PostdocPartum #11: Curriculum Mortis

{1645 words, 1 table, 7 minutes}

Curriculum vitae (CV): the course of (one's) life. "Life" (vita) is conjugated in the genitive/possessive singular case, hence the "one's" in parentheses.

Curriculum mortis (CM): the course of (one's) death. "Death" (mors) conjugated in the same Latin genitive/possessive singular case. According to the ever-excellent Wiktionary, mors can mean death, corpse, or annihilation [Wiktionary, 2017], which is perfectly apt for describing how an (aspiring) academic feels when facing failure and rejection.

The idea of a curriculum mortis is not my own, although I did do a little Latin homework to figure out why it should be mortis and not mortem (because rigor mortis vs. post mortem, right?). A "CV of failures" most recently drew attention when The Washington Post [Swanson, 2016] and The Guardian [Guardian staff, 2016] reported on Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer's tweeting about his self-publication thereof in April 2016. He himself ultimately drew inspiration for the act [Jaschik, 2016] from a Nature article by Melanie Stefan from 2010 [Nature 468, 467 (2010). DOI:10.1038/nj7322-467a].

The Inside Higher Ed article does gather an opposing viewpoint. Namely, Sonia Sodha counters that publishing a curriculum mortis is a privilege of the truly successful and suggests a "CV of good fortune" (n.b. curriculum fortunae) as the alternative but only half-seriously [Sodha, 2016]. Rather, she thinks that a CV of failures is little use against the larger socioeconomic forces that decide the job prospects of the younger generation, which is a whole other issue for another time. Overall, despite recognizing my own luck in obtaining a fellowship [PostdocPartum, 2016], because I think it's a much harder to distinguish between success and good fortune (and I may already be emotionally attached to coining curriculum mortis, ha). Expressions of good fortune are commonplace, standard even, remarks of academics who have any trace of humility; only review committees and panels know the difference between skill and luck. Failure and rejection are crystal clear and much more invisible.

The whole reason I'm writing about curriculum mortis is that I have a number of entries to add. The Norsk Forskningrådet (NFR, lit. Research Council of Norway) recently finished a grant proposal cycle and our relatively large wave of applications led to a record-setting influx of funds for IFE's Energy and Environmental Technology Sector. I also heard back from a proposal call from the EIG-CONCERT (absurdly long initialism/acronym) Japan program which funds joint collaborations between European and Japanese research groups. In total, I personally co-wrote one large IPN (business innovation project), wrote 90% of the EIG application, and advised and edited one large KPN (business competence-building project) and one researcher project. Of those four efforts that I was involved with, only the KPN project was successful. The two proposals I wrote or co-wrote both failed. In tabular form:

Table 1. Grant writing results, in descending order of time committed. All hours except the IPN are mental estimates.

Project	Involvement	Time	Result
IPN	Co-wrote	70 hours	Failed
EIG	Wrote	50 hours	Failed
KPN	Edited	30 hours	Funded
Researcher project	Edited	10 hours	Failed

I wish I could remember what my honest expectations were at the time. For any proposal, the curriculum vitaes (vitarum? Argh, Latin!) influence the chance of success and I know my curriculum vitae is not contributing to any proposal, because I definitely don't have enough papers on my postdoc's research topic of batteries since I switched from my thesis topic of fuel cells. For the proposals I edited, they came to me far past the stage when the concepts are malleable and my expertise with English writing clarified the language while preserving their original intention, like an artist polishing someone else's sculpture. For those proposals, I try to be optimistic out of politeness and respect for someone else's ideas, which often aren't in my field of experience. Certainly, I feel that their chances were improved because I improved a proposal's readability.

Nevertheless, my default expectation for any proposal is failure, strictly and objectively because of the 10 to 15% success rates of the applications is more likely to be accurate than my own fantasies. But writing has a way of making elastic my formerly rigid convictions. When I see the ideas start to take shape into a detailed plan, with all the traps and hazards being accounted for, with all the parts of a complex project mentally compartmentalized into comprehensible units, that skepticism fades and I start to think this whole darn thing might actually fly. It might actually work, if I work on it.

