Trying Again: Lessons from Failure

Most people have very rational fears. For some, it’s the dark…while some others may be afraid of the ocean and what lurks within it. However, for me, my biggest fear across my twenty-one years has been a failure. I distinctly remember being handed back a two-question participation quiz in the seventh grade having gotten one of them wrong. I was faced with a grade of 50% for the day and a long-lasting fear of disappointing my homeroom teacher. I had yet to truly grapple with the reasoning behind my fear of failure until I took my stem cell biology class in my junior year of college.

 

Since the start of my collegiate career, I had been interested in stem cell-based research. I was excited about the opportunity that I had to take a stem cell biology class as an elective. More than that though, I was excited to utilize the background knowledge I had on stem cells from working in the Armstrong Laboratory as an undergraduate to excel in the class. However, unlike the memorization and extrapolation, I was used to in any other, my stem cell biology class was largely project-based. I was thrown off. Our first project was to complete a pseudo-grant for a made-up stem cell biology research project of our creation that needed ‘funding’. I was excited about the challenge and submitted my grant almost immediately. I thought I had it in the bag. I had watched my research advisor's right grants before…how hard could it be?

 

I received the initial draft of my grant back from my professor. I had failed. I couldn’t believe it. There were red pen marks all over my draft and on the top corner, a note asking me to try again. I was in shambles. How could something I had initially thought was easy be so difficult? The next day, I sat myself down in the library motivated to think about this grant a little differently. After many more personal revisions, and most importantly, a new thought process on how exactly to approach the grant process in the first place, I decided to resubmit my final grant. A week later, I had my feedback, I had gotten not just an A, but a 100!

 

Rewriting my grant after scoring an abysmal grade on it originally taught me that an initial failure can be rewritten with a new outlook. While this was a very tangible example for me, I used this concept I had learned from class and applied it to my work in my research. I learned how to overcome initial failures in assays by pushing through and garnering a new perspective.

 

While I had learned how to tackle failure in the classroom, I had not learned how to face challenges outside of the classroom. For as long as I could remember, I had been afraid to take a computer science course in college due to a bad experience I had in high school. I knew, however, that I needed a strong computer science background in order to do well in the research field. I decided that I was going to take matters into my own hands and despite the challenge, I joined the lab of Dr. Ge, a celebrated molecular simulator and professor of chemistry at USC.

 

My time in Dr. Ge’s lab started out with a steep learning curve. I wondered how the graduate student and Dr. Ge himself were able to easily manipulate code that took me days, even weeks to decipher and create on my own. I was frustrated. No matter how hard I tried I seemed to be behind. I was, in my mind, failing. Facing defeat, I decided to talk to Dr. Ge myself and express my concerns about my work. Instead of the stern talk, I was expecting, Dr. Ge laughed. He expressed that the difficulty I was facing was a part of the process of learning in and of itself. He also taught me that it was always ok to rely on my peers. With his advice, I started attending regular meetings with the graduate students in our group, and quickly, with some peer help, I was able to turn my defunct code into something that was operatable. I was impressed!

 

Failure has long been something that has plagued me, but through my experiences inside and outside of the classroom at USC, I’ve learned that I can overcome failure with a new mindset and a team effort. I’m thankful that I’ll be able to use these insights to further my future career working in a research field and market myself as an innovative thinker. Attached below are my two artifacts. The first is my stem cell biology grant and the second is the code I created while working in Dr. Ge’s lab.