Submitted to get in to a doctoral consortium for a conference- but it wasnt good enough so they making me put in a poster instead. Apparently the standard was too high. I seem to keep getting these comments all the time. I get reviews back, act on them. But can never get very far. Its quite disheartening some times. It doesnt really matter to supervisors much, but its not them thats doing the work.Sorry for the rant. On wards and upwards.

Academia is all about the knock backs e.g. rejected papers, rejected grants, rejected conference abstract, rejected fellowship applications (weep!) et cetera! It's hard sometimes. We have to remember though that at this level, competition is **really** tough and there is no shame in not 'making the grade' every now and again. We can also take comfort in the fact that the peer review process isn't infallible and if someone has failed to recognise the genius in our work, more fool them! As you say, onwards and upwards!

I have shed tears over this so many times - Academics are trained in a way to find fault with everything, its what we do, its why we research. However we carry that over to criticising our colleagues with a little too much gusto sometimes. Don't worry we are most of us in the same boat. Those criticisms are not insults (well not always!)and even the best have to take it on the nose too. You are not alone.

This competition worries me sometimes. Our supervisor has often forwarded us papers that need reviewing and tells us that we must find faults. Sometimes there are glaring errors, data is missing or drawn conclusions seem implausible. Other times you find a paper that is exceptionally good and you are told that you must highlight some flaws. Don't worry about the rejection. I was rejected from giving a paper once at a conference and submitted a poster instead. I was still able to generate some great conversations over the wine and poster evenings and it worked out really well!

Yeah, but it is also about how the feedback is given. I am an educator myself and have learned when giving feedback to stress to good points first and ask the student what could have been done differently. Often students are very self critical already, then to focus on "errors" only is not helpful.

Yes I do the feedback sandwich too.
Nice thing, [criticism], nice thing.