I was debilitated by mistakes in grad school. A dream reshaped my perspective

From ScienceMag:

A rattle and a loud banging noise suddenly rang out in the lab I had recently joined as a Ph.D. student, and I realized I was to blame. When placing tubes into a centrifuge, I had failed to make sure they were perfectly balanced. My mistake was clear the second I turned it on. I couldn’t switch it off until the cycle finished, so I stood there, frozen, praying the large machine wouldn’t topple off the counter as it shook. When it was all over, a senior postdoc tried to cheer me up by saying, “These things happen.” But I was mortified.

I had always been a top student, and when I started my graduate program I had already completed medical school. I expected excellence from myself—not mistakes. Any misstep, in my view, was a sign that I might not be cut out for this kind of work at all.

I was determined to carry on and have no more mishaps. But the lack of a clearly defined curriculum in graduate school meant I did not always know the rules. I was used to structured systems, clear milestones, and prescribed paths. Suddenly, I was expected to build everything from scratch, while trying to steady myself on what felt like a rocking boat.

As the months went on, the mistakes continued to pile up. My first attempt at DNA extraction failed, and I feared I might never get it right. That fear deepened when a couple more attempts failed, too. Then I mixed up the results and methods sections in my writing, simply because I didn’t yet understand how scientific writing worked. When my supervisor told me I should be expanding how I did the experiments under the methods section and not the results, I was overwhelmed with the thought: “I should have known this.”

Even though these moments are a normal part of graduate school—students are there to learn, after all—I had trouble accepting my errors and moving on. As I kept making blunders, it felt like all eyes were on me, judging me.

The fear became so overwhelming that I began to pull back and stop trying so hard. I no longer showed up to the lab with a desire to ace everything. I didn’t speak up and ask questions. And when I had an idea for a new experiment, I was afraid to give it a try. I didn’t want to give others any more evidence of my inadequacy.

Then, one night I had a dream. I knew I was suffering, and I watched myself, with deep compassion. That dream showed me something I hadn’t been able to grasp in waking life: I needed to treat myself with the same compassion I would offer a dear friend.

If a friend had made a mistake, I would have told them to take it lightly, to see it as part of growing, and even to welcome it as a necessary part of learning. That realization led me to change my reaction after something went wrong. I began to treat myself like that friend. That shift in mindset made it easier to avoid being crushed by the weight of failure.

I also started to log my mistakes so I could learn from them. I would note whether there was something I could have done differently. Then I would move on. This simple practice helped me grow, even if that growth was messy. Flipping through my log, I could see how much I had learned to do better.

As I became more comfortable with the idea of making mistakes, I opened up with peers and mentors. What I heard from them was striking: Almost all of them had committed mistakes—small or large. I began to see that mistakes are part of life for any scientist who is learning and doing anything new, a realization that’s made it easier for me to navigate the uncertainty and pressures of graduate school.

The reality is, we are all going to mess up. I now realize that’s OK, even necessary. “Doing better” comes from “doing first,” often with stumbles along the way.

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