more "mundane" everyday activities; switching from grand ambitions and visions to nuanced and delicate personal interactions (e.g. in any leadership role) can be challenging; and the increased risk of missing things or bad decision making, which can be remedied by sanity checks with peers

✨ the recommendation to watch out for these opportunities - they're incredibly exciting, exhausting, and amazing learning and growth experiences. 

#HackingAcademia #ProfessionalGrowth #Burnout
#CareerJourney #InnovationLeadership #TechTranslation #StrategicResearch #PeakPerformance #RiskManagement #WorkLifeBalance #GrowthMindset #LeadershipChallenges #CareerOpportunities #ProfessionalDevelopment #Resilience #Ambition #Focus #LifeBalance #Risk #CareerSuccess #PersonalGrowth #CareerAdvice #Academia #Research #Technology #University #Startup #Leadership #Teams

It's late on a Friday afternoon here in Brisbane, so it's time for a fun story about a prank my PhD labmates played on me two decades ago, and how it unexpectedly led to my most highly cited and awarded research work. 📚🤓

At the time, I was working on our #RatSLAM system - a neurally-inspired robot mapping and navigation system that performed SLAM - Simultaneous Localization And Mapping. 🤖🗺️

SLAM is the process of a robot exploring and mapping a new environment while keeping track of its location. It's a big topic in robotics and computer vision. 🔍🚀

One day, my labmates put tape over the camera on our Pioneer 3-DX mobile robot, blinding it, and waited for it to fail. 🎥🙈 EXCEPT, the RatSLAM system continued to work, and I didn't initially notice any change. 😲

A SLAM system needs motion information and a way to recognize places it has visited before. The tape destroyed the camera's detail perception, but it still registered an "average brightness" of the scene, becoming a single pixel light intensity meter. 💡📷

In our stable office environment, the SLAM system continued to work because the light intensity readings were consistent and varied distinctively across locations. 🏢🔆

Years later, this discovery informed our #SeqSLAM system and our "How Low Can You Go" research, pushing the boundaries on low resolution and robust visual localization in specific use cases like path-like environments. The work won awards, led to millions in funded research & projects, and much follow on work. 🏆💡📈

So, while I’m not encouraging pranks, remember that when something goes wrong, it might lead to a breakthrough. You never know what you might discover! 🌟🤖🔬

📖 SeqSLAM: https://lnkd.in/drCN5B8s

📖 How low can you go? https://lnkd.in/dJhmzWj9

📖 Follow on work: https://lnkd.in/dKwWYRPn

#ResearchStory #PhDLife #Robotics #SLAM #RatSLAM #SeqSLAM #RoboticsResearch #InnovativeDiscoveries #AcademicJourney #PranksInTheLab #RoboticsMapping #NeuralInspired #ComputerVision #ScientificDiscovery #Brisbane #RoboticsLab #BestPaperAward #ResearchBreakthrough #FridayFun #UnexpectedInsights #AI #MachineLearning #ResearchImpact 

𝐆𝐞𝐭 𝐚 𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐤 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐚!!! 👀📚

The concept of success rates (and by extension, rejection rates) is something that comes up a lot in research and academia. 🎓

Grant schemes and publication venues have typical success rates that you can easily find online, but these numbers can obscure how success rates can play out at an individual level. 📉📈 

Likewise, social media is disproportionately filled with tales of success, as well as epic stories of people succeeding after unusually long streaks of rejection. 🌟💔

And other activities, like landing tech jobs 🖥️👔, or collaborating with industry 🏭🤝, don't always have clear success rate statistics associated with them. 📊❓

Today's video is an attempt to address that - I go through the approximate (estimated) success rates I've had in my career in publishing, grant funding, collaboration and job opportunity endeavours. 🎥🔍

The full half hour vid can be watched on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JnD01tA7Hdo

I also recount some particular anecdotes:

💠 a number of schemes where I still (yay) have a zero percent success rate (even now as a well established academic),

💠 a horrendous ICRA2015 where we got 1 out of 7 (14%!!!) of papers accepted,

💠 a paper (SeqSLAM) that was utterly slammed and destroyed by the computer vision community that, unchanged, won best vision paper awards and nominations in the robotics community, and now has over 1000 citations 🚫🏆🤖, and

💠 that rare, rare situation where you submit a proposal that you are 100% happy with. 🎉

I'd never claim that these numbers are "typical" - I've worked hard, but much of this is luck, having good people around you, survivorship bias, and the privilege of having the opportunity in the first place.

Nevertheless, with appropriate context, I think there is value to a) talking about them b) showing the huge variation in numbers even well into your career c) and showing the value of persistence (sometimes) if you're in a situation to keep trying. 💬📊✨

And finally a note about rejection: some people have a tendency to mythologize repeated rejection and eventual success: the challenging reality is, of course, that repeated rejection isn't always abuse - sometimes there's valuable signal in it: experience, and the advice of experienced others, is how you help differentiate between the two situations. 🧭👥.

There are lots of ways you can be successful, contribute, and leave an impact - sometimes rejection is a useful data point in determining what is best for you, rather than a challenge to overcome at all costs. 🌟🔍💡

#Academia #SuccessRates #ResearchLife #AcademicChallenges #Persistence #Publishing #GrantFunding #CareerDevelopment #AcademicJourney #SocialMediaReality