Celebrating Failure

• 1) Tell us about a time this past semester that you failed -- whether in this class, or outside of this class. Don't spare any details! It'd be even better if there was something you tried several times this semester, and failed each time. 
• This makes me a recall at time when I suffered a huge failure in a class that I took last semester. In the past spring semester, I was taking a core course called News Reporting. It's a class that's well-known among the journalism and communications majors at UF. It's been called "a boot-camp for future journalists." It felt like a boot camp. We were required to news stories every week outside of the class - not to mention weekly lab meetings in which we would write and edit stories with an hour deadline.
  
  News Reporting took away any time to sleep and my sanity after I received terrible grades on my weekly assignments. There was a week in the semester in which I did well on all my outside and in-class assignments. And in that following week, I received the lowest grade that I ever received on an assignment. I misspelled someone's name in a news story. In News Reporting, a misspelling or AP error on anything that you submit is like a signature of your death note. And I signed mine that day. 
• 2) Tell us what you learned from it.  
• It felt terrible after receiving low grades on my assignments in the beginning of the semester. It felt really bad receiving a low grade after I saw major improvements in the prior week. 
• I learned to appreciate success more for what it is. Failure will always be around the corner to meet up with you, but success truly needs to be meticulously sought out to be achieved. And I eventually achieved success in the class after learning from all my failures which were largely due to small errors that I never detected. 
• 3) Reflect, in general, on what you think about failure. Failure is hard, isn't it? It's embarrassing, sure, but it also means that we have to change something about ourselves. Talk about how you handle failure (emotionally, behaviorally). Finally, talk about how this class has changed your perspective on failure -- are you more likely to take a risk now than you were four months ago? 
• I am usually in a mildly emotional state in the first moment that I realized I've failed at something. I try not to let it affect my behavior anymore because I believe that you assign significance to events that happen in your life by how you react to them. I'm not as embarrassed to fail any more. This class changed my perspective on failure because I feel that there is a message that failing over and over again equates to being a step closer to achieving success. I am more likely to take a risk doing something that I thought about now than I was four months ago.