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…
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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Story from Pat Mathewson, President of the Students’ Association 2014/15 & 2015/16
By Pat Mathewson I have always been interested in student advocacy, which requires public speaking skills. Lacking these skills made me feel like a failure. In my first year, when I had to present to the whole room, I…
Story from Kyle Blain, DOSDA 2015/16
By Kyle Blain In 2013, I was responsible for organising Jailbreak, a race in second semester where the teams have 36 hours to get as far away from St Andrews as they can. The event was well attended, and we decided to…