Your Grant Proposal Just Missed the Funding Cutoff? Hoooray!!!

Good career success is on its way! See this article or you can just have a look at this picture published in The Economist describing the article:

 


"The authors discovered this by collecting data on grant applications submitted between 1990 and 2005 to America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) by junior-level scientists. In particular, they focused on two groups of applicants: those who received relatively high scores on their submissions but just missed getting a grant, and those who scored similarly well but just succeeded in being awarded one.

The three researchers found that, rather than automatically holding the failures back, as the Matthew effect might be thought to predict, an early-career setback of this sort was sometimes associated with greater academic success in the long run. While those who missed out on funding were more likely to drop out from the NIH system, the scientists who persevered and continued to apply for grants after their initial failure outperformed their counterparts who had succeeded first time, as measured by the number of citations of their research that they received over the subsequent ten years."

So carry on! Don't give up! Keep working!