How to Deal With Academic Failure in Eight Steps (Starting By Not Calling It Failure)

Learning is a great love of ours. Academia draws us in at the center of it and holds us with connection, purpose, and even aesthetic. But it is not always easy, and this sometimes necessary part of life can be overwhelming. In this unofficial series, we answer your questions, share experiences, and offer advice to help navigate the academic waters with community and health in mind. Academia should be a time of growth, and our aim is to help each other make it through (and past) with as much support and well-being as possible.

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A time may come in your academic life, if it hasn't already, where you'll fail to get what you want. Maybe you won't get into the school you wanted, or the selective program that would be perfect for your professional project. Maybe you won't get the grade you hoped for on an assignment you worked hard on and truly believed in. Maybe you won't get the ideal internship for you and someone better connected will get it instead. Maybe you won't be awarded a grant to work on your thesis. Maybe after that, you'll have to start looking for a job, and you won't get hired right away. 

All of these things have happened to me in one form or another, and I know how terrible they can weigh on your self-esteem. After a while, I created a sort of protocol for myself: an eight step program to deal with failure as best as I could. These suggestions mustn't make you forget that you might need professional help to get through an academic burn out, and that this is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of (you can find more on the subject here by Olivia). If, however, you've ever experienced what felt like failure in an academic setting and wish you knew how to start getting better, I certainly hope this will help.

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1. Give yourself a time to grieve.

Use this time to take the whole feeling of disappointment in. Allow yourself to feel absolutely horrible, to lament to everyone about how terribly unfair the whole thing is. You worked very hard, you deserved to succeed, and you didn't get to. It's completely natural to feel angry  and self-pitiful for a short while. Denying yourself the time to grieve will affect you more strongly in the long run than taking a moment to do so. 

However, lingering too much on this first reaction will also do you more harm than good, which is why I find it helpful to give myself a limited time to recuperate before starting to move on — usually twenty four hours. This doesn't mean that I miraculously feel better once the time is up, but it makes it easier to start looking forward from that point.

2. Don't rush into anything.

Once you've successfully completed step one, you might start to feel a void setting in. It's only natural: all your time, efforts, and mental energy were set on one goal, and once you've failed to achieve it the way you thought you would, you find yourself without any immediate purpose. You therefore run the risk of rushing  into a new endeavor without thinking it through – anything not to have so much time for yourself on your hands. Don't avoid this free time. Embrace this moment of stillness in your life to take the time to figure out what you truly want, whether that means pursuing the same academic or professional path that you did before or going in another direction altogether. You might feel as though you're wasting time, but really, you're saving it. Think about it: if everything had gone smoothly, according to plan, you might have found yourself settled into  a life only to discover you didn't truly want it. 

3. Develop interests outside of your chosen field. 

Investing the time and energy you now have in parallel projects is the best way to deal with the disappointment you'll inevitably keep feeling for some time. Unfortunately, very demanding fields hardly let you develop hobbies. Well, now is your chance to finally do what you never had time for, whether it’s  finally passing your driving license (or is that only me?), starting to volunteer at your favorite animal shelter , or writing an article for the Attic. The idea is not to overload yourself with a new set of responsibilities and pressures, but to realize that you can find joy and purpose outside of academia or your professional field — joy can be found everywhere (and for another great reflexive piece on the subject, I can't help but send you to read Jessica Armstrong's thoughts here). 

4. Recognize and salute the work you've put in.

It's easy to dismiss the work you've put into a project that hasn't paid off. In a way, it's comforting to think that if you've failed, it's because you should've worked harder, should've taken less time for yourself and fewer  study breaks, that you should've done things differently even though you had no way of knowing how things would turn out. For some people, it's a reassurance mechanism: if I didn't give it everything I had, then I’m not really the one who  failed, am I ? And for others, it's a way to put the blame on someone – and it might as well be us, since, like the all-too reliable art of Sarah Andersen suggests, we never work as hard as we think we ought. One way or another, by thinking the main cause of failure is ourselves , at least we have someone to blame. 

In my experience, this way of thinking is useless in the long run, because it doesn't allow you to learn from what you're going through. The fact is that you can be proud of the work you've put in. Maybe you learned how to better organize yourself, or maybe you gave a talk in public for the first time. Maybe you learned how to write a cover letter, or a thesis proposal, or how to set up an application for a grant – maybe you simply updated your resume. The fact is that you have taken something from your experience, even if it didn’t lead to the result you hoped for. Write down a list if you need to convince yourself. 

5. Take comfort in your friends and family, but remember that you know yourself best.

Take comfort in your family and friends, but only the right type of comfort. Of course, some of your friends will work in the exact same academic field you do, and will be able to perfectly understand what you're going through, but others might find themselves in different situations, and face different sets of issues. Your family might be completely foreign to the field you wish to enter, or were students when the environment was very different. They love you, and they are fully able to offer compassion, pieces of advice, and a shoulder to cry on, but you have to realize that at the end of the day, nobody knows you or your goals as well as you do. At this point, only you know what that is and what you are willing to do to reach your goal. Trust yourself. You'll get there eventually. 

6. Stay away from negative influences.

If you've ever entered a very selective field, you know the type of people I am about to talk about: they keep going on and on about how your carreer of choice is both incredibly hard to get into and not so rewarding once you do ; they adopt a know-it-all attitude to explain that the game is rigged from the start, but that it can't fool them because they are better informed; they share discouraging stories about that one person five years ago who succeeded in this very selective field without even trying and that other one who never got to realize their dream, no matter how hard they tried. All of this is not only useless to you, but stress-inducing. No two situations are the same. They are only trying to manage their own anxiety the best way they can, but I'll advise you to actively stay away from these people.

7. Find inspiration in unusual journeys.

I cannot stress enough how reassuring it is to find role models at this point – people who've faced difficulties and failures but fulfilled their purpose eventually. You might have heard of a friend of a friend, or of former students from your favorite teacher, or someone who redirected their carreer late in their life that fit that profile. If you can, contact them and ask them if they would be willing to talk about it over a cup of coffee. The ones who have failed usually are the best teachers. If you cannot think of anyone, there are always TED talks. 

8. Remember that you never learn as much as in failure.

I'm not trying to romanticize academic failure here. Your life would indubitably be easier if you had reached the goal you had set for yourself. The situation you find yourself in no doubt  harder on your finances and trickier on your self-esteem. But in a desperate effort to look at the bright side of things, you might also find that failure is a great philosophical lesson. I'm not one to praise Rudyard Kipling too loudly, but one line of his poem If stays with me nonetheless: 

If you can [...] lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss...

This is a lesson in stoicism. And for a lot of us, academic failure is the first time we realize that life is unfair, and that we might not always get what we want and feel like we deserve. We've been told since childhood that if we worked really hard, we would get rewarded, and yet, here we are. In other words, we are in a perfect position to adopt practical stoicism.

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Academic failure is not only a way to reexamine your study methods and get even better at what you do. It's also an opportunity to learn more about yourself, about your resilience and your determination to keep going forward, no matter what. It's a chance to reflect upon your dream and the professional path you want to take and to find the courage to let go of it if it's no longer truly what you want to do. 

Embrace failure. It might be the second best thing that could have happened to you.

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Milena Le Fouillé is an art historian based in Paris, France, with a specialty in nineteenth and twentieth century art and a strong taste for mythology, fairy tales and legends. She's probably hiding in a museum's cafeteria right now, reading a novel when she really should be working.