Failure: I’d Better Get Used to It

I hate failing. I know it’s a part of life, and I know it builds character. It’s not that I’ve never failed; it’s just that I avoid it as much as possible. During my senior year of high school, I wanted to keep straight A’s, so I dropped Physics class for fear of getting a B. I played violin for one year when I was 12 years old, but quit because I realized I wasn’t very good at it. I’m not afraid of failing, but I definitely don’t like it. I take risks, but it might be true that they are more calculated risks than I’d like to admit. I don’t need my life to be full of sunshines and cotton candy, but I do like to succeed, and avoid failure when possible. That’s probably normal human behavior, but as I reflect on my recent disappointment, it has been something that has crossed my mind.

Today I’m thinking about failure and disappointment because I had two conference proposals get denied this afternoon. Back in May, I worked with a few other people and submitted proposals for the annual TESOL Convention (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). It is the biggest conference in the field of TESOL, and my first time attending was last year. As I sat through several sessions over the full four-day conference, I realized that I actually had some ideas that would be valuable to some of the people that attend. As soon as I returned home from the conference, one of the people I met there emailed and asked if I wanted to submit a joint proposal for next year’s TESOL Convention. One month later, I had written two proposals that I thought were brilliant and started making plans (in my head) for how I was going to logistically make it to Houston to present said brilliant ideas next year.

The first proposal was submitted to the Intensive English Program (IEP) and Administration section of the conference. There were three of us on this panel proposal, each having different administrative roles at our IEPs dealing with activities and cultural engagement, and we had a beautiful plan to share our wealth of knowledge on this important topic to other IEP teachers and administrators. Apparently the committee that reviewed our proposal didn’t agree. We got all positive comments (there’s a website to view your specific feedback); however, there were two contradictory comments from two different reviewers. One comment said that this panel would be for a very broad audience and would have high interest, while another comment said that the audience would be too specific and we should make it more general. Not helpful, reviewers…not helpful. Discouraging, but mostly I just feel misunderstood. Poor us. Failing sometimes makes me feel like that– like the world has just misunderstood and completely missed how brilliant I actually am! Usually though, it just makes me feel like…well, a failure.

The second proposal is something similar to a presentation that I’ll be giving at a conference here on campus later this month. A co-worker and I proposed a presentation on the development of a new program geared towards incoming international freshmen students. Given that international student enrollment is such a hot topic right now in many education fields, especially in TESOL/TESL, we really were confident that the committee would see how valuable and interesting this presentation would be. Obviously, they thought differently. We got only two short feedback comments for this proposal which were completely contradictory. The first said “Interesting topic to be presented, very well presented and organized, clear abstract, congratulations.” Encouraging, right? The second said, and I quote, “Topic not knew. Very general not researched based.” I feel like if you cannot distinguish between “new” and “knew”, you shouldn’t be reviewing conference proposals for the largest convention in our professional field. I also feel like if you don’t know what is considered “new” and relevant in our field, you should not be reviewing conference proposals. Also, I feel like if you think that all 30,000 presentations at TESOL are and should be research-based, or if you don’t understand the meaning of “general”, (a presentation on the specific development of a single pilot course at one university is not my idea of “general”), …I could go on, but I won’t. I feel like failing sometimes makes me feel too many feelings. 

While I am of the opinion that my conference proposals were obviously fantastic, I am also aware that the acceptance rate for proposals for large conferences can be quite low.  I think the main reason for my disappointment is that I just didn’t expect the rejection. I am keenly aware of the fact that one cannot always succeed (or have every conference proposal accepted), but are we supposed to prepare ourselves for failure every time, just in case? I’m not sure it’s very healthy to live like that, but maybe it makes the pending disappointments go down a bit easier.

This is a good growing moment for me, and an experience that will toughen up my “disappointment muscles”, so to speak. I have a sneaky suspicion that this will, in fact, NOT be the only time that failure will disappoint me during my PhD student experience.

Bring it on, failure—bring it on.