Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 23, No. 2 (2026)
Rejected: Co-authoring With Undergraduate Students
Erin B. Jensen
Midwestern State University
erinjensen@bac.edu
Abstract
During my time as a composition faculty member at a small liberal arts college, I wanted to provide opportunities for students to pursue publication opportunities. In all of the composition courses I taught, I included discussions and readings focused on the benefits of undergraduate research and publication. I also decided to pursue co-authoring with students about their experiences in learning about and pursuing such publication opportunities. This article focuses on the experience of co-authoring with fifteen undergraduate students and the highs and lows of initial acceptance, lengthy edits, rejections, and resubmissions before finally being accepted for publication.
Introduction
As a rhetoric and composition faculty member at small colleges with little emphasis on publishing, I have created opportunities for undergraduate students to co-author and then publish with me. I want to give students opportunities to write about their experiences, be mentored by me through the revision process, and ultimately see that what they write is published in an academic journal. I have been involved in co-authoring with undergraduate students for two different articles and both articles required a lot of revisions and rejections before being accepted for publication. I found students often struggled with the motivation necessary to keep editing and revising after being rejected or from being overwhelmed when faced with extensive feedback. I found that my role was co-author but also motivational speaker and emotional success coach as I helped students to find the motivation and support to keep going until our efforts were accepted and our articles were published.
As an early career tenure track professor and someone that wanted to mentor undergraduate students to be inspired in research opportunities, I found these experiences incredibly labor-intensive while also being worthwhile after the publication was finally accomplished. If I had the ability to give myself advice before either of these long-term projects occurred, I would have recommended either waiting until I was tenured or putting more of my focus on mentoring students with their smaller projects instead (ie mentor students to present at undergraduate conferences or mentor students to submit their own essays to undergraduate research journals).
I want to focus on the experience with my most recent co-authored article with fifteen undergraduate co-authors. From the time the article was originally submitted until it was published, it took five years as it was rejected from four different publications, and went through over ten extensive revisions and numerous smaller revisions. The undergraduate co-authors depended on me to help guide them through the excitement of initial writing, the revisions, the rejections, the waning motivation to keep re-submitting or finding a new publication option, and all the other emotions that happen in the publishing process.
Literature Review
The research on mentoring undergraduate students through co-authoring with professors has focused on the benefits to both undergraduate students and the professors as well as some of the struggles that occur in these situations. Much of the research on co-authoring with undergraduate students does not focus on what happens when the article is rejected or detail the longer-term efforts in getting a rejected article to publication.
Research on encouraging undergraduate research cites many benefits for both the students and mentors involved. Taylor and Jensen found “involvement in undergraduate research and undergraduate research programs increases students’ academic achievement and retention rates” (2). Other researchers found that students involved in undergraduate research develop better critical thinking and writing skills (Brown et al.; Ervin; Morales et al.) and develop more academic skills related to study skills, time management, connecting with professors, and creating support networks (Burks and Chumchal; Jensen et al.; Plakhotnik; Taylor and Jensen).
The benefits to professors are also documented in the research (Ervin; Giuliano; Jensen et al.; Morales et al.). As Traci Giuliano, a psychology professor, writes “Publishing with students is truly my favorite part of being a professor—the thrill I get upon seeing a student’s name in print (especially in the lead position) is often greater than the thrill I get from seeing my own name.” I would agree with her that I enjoy seeing my students being involved in research and being published.
Mentoring undergraduate students through the publishing process has many benefits to everyone involved. However, there are challenges to the publishing process that can be more unique to co- authoring with students. One such challenge is the time requirement and the scheduling of time for both the professor and the students (Burks and Chumcal; Jensen et al.; Mina et al). Burks and Chumchal, in their article encouraging co-authorship between faculty and undergraduate students, acknowledge the considerable amount of effort for such an undertaking could be both “time intensive” and “daunting.” Mina et al. makes the argument that, “Without exceptional incentives and compensation for faculty members, mentoring undergraduate research becomes an exhausting, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and unrewarding experience.” In my own experience, I found that I had more time to write in the summer months or over the winter break, but my students would often not be available during this time as they would be taking a break or spending time with family (Jensen et al.). The time I had planned to use to collaborate and co-author did not end up being a good time for my students. Most of the collaboration and co-authoring time ended up happening during the semester when students were more focused on academic experiences.
