Failure Is An Opportunity To Learn
In the early weeks of 2012, I climbed the stairwell to the top landing of the Hall of Science, welcomed by the distinctive green floor tiles. The Chemistry and Biochemistry floor always had a calm air about it, a concentrated silence that no other place on campus could match, and I loved it. The air rushed to escape when I opened the laboratory door, the comforting scent of nitrile and acetone welcoming me back to my quiet little corner hood. After buttoning my coat, pulling on purple gloves, and sliding my goggles over my face I investigate my work space, relieved to find everything exactly as I left it the day before. Cracking open my laboratory notebook, I read through my notes again. I'm stuck.
Having toiled in the lab for a year, I wasn't new blood. And yet sometimes I still felt like I had everything to learn, especially that day. I had been unable to purify my synthesized compound for several weeks and although I knew my professor was being patient with me I was running out of patience for myself. Hundreds of vials of solvent later, I still had yet to identify my dual site inhibitor via nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and was beginning to feel the early twinges of pain from my impending failure. But I couldn't give up yet. I decided to try another solvent solution into which I sprinkled my last dwindling remnants of hope.
Despite my stubborn efforts, failure came. In one last desperate attempt to retrieve my compound I flushed the silica column, concentrated the sample, and ran it through the NMR. Those felt like the longest two hours of the year. I sat down with my professor, feeling ashamed to have been a disappointment. I could barely look him in the eye. And then I learned the greatest lesson of my undergraduate career: “Failure is an opportunity to learn,” he told me. “Some of the greatest discoveries in history were made by mistake.”
I synthesized my compound again and continued my work, renewed with confidence in my ability to learn from previous defeat. I no longer feel the strong pull of fear and anxiety when I consider failure. As a scholar it is my joy to continue learning and that will always involve mistakes and missteps, a necessary part of perfecting any body of knowledge. When I graduated Magna Cum Laude I bestowed my Stole of Gratitude to my mentor who taught me the hidden value of failure and the cost of learning. On the stole I wrote, “You taught me that every unexpected result is an opportunity to learn!” Because as they say, the day you stop making mistakes is the day you stop learning.