• Question: What's your biggest fail?

    Asked by anon-188268 to Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 15 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 15 Nov 2018:


      To me, it’s figuring out how to work more efficiently or say No more often, so that I can make out more time to spend with my family and friends.

    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 15 Nov 2018:


      Hi Chicken McFlurry. My biggest failure was poor time management and work/life balance during my PhD. A PhD is the qualification that lets me call myself ‘Dr Reid’ (and it is different from the qualification your medical doctor will have). To do a PhD in the UK it takes you years of work (four in my case) and there was an enormous amount of pressure I put on myself. A big reason I found doing my PhD very stressful is because I still hadn’t learned how to manage my time properly or establish a good work/life balance. It is important to do this because you can get very burnt out. This will not only be true for a PhD, but all sorts of work (so look after yourself). I am a lot better at it these days, and I make sure I am well rested.

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 16 Nov 2018:


      This is a pretty tough question to answer because I still find it difficult to reflect upon. I think my biggest failure was in my second year of undergrad. At a time where I should have really been settling into my course and being good at studying independently I was procrastinating a lot, not coping so well with being so far away from my family and having to do everything alone, and my grades started to really slip. I should’ve sought out support a lot sooner but somehow I almost felt paralysed by stress and anxiousness and therefore my second year grades were not that great. Somehow, I shaped up in my final year of undergrad and performed the way I should have been throughout the degree but because of my second year it pulled down my overall average. For a while I thought it would hold me back from the kind of degrees and jobs I wanted to do. Looking back I know I could have done so much better and at times I really regret it and wish I could do it over and be better.
      But! I figure it was a learning experience, that really pushed me to work extra hard in my future jobs, masters and now PhD. Because of it I over compensated by working smarter, to the best of my potential, going above and beyond- and I’ve been rewarded for it. I could have never imagined at that time that’d I’d end up where I am now!
      I’ve tried to not only put that failure behind but to use it as motivation to keep doing better. At the time I thought that failure defined me and that was just how good/bad I was and I couldn’t be better. But now I see that I’ve proven I’m so much more to myself and everyone around me. So it was definitely a learning curve.

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