If at First You Don’t Succeed by Laurie

If at First You Don’t Succeed by Laurie - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

As a high achieving student all through middle school and high school, I wasn’t fazed by the upperclassmen’s reviews of Mr. Wellman’s Chemistry class, which was said to be one of the hardest classes in the engineering program. On the first day, we were directed to create the best name-tag design that could stand, lay flat, and easily deploy. I came back to school the next day with a product I was sure would impress Mr. Wellman. He went around to each design, critiquing them individually. He got to mine, and I proudly showed him my cardboard contraption. He instantly raddled off several of his concerns: The cardboard didn’t seem flat enough; the complex folds weren’t easy to open; the name-tag wasn’t aesthetic, and all sorts of other characteristics seemed somehow out of place. He gave me a 2 on the assignment (out of 4) and moved on. What he didn’t know was that his lengthy critique and low grade felt like a slap in the face to a student who had never once felt criticism for her work in school.
This kind of critique in his class never stopped. My lab notebooks weren’t organized enough even though they had a table of contents. I didn’t show my work clearly enough just because I didn’t number the steps. My water filter design wasn’t good enough because it used the same stuff everyone else used. I didn’t know what to do; nothing I did was perfect enough in his classroom.
My grades in his class, however, told a different story. I checked my grades online and noticed I still had the same grade in his class as I do all the others, a bright, shining A. That’s when I started to realize what Mr. Wellman was trying to tell me; while nothing I do will ever be perfect, the important thing was that I continued to try. Mr. Wellman stresses the downfalls of designs because that’s how I’ll improve. Even if I meet the basic requirements, or even if I go above and beyond, there’s always room for improvement of some kind. I learned from him that failure, in any form, is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, I became accustomed to receiving critique; I learned to either accept comments and use them to improve my next design, or boldly defend my choices. Yes, sometimes I looked Mr. Wellman in the eye and explained why my design was much better than he thought.
When I first gave a design presentation about my robot in front of several esteemed engineers, my fellow students and I were able to calmly respond to each comment about our design. I realized during that particular presentation that my design was never going to work and I needed to completely start over. As a result, we ultimately scored well in that robotics competition with my new concept for the scoring mechanism. I honed my new skills in other classes as well. I could offer a solution to a problem without being worried about what others thought, even if I wasn’t quite sure what “rhetoric” was, or what the economy of the 40’s had to do with the society of the 50’s.
Mr. Wellman was looking out for us, showing us how to learn from our mistakes, how to use the thoughts of others to help improve ourselves and our ways of thinking. Some people shy away from trying new things or speaking out, but I don’t. Mr. Wellman taught me that even if I don’t succeed the first time, I can always get better. Mr. Wellman taught me that the key to success is often failure.