This article was written as part of a series directed toward incoming freshmen. Visit our Newsroom for guidance on registering for your first semester classes, or here for tips on how to spend your first week on campus.

One of the toughest aspects surrounding the transition from high school to college is the sudden raising of expectations. Students who earned a high GPA in high school with minimal effort will find themselves suddenly drowning if they do not quickly update their study habits. Students who found comfort in their prescribed high school schedule may now struggle with time management. Former prom kings and queens may not naturally assimilate into their new social setting. Student-athletes who were the star of their high school team may now find themselves back on the end of the bench—if they had ever been there in the first place. The first semester on campus is a vortex of new experiences. While students may experience it in unique ways, failure, to some extent, is inevitable.

This article will help students reconceptualize failure as a positive experience. This does not mean failure is always going to be a pleasant experience. Failing can be frustrating and, depending on the magnitude of the failure, challenging to bounce back from. But, failure is important. Both success and failure have lessons to teach; winning is great but incentivizes redundancy and complicity. Failure, on the other hand, inspires growth and change. Both are necessary for a fulfilling university experience.

Smart Goal Setting

The first step in embracing failure is understanding the initial goal. Many students set lofty goals before even stepping on campus, only for their experience not to match their expectations. This is not to cast shame on those students. Rather, their ambition is something to applaud! That said, setting goals should be done with experience guiding expectations. What should one do then if they have limited or no experience (such as an incoming freshman)? Set goals with limited or no expectations! I advise incoming first-year students to avoid performance-based SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timed) goals. "Avoid skipping classes without an appropriate reason" is an attainable goal based on effort alone. However, setting a goal involving GPA will be difficult to carry out effectively until students understand their new expectations. Understanding practical goal setting is a skill developed with experience, and failure is an excellent tool in honing that skill.

Processes that Achieve Goals

The second skill failure can help develop: building better processes to achieve goals. If, after honest reflection, a student could have achieved said goal, then failure helps the student understand what went wrong. Students often set a target grade for a course but come short of their target. Suppose students feel the material was within their intellectual capacity (which is more often than not the case). In that case, identifying where in the process problems arose will aid the student in being more successful in the future. When students fail to get their target grade, it rarely depends on how "smart" the student is. It does often have to do with circumstances outside of class.

Perhaps a student was on course for their desired grade but got test anxiety and bombed the final exam. This experience can be frustrating, but the student should not feel ashamed! Test anxiety is natural, and rarely is it a lack of preparation that leads students who struggle with it to fall short of their potential. That said, rather than lowering their expectations for their next class, I advise the student to keep the same goal but seek resources to manage their anxiety. Failure does an excellent job in helping us identify obstacles to success, but that does not exonerate students from overcoming those obstacles.

Setting Expectations

Some students may argue that they rarely experience failure. This is problematic. The third lesson of failure teaches what students' expectations of themselves should be. If students are constantly content with their performance, it likely means they are not pushing themselves to reach their full potential. Experiencing failure is an excellent tool for self-evaluation. If a student meets a goal without breaking a sweat, that student should reach for a higher target.

Alternatively, if a student misses their target significantly, it may be appropriate to lower the goal temporarily. Preferably, consider creating an intermediary goal as a stepping stone before reaching for the larger one again. Goals should not function as endpoints. Rather, goals are checkpoints that allow students to continue to push themselves and maximize their potential.

Failure can be difficult to swallow. It is undoubtedly disappointing to put hours or even days into a project only for it to come back with a sub-par score. But, students should not allow this to discourage them. Failure is a necessary step to improvement. Embracing this mentality helps students see lessons and opportunities for growth while developing a better understanding of themself. Embracing failure helps all students become capable of bigger and better things!