Another challenge is specific to early career or untenured faculty. Burks and Chumchal specifically mention early career professors as they argue, “Consequently, faculty members (particularly untenured ones) should consider a number of factors before deciding whether publishing with undergraduates represents the best career move. Publishing papers with undergraduates takes more time than if the faculty member wrote the paper alone (our conservative estimate would be 4 times as much time).” As an early career professional that has co-authored two very time-intensive publications, I echo their thoughts of the immense time commitment this requires. My first attempt at co-authoring included my meeting individually with each of the eight undergraduate co-authors and then meeting with each several times each semester. Just having all these individual meetings took a huge amount of time, not to mention all the writing and revising time that was necessary to have the article published (Jensen et al.). The amount of time it took to publish with co-authors could be an obstacle to early career professionals.
Article rejection is part of the publishing process but less research has focused on how to handle rejection when co-authoring with undergraduate students. Lettner-Rust details the feelings of being “disappointed, despondent, even despairing” (233) when receiving a rejection for a project or article. Her advice is to turn to mentors and communities of supportive people to help yourself handle the rejection and figure out a plan on moving forward. Owens discusses how to deal with the emotional part of working hard on an article and then being rejected for her efforts. As she writes, “rejection is more common than acceptance…I’ve found it slightly less ego-crushing to know how common this is” (305). After re-assuring herself that most people experience rejection, she reminds herself that “The publication merry-go-round is there, going around and around, waiting for you to jump back on” (305). I found that I had to have lots of conversations with my students about rejection and how being rejected did not mean that their writing wasn’t good enough or that they weren’t good enough. I tried to emphasize that rejection just meant that we needed to revise and improve the article and that we would eventually find a journal that would publish our article. I did find that some students really struggled with having our collaborative article get rejected so many times and I found that many students stopped replying to my emails letting them know that we needed to revise the article again. Helping students better understand rejection is a skill that I need to work on as I want to co-author with students again.
Case Study: Co-Authoring with 15 Undergrads
I would like to highlight my experience of being an early career pre-tenure professor that co-authored with fifteen undergraduate students on an article that took over five years before finally getting published. I am grateful that after all our efforts that the article was finally published, but I would advise other early career professors to consider the time commitment before engaging in such a project. I wish that I had approached the project with a better understanding of the massive time commitment that I was committing to. The positives of having the article published and that allowed students an opportunity to be published, do outweigh the negatives. However, I think I may need at least a couple of years before I attempt another co-authored article with undergraduate students.
The article that took five years to get published started with my reading an email about a journal that wanted articles focused on co-authoring with undergraduate students majoring in the humanities. As I was an Assistant Professor of English, I thought this seemed like it might be a good fit for my own goals surrounding encouraging undergraduate students to co-author with me. I thought it would be interesting to have students write about their experience of co-authoring while actually writing the co-authored article, but knew that this might not be what the editors were looking for, so I emailed the editors to check and both replied that this sounded like an interesting way to structure an article on co-authorship. With this encouragement, I emailed several students to see if they would be interested in co-authoring with me and three responded back. I wrote the initial proposal as there was a very short deadline to meet, but included their names as co-authors. We were all thrilled when the proposal was accepted and we were given a few months to write the article.
Previous to engaging in this project, I had co-authored another article with eight freshman student-athletes and so had some experience in co-authoring. That experience had helped me understand that co-writing works out better if everyone can meet and discuss the topic and what we wanted to write about. I followed that same pattern and asked for everyone’s schedules and worked out a time that all four of us could meet and discuss the project and our goals. Before that meeting, I sent out the original CFP and asked students to re-read what the editors were looking for. We met and discussed our goals and tentative timeline for the writing of the article. We discussed how we wanted to organize the article and then each of us (faculty member and three undergrads) picked a section of the article to write.
