Failures
This page lists some of the things my CV leaves out.
In academia we tend to celebrate our successes and hide our failures. As a result, academic CVs are heavily filtered documents: they list what worked but quietly leave out the unsuccessful applications, the proposals that never got funded, and the rejected papers. That filtering is not harmless. It makes careers look like smooth, planned-out sequences of successes, which builds pressure on more junior researchers and hides something that is an integral part of research: failure.
I am publishing this to show some of the rejections, roadblocks, and criticism I have had to deal with in my career. It is explicitly not comprehensive: things are left out to protect colleagues and, sometimes, myself. It is also not meant to say that everything works out in the end if you only try long enough — some of the things I failed at I eventually managed to bring to a good conclusion; others I did not.
The idea goes back to Melanie Stefan’s A CV of failures (Nature, 2010).
Academic positions and education
2020: did not get a Senior Scientist position at BOKU in Vienna
2020: did not get a Climate Data Specialist position at C2SM in Zurich
2014: only made the waiting list for the PhD position in Graz that I ended up graduating from
since 2012: never finished my second bachelor’s degree in geology
Rejected proposals
2026: Horizon Europe consortium proposal, not funded
2023, 2024, and 2025: the first proposal I ever wrote was reviewed well by the Austrian FWF but not funded in 2023. I resubmitted it to the German DFG in 2024 and again in 2025, it was reviewed well both times, and it was still not funded. (I am currently mustering the motivation to pick it up once more.)
Beide Gutachten sind grundsätzlich positiv und halten das Vorhaben insgesamt für förderwürdig, Gutachten #2 allerdings nicht mit höchster Priorität. [...] In der vergleichenden Diskussion kann der Antrag deshalb nicht die für eine Bewilligung notwendige hohe Priorität erreichen, so dass eine Ablehnungsempfehlung ausgesprochen wird.
Rejected papers
2025-2026: rejected after review by Science Advances — after making it past the editor (that one stung, took me a while to get back to it). Then rejected by the editor at Nature Climate Change. Now published in Communications Earth & Environment.
2024: my first attempt at a high-impact journal, rejected by the editors of Nature and Nature Climate Change. Now published in Nature Communications.
2015: my first PhD paper (that one really hurt), rejected after review by Geophysical Research Letters. Now published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
Countless critical reviews (as well as many positive and appreciative ones) that ended up improving my work. Side note on how I deal with them: read, be mad about the unjustified criticism, wait a day or two, read again and realize that the criticism is justified, address it as best I can, resubmit.
Other failures
2025: participated in a panel discussion on failure organized by Diverse Climates Hamburg
At least one paper on blocking and one on model interdependence that I never finished
Countless smaller ideas that did not lead to anything. This is a good place to advertise the recently introduced EGU session that gives such ideas a home: Blunders, Unexpected Glitches, and Surprises (BUGS), as well as the new article type that grew out of it: LESSONS.