Fail Loudly, Dream Louder
December 11, 2025
At the start of the school year, I decided I would document all my failures.
I locked myself out of my room seven times this semester.
Near the start of the year, I was cooking what my friend called “Japanese prison food.” Was it just miso paste, noodles, and vegetables boiled in a pot and hastily adorned with sesame seeds and furikake seasoning? Perhaps.
When I was looking for 32-004 to take my first 6.1010 quiz, I got lost navigating the twists and turns of Stata. At one point, I found myself in some kitchen storage area. Mind you, I had stumbled upon this spot before, but in my panicked state five minutes before the quiz, I completely lost my navigation skills.
These are just a sampler; believe me, there are many, many more.
We should be more open with our failures. Usually, we only see each other’s outcomes, so what tends to happen is we show off our successes and hide our failures. As a result, I think failures are underrepresented. There’s also a general sense of shame surrounding failure — either that, or it gets brushed off. While it’s very natural to tell someone “it’s okay” and provide encouragement, it’s also worth revisiting the failure and discussing what can be learned from the experience.
A natural question might be, “What constitutes a failure?” To me, a failure counts as an event that results in an undesirable outcome initially; in hindsight, I might be grateful for said failure, but there’s an initial feeling of disappointment. This might range from flunking a test to having an application rejected.
However, I think the term “failure” is a little heavy for some of the events I want to share. So instead, to keep up with Gen Z (or at this point, alpha (α)?) slang, I’ll call them “cooked moments.”
August
- I applied to be an MIT admissions blogger over the summer, but got rejected. I wasn’t expecting anything, but was still quite sad, as one of my main personal projects in high school was my blog. However, in their rejection letter, they recommended I write in the Campus Life section of The Tech, and here we are!
- Caught in the preliminary firehose of deciding between ASEs, I chose to take the 5.111 ASE. I was completely slammed by this exam (that kind of rhymed!). I took the equivalent of AP Chemistry in high school, but I had heard this exam was diabolical. It indeed was. We were given three hours for this exam; I walked out 75 minutes in.
- I nearly got a concussion from falling backwards and hitting my head really hard on a shoe rack. I was fine and the injury was nowhere as severe as I thought, but it was still not fun. At least it got me familiar with MIT Health!
September
- Around the first week of this month, I tried out for six acapella groups with minimal singing experience and got rejected from almost all of them, though I yielded a 33% acceptance rate! Not too bad for my first rodeo, honestly; I only had some piano experience and elementary school choir experience going in.
- I pulled an Icarus and flew too close to the sun. Or more accurately, the sun flew too close to me. Ask me in person for the details, if you’re curious.
October
- I applied to be a part of Borderline exec, specifically for web development, but got rejected. In hindsight, I’m glad this happened, because I was absolutely swamped and shouldn’t have tried to commit to an exec position.
- The first midterms for 6.1010 and 6.1210 happened, which were both pretty rough for me. Somehow, I passed both!
November
- Unfortunately, I didn’t do as well on a 6.1010 quiz. I’m glad it’s not too big of a deal in the long run.
- The second midterm for 6.1210 was also rough, but I somehow passed. At one point, I was six lectures behind, which was quite a demoralizing experience.
- This month was also not the best, but I started calling my parents every day instead of at sporadic times, which helped a lot.
At the time of writing, December hasn’t really happened, but I’m quite worried about finals week. In the end, as all things are, I’m confident things will work out in their own ways, just like how everything else has before.
Although there were a lot of failures, there were also some surprising moments I was quite happy with:
- I got into and joined the MIT-Wellesley Toons this semester. I’ve enjoyed seeing how an a capella group actually plays out!
- Originally, I didn’t plan on taking on a UROP, but I surprised myself. Back in April during CPW, I saw a poster for the Biomechanics of Piano Playing. It was outdated though, so I didn’t think they were going to take anyone. I ended up running into the PI at an academic expo, and it turns out they were still taking people! I really wanted to continue doing something piano-related, and this seemed like an interesting project to work on.
- A friend did a MISTI internship in the Netherlands over the summer, so I decided to check out the program. MISTI allows for students to travel outside of the country to either study abroad, take on an internship, or teach a group of students. I applied to Global Teaching Labs, the last option. For some reason, I decided to start writing my essays the day the application was due and somehow got in for IAP. Even though this had a good ending, I would not recommend starting this application so late; there’s a lot of essays, which reminded me of college applications season all over again.
- I applied to be the DormCon i3 chair, which takes on the task of organizing the videos that showcase dorms across campus. I couldn’t even attend the event to represent myself, so I had to ask a friend from Next House to stand in for me. I thought this position was more competitive, but it turns out no one else ran for it. I’ll be starting next semester.
At the beginning of the fall semester, I made an effort to do some boundary testing, meaning I would try to push the limits of what I could achieve. Now that we’re at the end of the semester, I still think I didn’t actually reach the boundary; there are still more clubs, places, and activities to explore.
If you never climb, you never fall. But if you were told you were guaranteed to fall, perhaps even thirty times before you finally found your footing, wouldn’t you try to fall as soon and as quickly as possible?
I wrote this article originally for The Tech, a student newspaper group at MIT! You may read this post here.
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