Students planned to write first-person narratives of their experience and I had agreed to write the theory section and to help with connecting the first-person narratives together. The students were so excited and all turned in their portions before the agreed upon deadline. They also mentioned this article to their friends and I had several more students email to request to participate. I thought that having more students might be helpful and I wanted to give students an opportunity to co-author, but wanted the permission of the original three co-authors. They agreed that more students would help to add more student perspectives and so I invited an additional five students to participate. They also submitted their portions to the shared Google doc and I worked on melding the various portions into a more cohesive article. By the time we met to revise, there were eight undergraduate co-authors helping with the article.
The first editing session was a chaotic experience as some of the students just wanted to grammar edit, others wanted to have a discussion about every sentence, and others read over the draft and declared it “perfect” and ready to submit. Looking back on the experience, I have to smile at how naïve we all were in thinking that what we had created was what the editors wanted. I had some concerns about “flow” as the draft did sound like nine different people had written it and I tried to add in revision suggestions to help with the different sections connecting better to each other. But I didn’t want to lose the voice of my students and so I mainly tried to help with the flow of the paragraphs and sections and did not do much editing of the personal reflections from students.
We met several times to revise and some of us kept revising on our own within the Google doc. Three more students had requested to join the project and with the approval from the co-authors, I added them to the project. That brought our numbers up to one professor and eleven undergraduate students. After extensive revising from all co-authors, we thought the article was ready to submit. I thought we would receive extensive feedback with the comment that it sounded like multiple people had written it and so prepped everyone with the knowledge that we could get rejected from the journal or that we would need to make extensive changes. The co-authors thought the article was great and thought we would mainly get some comments, while I thought that while the topic was good, there were some issues with how we had written the article. With these thoughts, I went ahead and submitted the article to the editors.
About three months later, we received extensive feedback with both a 3-page letter and individual comments on the document. They provided feedback that did request that we make substantial changes, but even these extensive changes seemed manageable as most of the comments focused on improving the theory section and changing how personal narratives were included. One of their chief comments was our use of individual names for various sections of the article. Sometimes I would be writing about my part of the process and other times, individual students would write about their part of the process. One of the comments from the editors was, “We were delighted to receive a draft with 13 undergraduates listed as coauthors. But we’re puzzled that everyone is referred to in the 3rd person throughout the essay. In many ways, your work in this draft could lend itself to a powerful interrogation of what ‘counts’ as coauthorship for an undergraduate. What work must an undergraduate do to receive authorial credit or a byline?”
This comment helped all of us realize that we needed to form a more cohesive “we” in our writing and not try to have so many individually authored sections. Other helpful feedback included these statements:
Readers will want to hear about how the 14 of you accomplished this work, given 14 authors is a lot, but especially with 13 of them as undergrads!
Mentoring students to publish or present their own work is a lot of work for faculty. But actually coauthoring with undergrads is EVEN more work for faculty.
The comments and requests for change were mainly positive and we were all optimistic that we could make these changes and submit an article that they would be interested in publishing. The editors also wanted us to delete anything that wasn’t tied directly to co-authoring. The students were so excited at this stage of the process and would come to my office hours to talk about how exciting it was to write something, email it to the editors, receive feedback and then submit it again. Most of the students felt confident that the editors would like the revised version and accept it for publication. I was cautiously optimistic as well as I thought we had revised and addressed all the changes the editors had requested we make. These changes resulted in the article looking very different from the article that we had submitted the first time. With some optimism, I emailed our revised chapter.
The second round of feedback only took a few days and the tone of the feedback had changed to being much more negative. The editors didn’t like our changes and now thought the use of a collective “we” sounded too generic, our literature review was weak, and I specifically got the comment: “do you understand the concept of co-authoring because it does not seem that you do?” I will admit to feeling defensive and internally thinking about how a professor and fifteen undergraduate students all writing an article together about the experience of coauthoring, could be accused of not understanding the concept of coauthoring, but I kept my frustrations to myself. I did not think letting students know how much the negative feedback bothered me was going to be helpful. I tried to put a positive spin on the feedback and reminded students that part of the writing process is that the writing has to go through main revisions before it is ready to be published.