For the IPN, I was pulled into the ideation process one month before the proposal deadline. When the partners presented me with their draft which was clearly composited from copying and pasting from various other proposals, I knew an enormous amount of effort on my part would be needed but was too pressured by outside forces to pull out. I was also skeptical of their idea and doubted whether our silicon could achieve their targets. And my sense of hope got the better of my judgment. With reluctance, I poured more and more into the proposal to make it work. A lot of that was due to me trusting (read: assuming) that the partners in the project were leading on the project since they were the principal applicants. They weren't at all on schedule and their lead writer faced a sudden medical emergency. The nigh-crisis culminated in a one-day boomerang flight for my colleague and I one week before the deadline for a 10-hour working meeting that we should have had at the start.

That meeting was me, hyped on a single cup of strong coffee, ideating on a whiteboard, outlining the project, reshaping the text, and sketching the figures while taking in feedback from their scientists, management, and CEO. Seventy hours of dedication to that proposal over a few weeks doesn't seem like a lot but having that on top of my normal postdoc work (which dragged to a near halt) and mentoring my Master's student, sucked a huge amount of creative and emotional energy from me. I took another research trip to Germany right afterward and then took a much-needed vacation to the U.S. almost immediately after that, losing nearly two months of continuity in my experiments due to KPN and IPN proposal writing deadlines being one month apart. I would come to realize later, this series of events would completely wreck my productivity for the rest of 2017.

For the EIG project, I started out struggling to put something together but several creative, brainstorming sessions with my colleague and mining the proposal for details on the budget built my confidence. It also helped that I was able to get two well established Japanese and German research groups to be on-board by using my existing network. With time to develop the central ideas and figures until I was satisfied with them, I started to feel more confident in the proposal. By the time I submitted, in the sweltering lobby of a KAIST dorm after a conference in South Korea, I felt like I couldn't polish it more. And the payoffs were dreamy: annual trips to Japan and Germany, collaborating with one of my best friends, leveraging elite research groups to pull up my own curriculum vitae, elevating my institute's status, and obtain a grant from the European Union, which is a highly coveted honor in its own right. "I could actually be validated as a bonafide scientist. This would be the start I needed to really take off, the start of something really great."

Those confidences were misplaced, which I slowly grew to accept as time dragged on and the wait for decisions grew long (EIG's decision came a month later than originally scheduled). Others were more confident than I in both the IPN and the EIG proposals. They kept nagging on my skepticism, and their optimism were infectious sparks that were troublesome to snuff out. Who doesn't allow themselves to dream the luxurious dream once in a while? I even allowed myself to dread the unrealistic possibility of receiving both projects, considering how I might clone myself to do all of the work required. I prepared to be disappointed.

And I was right. Both the IPN and EIG projects failed, most likely rightly so. The IPN was too ambitious, among other feedback I haven't received yet, and my detective-like focus on the using the budget details to inform the structure and aims of the EIG project was adolescent and naïve according to the reviewer's three sentences' worth of comments. I was prepared for these rejections, skeptical of any hint of success just a year into my postdoc, but it still stung. I acknowledged it, forwarded the notice to the requisite parties, and moved on. But it still hangs around, interjecting sharp reminders of failure at mundane moments like washing my hands or peeling an orange. Perhaps the purpose of writing a curriculum mortis is to help it take it out of my mind and allow me to shelve it away.

It's a humbling point in my postdoc. It might be what I needed. A dose of reality, a sanity check, an anchor to fall through the soft, fluffy cloud of one too many dreamy fantasies I allowed myself to float upon. I got ahead of myself. I switched topics and don't want to acknowledge the hard truth of seeing the hole I'm in, how far behind I am in knowing the battery literature, lithium-ion chemistry, and how to do good science. I think I'm such a better writer than anyone else, that I think it can overcome what little science I have to actually write about. I think this episode shows how I've failed with that attitude. Sic curriculum mortis.

Micro-Scandinavium post scriptum: Google searching for curriculum mortis reveals that it is the name of BOTH a former Swedish melodic death metal band [Metal-Archives.com, 2016] AND an active Peruvian thrash metal band [Metal-Archives.com, 2016]. Because, of course it is.

Post-post scriptum: It was also the name of an exhibition of sculptural Islamic grave markers [Cotter, 2013] by Iranian artist Barbad Golshiri.