Failing with grace

Last Thursday was a pivotal day for the over 28,000 high school seniors who applied to join the Class of 2020. For many of them, Duke was high on their lists and for most, even at the top. Over the course of high school, they probably visited campus, revelled in the excitement of last year’s basketball championship, strived for perfect test scores to impress admissions officers and poured their hearts into Common App personal essays. At the end of that, more than 20,000 of them received no reward except for the closure of a disappointing denial letter. At a time when many Duke students are experiencing rejection and failure in the forms of job and internship searches and difficult midterms before the rush to LDOC, today’s editorial will explore failure and the role it can and should play for students.

Duke students are not always accustomed to failure. Success in high school, the promise of great things to come at an elite university and the high expectations placed on those to whom much has already been given makes failure something that happens to “the other.” When it does strike, it is often quietly swept under the rug as a source of personal shame to be forgotten. Surrounded by a sea of talent, students pressure themselves to live up to an impossible standard of perfection, fearing that any form of failure is proof that they do not belong.

The idea that some people never fail though is a preposterous fantasy. Failure need not even take the form of a graduate school rejection, a bad grade or an internship denial. Consider a student with a perfect GPA in the most difficult of majors. While succeeding fabulously in the academic world, any number of personal areas of happiness may be lacking, they might feel spiritually unfulfilled and they may feel they never left time for community service. Each of these is a different kind of failure not it is evident on a resume. Using another example, imagine a senior, about to graduate, who has been heavily involved in campus activism. Although she might be headed off to the most exciting opportunity she could imagine, she might feel failure in seeing that she has not achieved a total reform of campus culture. Failure is ubiquitous and amorphous. Every person will fail in some way or another.

The reasons for denying or ignoring failure are clear: when people fail, they inevitably feel disappointment. Denial, though, is not a sound mechanism. It amplifies doubts and impedes movement. Instead of being denied or ignored, failure ought to be taken advantage of and used for self-betterment. Initial failure can be used for motivation: a pick-me-up to motivate a person into working for success. In a different strand of reasoning, failure can be used as a guide. For instance, if a student fails a major class, their failure might force them to realize that their heart is not truly in their current course of study, but lies elsewhere. Regardless of how failure is used, a string of mistakes and rejections is not indicative of a life of failure. Any student who has written an essay, worked in a lab or attempted to overcome a challenging problem likely understands that failure is simply part of the process of progress—a sidestep on the path forward.