About the CV of Failures

Every line on my regular CV hides a few attempts that did not make it. A CV of Failures writes those attempts down. This page explains where the idea comes from and why I keep one; the record itself is on the CV of Failures page.

What is a CV of Failures

The idea comes from Jia-Bin Huang, who keeps his own “CV of Failures” and wrote about it in his “awesome-tips” repository. In 2020 he summed it up in one line:

A year later, in a thread on how to cope with paper rejection, he came back to it:

One of the lessons in that thread is the same advice: maintain a CV of failures – you failed because you tried, and writing the failures down helps normalize these setbacks.

Why I Keep One

I began to receive paper rejections early in graduate school. As I submitted more papers to AI and data mining conferences, where competition keeps growing, my rejections also grew. Some rejections had clear reasons. Others were hard to explain.

In graduate school, research is rarely done alone. Many researchers share one lab, and sometimes a colleague next to me announced an acceptance on the same day I received a rejection. In those moments I felt discouraged, and sometimes jealous. I wanted to be simply happy for my colleagues, and it bothered me that I could not. While I was looking for a way to deal with these feelings, I found Huang's CV of Failures and decided to keep my own. Writing each rejection down helped. The stress and the negative feelings began to fade, and I have kept the record since then.

I record small failures as well, because I believe they matter too. Keeping this record changed how I look at myself. I see my work more honestly, and a failure now points me to the next step. For papers, a rejection no longer holds me back for long. It is a signal to improve the paper and move on.

Why I Share It

I share this record for people who go through the same experience. In a lab, there are times when we feel jealous of our colleagues or compare ourselves with them. Recording my failures helped me ease those feelings and keep going on my own path. When junior students look at my publication list, they see only the accepted papers. I want them to know that many failures are behind it.

I also share the LaTeX template, because I spent a lot of time searching for a good template when I started this record. The reviews are kept for a simple reason: I want to see which reviews each paper received and how the paper improved after each round.

As Huang noted, sharing our failures can be a “(tiny) contribution to academia”. If you would like to share your own experiences or reflections, feel free to reach out.

Further Reading

• Dealing with academic rejection (Eric Gilbert)

• Research statistics about Xovee's research

← Back to the CV of Failures. The PDF and its LaTeX template are free to reuse.