We were given a week to make these extensive edits and it was during midterm week when all the undergraduate students were busy studying and taking tests. This meant that I ended up making most of the revisions. I had hoped that the revisions would be acceptable and that we had finally written the way the editors wanted us to be writing. I was disappointed to receive an email from the editors that our article still did not meet their standards and so they were rejecting the article. Similar to the previous comments, the main issue the editors had was that we did not “fully understand what coauthoring means.” I sent back a polite email letting the editors know that we appreciate their efforts and feedback and then sent another email to my co-authors, letting them know that I also appreciated their efforts and that I would find another journal to submit this article to.
Students were understandably disappointed as the article represented a lot of time and effort of writing about our experiences with coauthoring. I re-assured everyone that we could find a different option for publication.
Second Journal Submission
I spent time going through various CFP’s and eventually found another journal that I thought would be a good fit for our article. I decided to go ahead and submit a similar proposal to this journal that I had used for the previous one. The editors let me know that they thought our proposal sounded interesting and they would like to see an article. I ended up submitting the article that had been rejected from the previous journal. While I realize that was a risk, I thought that version was the best version of the article that we had created and the new journal had similar requirements to the previous journal.
Within a month of submitting the article, we received a “revise and resubmit” and several pages of comments that were critical of our “voice.” Some of those comments included such statements as the article “sounded like undergraduate students had written it” and that the tone of the chapter was “inappropriate and juvenile.” I emailed the editors and thanked them for the comments and then emailed students that we needed to revise the article again. By this point, more than a year had passed and fewer and fewer of my co-authors were responding to my emails. The three original students had graduated and moved on to other things in their lives.
The students that were still participating helped me in revising the article, with the comments helping to lead those revisions. Students still had hope but this last round of comments seemed particularly mean and students were complaining about why their thoughts and experiences were not being valued by the editors. I tried to calm everyone down and remind them of how much I appreciated their help in the writing and revising of the chapter. We continued to revise and submitted a heavily edited version that I thought had lost the unique voices of the individual students as we revised the article to use a united “we.” We received another round of revision requests including more comments about the “juvenile writing styles” of the authors and the need to eliminate any “first person stories” as these “did not add to the knowledge that everyone already knows.” Our chapter went through four more intense revisions and feedback loops where we made every requested change and yet the feedback kept coming. The final version of the article did not resemble the original and as I read each version, I kept thinking how sad I was that this journal did not really want to hear the actual experiences of students, but instead wanted something else.
After seven intense revisions cycles and where I thought we had finally achieved an article that they would accept, I received the heartbreaking rejection letter from the editors that we had not achieved the level of academic prose that they required for us to be published in their journal. They also suggested that this article was not written in a way that any journal would be interested in.
The results of this rejection were devastating to students. I invited everyone to my office as I wanted to deliver the news in person and when I let them know that all their efforts at revising and changing their stories to meet the desires of faceless editors was in vain. Several students started to cry after I told them the news and several others rushed to comfort the crying students. This was a devastating blow to all of us after three intense years of revision and re-writing.
I always tell students in my classes that when you submit something for publication, the worst thing that could happen would be to be rejected, but if you don’t submit, you will still be rejected. However, watching half my co-authors sitting on the floor sobbing while the other co-authors tried to hug them and comfort them, just about broke my heart and made me realize that rejection can feel even worse than inaction.
Seeing students crying and feeling so dejected just increased my resolve to get this article published. I doubled my efforts to find a journal that I thought would be a good fit for including undergraduate student voices.
Third Journal Submission
I found another journal that I thought would be a good fit for our article. I used an earlier version of the article that still contained more of my students’ voices and individual experiences as I thought that some of the versions had been edited too much.
The article made it through the first round and was sent to reviewers. We received extensive and in-depth feedback on what we needed to change to be able to be accepted by the journal. At this point, several more of the fifteen co-authors had graduated and several more stopped responding to my emails or texts. Only two students helped me make these edits and changes to the article. I re-submitted and hoped for the best. Unfortunately, the article was rejected for similar reasoning as the first journal editors had rejected us, “the writing feels juvenile” and “this article isn’t written at the level we have come to expect from our journal.”
