This is an idea I first encountered on Lindsey Kuper's blog. She said it best, so I'll quote her: "People with tons of publications aren’t getting rejected any less often than the rest of us are; they’re making more attempts."

There are three reasons this is important to me: first, negative results need to be destigmatized, and I think a prerequisite for that is doing the same for rejections; second, I want to show researchers who are even more junior than I that rejections are part of the process; and third, I am legitimately proud of rejections arising from highly experimental work or from reaching out to new communities.

Rejected Fellowships and Grants

1. 2013. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG)

Rejected Publications

1. Osborn, J.C., and Mateas, M. (2017). Modeling Action Games as Hierarchical Hybrid Automata (submitted draft available on request). Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages Workshop 2017

   This one was rejected for lacking concrete analysis results or concrete semantics. Also, it was a game-oriented paper that had some unexamined assumptions not shared by the PADL community. A fair rejection and the paper will certainly improve!

2. Martens, C., Summerville, A., Mateas, M., Osborn, J.C., Harmon, S., Wardrip-Fruin, N., and Jhala, A. (2016). Proceduralist Readings, Procedurally. AIIDE 2016 (later accepted to EXAG 2016)