Paper Rejections
Lessons Learned
- Having the same paper rejected multiple times was deeply discouraging and emotionally draining. Persistence alone rarely fixes fundamental issues.
- I learned that an impactful research question, well-executed work, and a paper written with clarity, structure, and care matter far more than resubmitting again and again—you have to do everything you can in the initial submission.
- I also learned how much guidance and advocacy from senior authors can significantly change a paper's fate, and that is the kind of support I strive to provide as a professor.
In the Shadow of Judgment: Mapping Out the Landscape of Human-AI Decision-Making Through a Systematic Review
Rejected at CHI after R&R, and decided not to resubmit in the near future.
Through a Live Elections Dashboard, Darkly: Managing Expectations and Trust in Progressive Vote Counting During the 2024 U.S. Election
Rejected at VIS → accepted at CHI after revision.
Whose Boat Does it Float? Improving Personalization in Preference Tuning via Inferred User Personas
Got lower scores in the first submission to ACL.
Self-Supervised Continuous Colormap Recovery from a Scalar Field Visualization without a Legend
Rejected at PacificVis → accepted at VIS next year after revision.
A Comparative Study on Visualizations of Scheduled Event Sequences: Gantt, Extended Gantt, and Stringline Charts
Rejected at VIS → accepted at TVCG after revision.
How Can Deep Neural Networks Aid Visualization Perception Research?
Rejected at CHI → VIS → accepted at CHI after resubmission.
Visual Cue Effects on a Classification Accuracy Estimation Task in Immersive Scatterplots
Rejected at VIS → TVCG → accepted at TVCG after resubmission.
A Virtual Reality Memory Palace Variant Aids Knowledge Retrieval from Scholarly Articles
Rejected at VIS → TVCG → accepted at TVCG after resubmission.
How Do Visual Explanations Foster End Users' Appropriate Trust in Machine Learning?
Rejected at CHI → VIS → accepted at IUI with a Honorable Mention Award.
Correlation Judgment and Visualization Features: A Comparative Study
Rejected at CHI → accepted at TVCG after a major revision.
Job/Student Applications
Assistant Professor Position (2024)
applied for 40+ positions, got 8 phone interviews, 3 on-site interviews, and 2 offers.
Internships (2016-2021)
applied 10+ internships every year during 2018-2020, and got 1 offer (then COVID-19 hit in 2020).
PhD Position
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2016:
applied for ~10 positions, got 3 offers; rejection includes one from UMD CS ◡̈
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2013:
applied for 30+ MS/PHD positions, got ~5 offers; rejection includes one from UMD CS ◡̈