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572 Personal reflections on the COPSS Presidents’ Awardindustry; at the time, this was a grand insult from an academic. The onlyeffect that had on me was that I worked harder, and I swore that one day that# # &# Editor would invite me to give a talk at his university, which finallyhappened in 1990. By then, I had calmed down.Over the years, editors have become less judgmental, but it is easy to forgethow devastating it can be for a new PhD to have his/her thesis paper rejected.Ihaveseenverytalentedstudentswholeftacademiaaftertheirthesispaperhad its initial rejection. As the Editor of the “Theory and Methods” Sectionof the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) and then laterBiometrics, I was always on the lookout for new PhD’s, and would work toget their papers published, even in very abbreviated form.Unfortunately nowadays, it is routine in some sub-areas of statistics tosee applicants for an initial appointment at the Assistant Professor level withapproximately six papers in top journals, without a postdoc. I remain skepticalthat this is really their work. In any case, this makes it harder to be generous,and it has led to a bit of a coarsening effect in the review of the first paper ofmany new PhD’s.47.3 Luck: Have a wonderful Associate EditorWe all know that many Associate Editors are merely mailboxes, but by nomeans all. My experience is that the quality of Associate Editors is a stationaryprocess. I wrote a paper in 1976 or so for The Annals of Statistics which hada rather naive proof about expansions of what were then called M-estimators(I guess they still are). The Associate Editor, who knew I was a new AssistantProfessor and who I later found out was Willem van Zwet, to whom I remaingrateful, wrote a review that said, in effect, “Nice result, it is correct, but toolong, here is a two-page proof.” The paper appeared (Carroll, 1978), and foryears I wondered who my benefactor was. I was at a conference at Purdueabout 15 years later, and Bill came up to me and said, and this is a quote“I wrote a better paper than you did.” He was right: the published paper isfive pages long!47.4 Find brilliant colleaguesI was and am extremely lucky in my choice of colleagues, and there is bothplan and serendipity in this. A partial list of collaborators includes Presidents’Award winners Ross Prentice, Jeff Wu, Peter Hall, Kathryn Roeder, JianqingFan, Xihong Lin, and Nilanjan Chatterjee. Anyone who writes papers with