“Fail to Succeed”, was a session led by four senior AFM students who spoke of their academic journey. They talked about meeting their goals and how those goals changed over time due to either a change in their interests or failing to achieve their original goal. When asked the question “If you could go back to high school and change anything, what would you change or tell yourself?”, one of the speakers, Jasper, said, “Everything you’ve done up to this point has led you to where you are now”. Meaning that he wouldn’t change anything. Everything he went through and had to push past to get to this point in his life has shaped him into who he is today and changing things in the past would affect who he is now. Even though we are all taught that failing is a bad thing and that we shouldn’t fail, Jasper along with the other three panelists believe otherwise. All four panelists agreed that they had to fail to get to where they are now and that they wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t.
After this session, I sought feedback from other students in attendance. In response to the question “Failure is typically something frowned upon, how has this discussion changed the way you think about failing?”, Allen from A.Y. Jackson Secondary School said, “I thought it was really great to see that all four panelists really express that they too struggle with time management, they too struggle with not doing well in their academics… Being able to see that university students also struggled with transitions as big as going from high school to university and other similar transitions, and having to swallow their pride and ask for help, motivates me to do the same… and be better as a person”. Despite what we are told as children, failing isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s good to experience and work through a failure in order to learn and grow from it. We need to fail so we can learn from those mistakes and better ourselves for the future. Failure can be seen in many different ways, but I know after having attended this workshop, I will be seeing failure as a good thing rather than something to be ashamed of.