You love success? I love failure.

Here at UCSB, particularly for some Pre-Biology major students, fear plus stress on top of uneasiness can be verbally induced in vivo by simply mentioning the phrase “ready for your second year as a pre-bio student?”

It turns out it actually isn’t that bad.

As my second year as a pre-biology student is coming to an end, there have certainly been times where I had to work extra hard to maintain a good balance in all my involvements. However, I believe all the challenges presented and hard work I have put in will make me better at whatever I am doing. Although I am still at the beginning stage of my personal development, I feel like I have learned quite a bit this past year.

I believe we as individuals and students are constantly learning some sort of “life lesson.” It can be about effective time management, relationship building, so on and so forth. For me, one of the most meaningful lessons is to not take failures too personally but instead learn from them. These failures can originate from almost anywhere. An ignorant mistake when running a lab experiment that requires a start-over all the way from the very beginning. Unanimous rejection from all my applications for summer programs. These events certainly cause sad faces and gloomy days, but I try not to let them swell in my mind, as it would only worsen the situation.

These failures, however, are just like coins – there are two sides. While one side oftentimes represents frustration, the other side represents the “good things” about failures. They can be the lessons one should take away and not let the failures repeat themselves. In fact, I believe the more successful a person is, the more failures he/she will have experienced. Interestingly, there have been faculty members at several universities that created their “CV of Failures,” showcasing all the rejections they received in the past. To me, these CV’s do not simply serve to make these professors famous (although Professor Haushofer from Princeton University did list down a “meta-failure” on his CV of Failure as “2016: This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work”), but instead, they carry an important message. When I see people getting awards or read papers published by others, I inevitably get drawn into their “success” and question ourselves, “why do they/their experiments look so perfect, but mine don’t?”

Indeed, these people were able to make significant contributions and be recognized for them. However, the truth of the matter is, almost all of them have failed many many more times than I have. Without these failures, the success would not be as meaningful. In fact, without these failures, one might not even arrive at the success at all.

So next time if I mess up the results from an experiment I am running, instead of thinking I am a super idiot, complete failure and totally worthless, I should tell myself I might have gotten myself one step closer to the answer I have been searching for.