Failing Forward

Joshua P.

Me at a SASE welcome event. (SASE = Society of Asian Scientists & Engineers)

Mistakes = Growth?

Before entering college, one of my aunties told me, "You are going to make lots of mistakes” in college. Hearing that statement from her felt like a sword impaling my perfectionist ego. As someone who tries to perfect everything I do, I hated that she thought I—out of all people— would fail in college. Not literally, of course—as my grades say otherwise. But the idea that I would struggle? That stung.

In high school, mistakes were rare. Almost as if perfection was inevitable. I had a system; a scheme; the whole shebang. Tests? Aced. Assignments? Completed. Sleep? Gradually lost over the years, if that counts for the typical high schooler. Getting sleep is beside the point; my life before college was precisely calculated and successfully executed. So, I thought college would be more of the same but on my own.

Yet, I never knew how true that was until I reflected on my first semester in college.

Freshman Mistakes

The beginning of many mistakes started when I tried to join many clubs. My freshman self was so eager to join many organizations that my health became irrelevant, as my mom would say. For instance, on the first day of school, I walked around 20,0000 steps exploring the campus. In sweltering heat.

For context, I am not an athlete in any shape whatsoever. But, I was excited. So excited I kept that same energy for the next two weeks.

Didn’t I still have assignments? I had none cause it was the first week!

During this first week, my eating and sleeping schedule got wrecked.  I started eating dinner around 10:30 at night and going to bed around 1 in the morning.

If overloading myself with clubs was my first mistake, my next one was underestimating the challenge of engineering projects.

Josh vs. Robot

Fast-forward to the beginning weeks of my first ever engineering-lab project—my engineering career had begun. One of the introductory lab assignments, before the project, was to build an origami bot that moved.

­One thing I lacked that my friend had an abundance of was STEM knowledge. His high school taught him how to engineer things. My high school taught me how to be a full-fledged musician. While he could create 3D designs and circuit boards with ease, I was still figuring out how to get my wiring to work.

I remember skipping dinner and staying up till 1 am to fix this origami bot because of how tedious this assignment was. But this was just one of the introductory assignments that led to the group project.

Our group project was to build a follower-robot. In other words, a robot that would move according to any type of sensing mechanism. My group’s idea? A Formula-1 Robocar. The beginning stages were rough—we could not get our robot to move. It was my job as the testing lead to figure out what was wrong, and at first, I failed. However, after 8 hours of analyzing and problem-solving, we as a team got our robot to finally run properly. With that knowledge of what we did wrong, I helped two friends troubleshoot their robots.

Finished Origami Bot

Finished F1 Robot

(yes, I know that our robot does not look like an F1 car, but at least we tried!) 

Mistakes Grow You!

To be frank, most of my mistakes are simple instances that I perceive as being short of perfect.  

But looking back at these past failures, I learn more about myself:

  • What I can handle
  • What I cannot handle (and that’s okay!)
  • What I can improve on

Though my adult life has just begun, I’ve learned how mistakes can shape me.

Without failure, how can I succeed or grow?