It must have hurt the first time you failed a subject. The thought of having to retake that class, deal with it, and survive it again is just excruciating and depressing. No words can explain how it feels to have a failed subject, how it feels to disappoint other people for being such a failure.
But what can you do? The professor already inked the grade, and what’s left for you to do is assess where you went wrong and what to do with the failure.
First thing is first: you are a not a failure. You have failed a subject but it doesn’t translate to you being a failure. It’s just a speck of who you are so calling yourself a failure for such a thing is unfair. Don’t drag yourself way down because it will be difficult to pull yourself up that way. You are just punishing yourself for that.
There is no easy way to deal with the failed subject because it might be your first time. Or big expectations might have been failed. Or all along it was a subject that you thought was your cup of tea.
Photo via The A-Blast
But it doesn’t matter: you are faced with a reality that you have failed that subject. The first stage of moving on, also the last stage of grief, is acceptance.
Accept that it’s already been done. Accept that you need to get through that engineering degree with that stain in your transcript. Accept that you will no longer graduate with Latin Honors, as if that’s the most important thing. Accept that you will be an engineer regardless of every failed subject.
It’s a matter of looking at the silver lining rather than focusing on the bad things that had happened. There is always hope! Use the failure as your springboard to success instead of a burden.
Learn from the failure by reflecting what went wrong, what factors were missed that led to such incident so it will never happen again.
The most important thing is to get through past the stage of thinking “that’s it.” It’s not yet the end of your engineering pursuit
Trust me when I say that one day, when you are already an engineer, you will look back at that failure and that you will be proud of yourself that have braved through it. You will realize how strong and resilient you are for standing up, for not quitting because things are difficult.
To survive engineering, you must be ready to fail. And time comes that you fail, you should be ready to accept it.
