23 articles found

Picking Up the Pieces

Rebecca Cornwell, Public Engagement Officer, School of Biology shares her love of knitting and what it has taught her about failure. In life, as with knitting, you can always pick up the pieces and mend the tears.  As a novice knitter, I fell in love with a Shetland shawl pattern with lighthouses on it. The…

I am not scared of failure! My ego is…

Entrepreneur and Enterprising Mind of the Year 2023 Runner-Up Pabita Kister writes of her experiences with failure and how she came to realise that the journey and the process are much more important than the end product.  Take a minute to think back to a time when you felt like you had failed. Maybe it…

Thoughts on Workplace Failure – Cat Wilson

By Cat Wilson, Director of the Centre for Educational Enhancement and Development I was recently asked to deliver a Pecha Kucha talk about ‘learning from failure’ and managed to fill up 20 slides with photos of my dog and my failure to train her to walk without throwing herself to the ground in a fit…

Interview with Dr Prabs Dehal

TRIGGER WARNING – themes of miscarriage and endometriosis. Dr Prabs Dehal candidly discusses her experience with failure and how she has grown as an individual in the process. Dr Dehal is the Engineering Coordinator in the School of Chemistry.

Interview with Dr Shruti Narayanswamy

Dr Shruti Narayanswamy candidly discusses her experience with failure and how she has grown as an individual in the process. Dr Narayanswamy is the Entrepreneurial Education Developer at CEED and the coordinator for Vertically Integrated Projects and the Summer Team Enterprise Programme. She is also the convenor and lecturer for the sub-honours module ‘ID2007: Enterprise…

Building Resilience in Coding

By Anonymous Failure happens almost every day in coding, and it is inevitable. Computer Science students in fourth and second year reflect on their experience with building resilience in coding. Your code will fail a number of times before you get it right. Sometimes it happens more, sometimes it happens less. It is important to…

A Deferred Exam

By Anonymous I once did a module based on the writings by a specific author, and by the end of the course I still hadn’t read a single book by them. I revised for the exam as much as I could, but had to defer it until August for personal reasons. I later realised I…

Falling Out of Love With My Major

By Anonymous I felt like a failure after I came to the University of St Andrews being very passionate about my subject at first, and then falling out of love with it. The fear of the situation happening again stopped me from changing my major. I thought I was not making the most of the…

A Fundamental Mistake in a Published Paper

By Anonymous A group of researchers, including me, doubted a common theory that used to be taken for granted as being true. We were looking for a clear way of showing where our hesitations came from and how to prove them. After several months of discussion, we managed to do a calculation that proved our…

Losing the Elections

By Anonymous My experience with sports club elections taught me a lot about resilience. In the end of my third year, I was very keen to join any sports club committee and ran for the same position in a few clubs. I felt very confident about my suitability and didn’t pay much attention to preparing the…