Assignment 26A: Celebrating Failure

My Failure

            One of biggest shortcomings has to be that when I have to do something important I usually will wait till the last second to do it. Studying for an exam, working on a group project, updating my resume for Career Showcase, you name it I probably was too lazy to do it on time. This failure revolves around the last example.

            This semester for Career Showcase I waited until 11 o’clock the night before to update my resume. That was my first mistake because I had just gotten off work, was very tired, and I knew that my head was not in the right mindset. My roommate is a Cap Mentor so I asked her to look over my new and improved resume (I had a lot of updating to do because she said the formatting for resumes changed). She looked over my resume and said it was great, so I printed out my resume and went to sleep.

            The next day I woke up and went to the O’Dome to talk with different recruiters. I basically introduced myself as Lauren, a marketing major and talked to them about all of my marketing experience because I am a MARKETING major. I was mostly looking for a job, but I handed my resume to a few recruiters for internships and leadership development programs.

            The last recruiter I spoke to brought my failure to light. Once again, I introduced myself as Lauren, the Marketing major, and told her about my marketing internships. She said that I would have better luck applying for a job rather than going for an internship, which she was recruiting for. The last thing she said to me made my heart sink. She said, “Yeah, I would look online for jobs closer to your graduation date. There will be plenty of opportunities especially since you are a Finance major.” I literally screamed WHAT when she said that. I looked at my resumes and saw that my roommate has accidently changed my major from marketing to finance because she is a finance major and she was on the verge of falling asleep when she looked at resume.

            My first reaction was that I could not stop laughing, I thought it was hilarious, but I also felt incredibly stupid because I did not proofread my work. This hurt more when I kept getting rejection letters from the leadership development program and internships because the businesses I talked to were looking for Marketing majors and not Finance majors. YIKES.

What I Learned

            Initially from that experience, I thought that I had basically wasted my time at Career Showcase. It did not really affect me because like I said I was looking more for a job rather than internship, but still rejection letters are never fun. The main moral of this story is PROOFREAD, PROOFREAD, PROOFREAD. I know this appears on each of our assignments in this class and we just want to submit it and get it over with, but one small error can change the meaning of something. I also learned that waiting till the last second, especially with regard to important things, is the worst thing you can do. Work at things little by little and as I will keep saying proofread. Read it yourself, have other people read it, have your computer read it to you. It will only help you catch the mistakes.

Reflection Failure

            It is very embarrassing to talk about and reflect on failures. You can imagine how upset my parents were when I told them I had the wrong major written down on my resume. But something good came from this experience, I learned just how important proofreading is and not to wait till the last minute to accomplish tasks. Learning from mistakes is an important part of life, some of them might be ugly or absolutely ridiculous, but I can say I will do whatever I can to not make the same mistake again.

            I feel as though this class has helped me realize how important failures are to any process. Talking or reflecting on failures is hard because we do not want to think about mistakes that we made. But learning from them can help us more in the long run. I feel as though I am will still take risks, but now I know that even if I fail I can still create value from it.