Deconstructing Failure: A Closer Look At A Student's Worst Fear

By Julia Dunn on September 5, 2016

East Carolina University made national news recently for their increase in students seeking crisis counseling. This caused administrators to consider the ways their institution does or does not ensure students receive enough guidance on how to navigate adulthood, and ultimately speaks to a widespread apprehension towards failure in general.

NBC News reported:

“The college has boosted its counseling staff and resources and also introduced a new program — Recognition, Insight and Openness or RIO — to teach students self-talk, journaling, mindfulness and other cognitive-affective stress management techniques.”

This instance at East Carolina University is not unique in its subject matter — across the country, college students have propagated the word “adulting” to mean the process of adjusting to adult responsibilities, difficulties and elements of life that prove you’re no longer just a college student.

A few key examples of adulting:

-Paying rent on time

-Fixing household issues

-Gathering the necessary supplies to maintain an apartment or room of one’s own (it turns out that apartments don’t come with cleaning supplies, plastic bags and a vacuum cleaner after all!)

-Planning out your own academic track and post-graduation plan

-Managing money and grocery shopping on a regular basis

-Cooking healthy meals and snacks

With “adulting” comes a lot of anxiety about doing so correctly, and this leads into a larger and more poignant discussion of the way we speak about failure and address it as it arises.

Students have been taught (largely indirectly) that failure is catastrophic — that if they choose the “wrong” major or receive a D in one of their core classes, they are doomed to losing at life and repeatedly mishandling their situations.

This mindset is problematic for several reasons; for one, it supposes that students are flawless. For two, it creates a stigma around failure that prevents students from recovering from their mistakes and discourages healthy discussion with others about their own failure.

Image via Pixabay.com

It could be true that a more prominent or pervasive fear of failure has a lot to do with social media, as students are more readily able to compare their lives to those of their peers. When your classmates and coworkers’ accomplishments are posted all over your Facebook newsfeed, it can be particularly easy to compare your present situation and overall life with other people’s lives.

It’s not surprising, given the ubiquitous access to social media, that students are more sensitive to their own idea of what it means to fail at life, fail at college or fail at “adulting.”

Another common misstep students make surrounding failure is the conflation of external success with personal worth. If you see that your old roommate has landed a new medical sciences internship, it may seem like they are a better, more valuable person than you are if you haven’t had a comparable achievement yourself.

The truth is, your value as a person has nothing to do with what’s listed on your LinkedIn. Sure, you may be more desirable in the job market if you’ve got your life together professionally and academically (whatever that may mean to you). Nevertheless, you are just as important as your fellow students.

Failure should be based upon your response to life’s challenges themselves — in other words, it’s all about how you react to adversity and less about what actually happens to you. How do you respond to challenges? How do you cope with shortcomings you didn’t foresee? These questions are key to understanding the fundamentals of failure and success.

Image via Pixabay

Generally, it seems that the stigma surrounding failure actually causes students to fail even more often than they need to. To combat the roots of failure, educational institutions and college students alike should consider re-framing failure such that it isn’t a taboo topic. We should be talking about failure –the more we elude its mention, the more we normalize false standards of perfection for students still learning how to write a utilities check or ace a tough midterm.

Whether your university offers an “adulting” class or not, you are allowed to “fail.” You’re a college student learning the ins and outs of surviving in the world on your own without parents in a 3-mile radius. You’re allowed to slip up when solving anything from a small household problem in the absence of parental advice to a larger academic issue that could set you a year behind in your degree plan.

During times of perceived failure, students need to know that there are resources available to them on campus and in their community to seek out when they feel out of hand in transitioning into a fully-functional adult. Whether it’s talking to a housemate about how they’re navigating their own challenges or scheduling an appointment with an adviser at your university, support abounds.

Failure is very much a relative term and a relative concept: what you might consider a failure could be another student’s success, which is helpful to keep in mind whenever inklings of inadequacy creep into your thoughts. Failing provides students with lucrative learning opportunities, and for this reason, maybe we should actually celebrate failure (in certain respects, of course).

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