By Erin Cruickshank, Enterprising Mind of the Year Winner 2025 When I first set out on my Working Integrated Year Abroad, I had one goal: to make language learning more accessible for young people from state-educated backgrounds in Scotland—something I wish I’d had more of growing up. What I didn’t expect was just how many…
By Connor Salter, Postgraduate Student Why do we make art when it’s never as good as we wanted it to be? A friend who makes public art for a living in Chicago asked me this question as we had lunch in Northpoint Café. I work more with words than visual art, but I understood her…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…