A Reflection on Rejection

S. Michael Gaddis
5 min readDec 30, 2021
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Don’t be like me. Well, don’t be like pre-pandemic me, that is.

The picture above epitomizes pre-pandemic me. I used to get mad and trash my papers when they got rejected after a few tries (or even once, in a few cases). That’s right, I would take the time to write an entire academic article — 6,000 to 10,000 words, often with original data collection and half a dozen or more tables and figures — and then leave the…

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S. Michael Gaddis

UCLA professor. Peeking into the interesting parts of the social world through data.