Lots of grad students are afraid of failure. Let me tell you about one of my biggest mess-ups in grad school (and they still let me graduate)!

It was the semester I completed my qualifying exam, proposed my dissertation, and started to run Experiment 1. I was the TA for a lower-level course with 80+ students. My reputation around the department was that I’m a pretty conscientious person. I even took the short-version of the Big Five Personality Inventory, and I scored in the upper percentiles of conscientiousness (insert proud smile).
 
But my conscientiousness failed one tragic day. I was with my professor (who was also on my dissertation committee) proctoring an exam. As she was handing out the exam, she directed the students to the last few pages to give further instructions on the essay questions.

“If you look on page 6…er…what?”, she stammered, dangling a student’s exam in the air. “Where’s the other essay?” Immediately, I felt a rush of heat go over my entire body finally reaching my face. I jumped up in disbelief, as my professor frantically flipped through the exam. “Half the exam is missing!”
I realized what I had done. I had programmed the copy machine to make copies from a single-sided document when the original was, in fact, double-sided. “Oh no! I’ll go copy the missing pages,” I whimpered, grabbing the originals. My whole body was shaking as I rushed to the copy machine. Such a stupid mistake!

Long story short, I ended up copying the rest of the exam, which then made the whole scantron thing pointless. So I told my professor I would grade each exam by hand, cross-checking their scantron sheet with their actual exam. I triple-checked each exam. It took me 7 hours straight to complete it, but I got it done that day.

I even did an item analysis for my professor to identify the questions people missed the most. I felt so incredibly bad, and so disappointed in myself. My professor wasn’t the type of person to take things like that lightly either, but she seemed to appreciate my effort after-the-fact. The students didn’t really seem to care, either. They just wanted to know their grade, and there were few who were antsy before they were completely graded (within two days after the essays were graded).

What’s the lesson in this tale of woe? It’s okay if you mess up in graduate school. It happens, and you deal with it when it comes up. This situation in no way affected whether or not I graduated. So if you’re worried that you’ll mess up or make a mistake. Don’t worry about it! You got to grad school because you’re smart. No one expected you to be perfect. My stupid mistake definitely took time out of my day that I could’ve spent doing other stuff, but in the end it was fine. I actually learned a valuable lesson: always double check your copies!