I didn’t even tell students the article had been rejected. I didn’t want to see the dejection and sadness in their faces again. I finally decided that I would try one more time as I very much felt the expectations of the fifteen co-authors weighing on me.
Fourth Journal Submission
I felt the weight of fifteen co-authors’ expectations that I would help them get published and that all the work that they had put into this project would result in a publication. I very much wanted students to be published and that goal is what kept me searching for another opportunity for our article.
I eventually found a journal that I thought might be a good fit. I wanted to make sure to get the editors approval before submitting the article and so emailed the editor and asked if our topic sounded like a good fit. A couple of days later, he responded and replied that he would be interested in seeing the article. I made the executive decision to use the same version I had used for the third journal, as I thought that if this article was finally going to be published, I wanted my students’ voices to be centered.
Without consulting any of my co-authors, I submitted the article to the editors. I made the executive decision to only contact students to tell them if the article was accepted. Within a month, I received an email that the article was a “revise and re-submit.” The readers suggested a few changes, but also expressed that they appreciated the inclusion of fifteen undergraduates writing about their experiences in the publishing process. This time, the journal appreciated the use of individual voices writing about their experiences.
I made the suggested changes and submitted the article. The reviewers and editors liked the changes and agreed to publish the article. Finally! It only took five years, four journals, and lots of revisions to finally have our article published. I let students know and all students eventually emailed me to let me know how excited they were to be part of this project that resulted in a publication.
I wanted to take a moment to honor my undergraduate co-authors and all of their experiences in this long process. Thanks to the efforts of Morgan Lanzo, Rebecca Spurgeon, Lauren Denhard, Danashia Tucker, Andrea Antezana, Robin Wiley, Reagan Cullen, Joy Dygowski, Anna Li, Ronald Klein, Emily Nagle, Seth Farris, Katherine Scifers, Jose Hernandez, and Lauren Harper. Also thanks to the journal, NETSOL: New Trends in Social & Liberal Sciences, for accepting our article for publication and giving us an opportunity to share our experiences with co-authoring.
Conclusion
As an early career pre-tenure professor having now successfully co-authored with fifteen undergraduate students, I am glad that the project was ultimately worth the stress and time commitment. Students were also glad to finally be able to read the article and see their experiences be published. I would encourage faculty to pursue co-authoring opportunities, but would encourage people to be aware of some of the struggles of the process.
As I reflect back on the experience, I have a better sense of what changes I would like to make to the process and what may be helpful when thinking about future opportunities. As much as I appreciate all students involved, fifteen co-authors is a lot and I would not recommend this number in future opportunities. Trying to manage fifteen undergraduate students' schedules is chaotic enough without attempting to plan, write, revise and try to give equitable access to the document and involvement. I plan to have a more specific topic to write about. I think our efforts to write about co-authoring by co-authoring was too vague and this focus did not help in making sure all ideas connected together. I also found that having students write their own individual narratives and then combine them into one narrative led to a lot of problems and probably the critique that the writing was juvenile. In the future, I would recommend more of a cohesive voice and not individually focusing on sections.
I found this experience to be a learning opportunity about what “scholarly work” is defined as. As our experiences suggest, there are journals that view scholarly work as needing to have a certain writing style and tone and that undergraduate student writing styles were described as being “juvenile.” I didn’t want to lose the voices of my students and wanted to give them a forum to share their opinions. In the future, I need to look more for journals that appreciate student voices and experiences.
In writing this article, I went back and talked to all fifteen students about their experiences. All of them mentioned the crushing blow of being rejected from the first and second journals as both of these journals required a lot of revisions and back and forth conversations with the editors. Students mainly found the constant rejections to be very difficult to deal with and most said that the only reason they kept responding to my emails is because I kept the hope alive that the article would be published. Just like I was relying on them to continue to motivate me to pursue publication, they looked to me to continue and motivate them. I appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with the students and get published. I look forward to pursuing other opportunities for such collaboration and publishing.
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