Not Exactly Setting The World On Fire
On shadow CVs and resumes of failure
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” - Michael Jordan
“Soy un perdedor” - Beck
I found out today that a grant I applied for was unsuccessful. If you are a scientist, or have ever read this blog, then this will come as no surprise to you. It’s part of the game. I can’t say I even felt too bad about it, in the grand scheme of things. Probably because I didn’t pour in dozens of hours (or more) into it, and my employment doesn’t depend on it. This was actually quite a fun grant application to write, because it was done in collaboration with colleagues scattered across the University - that’s right, I was living the interdisciplinary dream. And even though the grant was unsuccessful, our dream has not yet died (we’re going back to the drawing board).
Anyway, one of the people I wrote the application with said he would put it on his resume of failures. And then he shared a link to it! I’d actually come across this lovely idea some time ago, back when I was on the executive committee of the EMCR Forum. Someone had called it a Shadow Resume, which sounds far more mysterious and possibly even hexed than a Resume of Failures. One of the other people on the team replied saying they loved it, then quickly replied again clarifying that they didn’t love it that he’d failed per se, but rather loved the irony and ownership of failures. In that spirit, please allow me to introduce…
Future Fire Failures
Education
Primary School
Year 2 Science - C. God bless my honest teacher, who called out my laziness. I hate to sound like one of those people, but I can’t understand a word of my kids’ report cards these days. It’s almost like they’ve been written by the Department of Education version of ChatGPT to carefully ensure there is no trace whatsoever of the teacher’s personality or the impression your kid has left on them.
High School
Year 7 Japanese - 25%.
Year 7 Music - 52%. I still feel sorry for my music teacher. She had the class from hell. There was an old piano at the back of the room which for some reason had the front panel missing, exposing its innards. At random times during the class you would hear an almighty, sonorous clang, as a result of it being hit by a rubber band expertly flung by one of the many naughty kids in the class. Who knows what kind of mischief was avoided elsewhere by those kids having that kind of outlet every week.
Tertiary Education
Bachelor of Business / Bachelor of Arts in International Studies, majors in Marketing and German, submajors in Accounting and Spanish. Have I ever again uttered a word of German or Spanish? Have I ever again marketed or tallied accounts? Double degree, double wasted.
Bachelor of Science majoring in Biochemistry and Neuroscience. Around the time I graduated, I was invited to pay $90 (or something) and join the prestigious Golden Key Society. And I paid! I never did anything with it. I never got anything out of it. What a nice demonstration of how intelligence and stupidity can flourish together in the same noggin. This could have been the high water mark of Future Fire’s ego, before the Great Contraction began shortly after I got married. More to the point, I toiled long hours in a molecular biology laboratory over a year and have never since picked up a pipette in anger, examined a neuronal growth cone, run a Western blot or discovered the one true theory of consciousness. Honours degree, honourably wasted.
PhD in Climate Science. One: I have a PhD in climate science and I can’t tell a gravity wave from a gravitational wave. Two: I left my PhD supervisor off one of my PhD publications! And I only did three! I still don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I owe him big time. Damn.
Job Applications
I don’t have the guts to list them all here. Let’s just say there’s fünf in the last año.
One of them was for a Level C/D teaching and research position at ANU’s Fenner School. That’s the only one I interviewed for. Seems like a really cool place, the interview went well, enjoyed touring the place, meeting people, gave a presentation that went ok. And I was beaten out for the job by a rock star climate scientist who was then appointed at Level E. That’s my kind of failure.
Grants
Not gonna list them all, not because I lack the guts but because there’s too many. Here’s the highlights:
DECRA, 2021. Nope. Crappy reviews.
DECRA, 2022. Nope. Slightly less crappy reviews.
NSW Premiers Prize, 2022. Nope.
NHRA, various projects over a particularly barren period from 2022-23. Nope x 5.
Marles Medal, 2022. Nominated my boss. Nope.
Marles Medal, 2023. Nominated my boss again. Runner up.
Shaping Australia award, 2023. Nope.
Churchill Fellowship, 2023. Made it to final interview.
Theo Murphy Initiative, 2023. Nope.
Discovery 2024. Nope - didn’t get past EOI stage.
Wellcome Trust funding, 2024. This was a big $5m application stemming from an entirely new international collaboration. Maybe we’ll have another crack next year.
And obviously there’s the one I mentioned at the top of this post. Actually, that was a beautiful one page scheme, so I couldn’t resist putting nine in. I haven’t heard back about the other eight yet. Sound excessive? You haven’t been paying attention.
Publications
If I’d submitted anything lately, I’d have a chance to be rejected. Last good one was the mega-paper from a couple of years ago, rejected by Nature Climate Change. Its story is spelled out in glorious detail here. Another one from around the same time was rejected by Science of the Total Environment.
I still harbor delusions of submitting several papers before the end of the year. There’s still time for more failure!!
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I went to a great interdisciplinary networking event last week. They asked us to prepare slides using a template, to talk about what we do and the kind of collaborations we long for. Here are mine.
