I never really failed at anything until in 2008, after eight years being very successful and very ill at Oxford, I started to get better and also failed to get a research fellowship, and then another. And what does that year mean to me? The start of happiness, of course, not the start of failing.
Being open about failure—with ourselves and other people—changes all kinds of things. In particular, it’s made me realize how little overlap there is between the things that feel like failures at the time (failing to get jobs, research grants, paper acceptances…) and the things that keep bothering one years afterwards (not having been kinder, having turned down that opportunity for an adventure, not having said what I meant…).
Perhaps more than anything, I’ve come to understand that failure is potent, for everyone, and that it loses its corrosive, undermining edge when we look that potency in the eye rather than shying away from it, and when we acknowledge that it is so (the potency and the defusing) for everyone else too.
In 2013, I saw an advert for a lunchtime talk called ”Overcoming a sense of failure in academia“. I didn‘t go (had more important things to get on with, obviously), but the title stayed with me, and in 2016 I ran an event inspired by it, ”Overcoming a sense of academic failure“. That in turn gave rise to a workbook and a series of audio podcasts. You can download the PDF workbook here, and access the podcast episodes via the Oxford University Careers Service site here or (with slightly fuller episode summaries) from their podcasts site here (note the episodes display here in reverse order; start with “The feeling of failure”!).
And, since for those of us who have grown up in academia, thinking about leaving it, or leaving only a few toes in it, can so often feel like failure, I’m also including on this page a workbook I put together in collaboration with Oxford’s Careers Service on Portfolio careers: How to optimize and manage them. In case you don’t know the phrase, a portfolio career is basically a multi-stranded mixture of usually mostly freelance roles, sometimes with an anchor of part-time employment. It’s what I now have, and I like how it makes slightly haphazard heterogeneity sound so smart and proper! The workbook is full of tips and exercises to help you prepare for a portfolio career, or optimize it if you already have one. It includes material from Barrie Hopson and Katie Ledger’s excellent book And What Do You Do? and covers topics like finances, marketing, support networks, time management, and how to tell your story. I also wrote a little piece on the pleasures and the difficulties of managing a “portfolio career” for The Oxford Guide to Careers 2019, and another for the British Academy’s case study series on the career pathways of doctoral graduates. You can find the workbook and more resources on this topic on the Oxford Careers Service website here.
If you’re interested in running or taking part in a failure-focused event, at your university or in some other context, you can read about my workshop on “Overcoming a sense of academic failure” below.
And finally, in the spirit of openness, and because writing a CV of failures is such a beautifully cathartic thing to do (I wholeheartedly recommend it to you), here’s mine. The idea of doing so comes from a 2010 piece in Nature by a lecturer in biomedical sciences (then postdoc), Melanie Stefan, and was popularized by economics professor Johannes Haushofer, whose meta-failure is that “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work”.
If you end up using any of these resources, I’d love to know what you make of them. Do get in touch if you have comments of any kind.
Overcoming a sense of academic failure
I’ve run versions of this workshop in many online and in-person contexts, for undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. It can be framed as a large half-day event involving small-group work connecting established academics with students and early-career researchers, as an intimate workshop for a close-knit cohort, or anything in between.
We start right from the beginning, with what the feelings of failing or being an impostor (who’s always right on the brink of being uncovered) actually are. We build up a systematic framework for doing far more constructive things with the feelings than our defaults tend to allow for.
Topics that may be addressed include:
- why failure and impostor syndrome matter (in academia), and how they relate to anxiety and perfectionism;
- what you want to be different;
- how to start classifying your feelings into useful categories;
- how to put failures into perspective (in the wider context of now, and as now relates to the rest of your life);
- failure and fraudulence: you, your career, and other people;
- shared and individual actions that make a difference;
- how you’ll know when you’ve succeeded in making a difference.
Activities may also include supportive simulations in which participants can share their own experiences, and case studies of common elicitors of feelings of failure to help uncover shared themes in responses to setbacks.
The workshop draws on a podcast series and workbook I created after the first academic failure event I ran (find out more here), including beautifully honest testimony from “successful” academics at all career stages.
If you’d like to make this happen at your institution, please reach out via my contact form or by emailing emily [at] troscianko.com.
Emily T. Troscianko 