We mentioned before that you may want to get comfortable in failing and feeling like a novice. The truth is, you will fail at least a few times in your life, especially if you plan to do a PhD. It’s all part of the learning experience. It’s not about the act of failing, though; it’s about what you do afterwards.

When I started my PhD, I thought I knew how to write well and how to present information so that the general public could understand it. I hadn’t really worked with so large a project before, but I thought it wouldn’t be too different from smaller projects. It is quite different, actually, as I found out not long after starting. I would create something that I thought would hold up, but when I’d meet with supervisors or peers to go over it, it would be torn to shreds with new ideas brought in to replace it. Every time this happened, I felt like I had failed and like my work would never be good enough. Emotions of embarrassment and failure flowed through me, and I felt that this reflected on me as a person. It’s hard to have something you’ve worked so hard on for so long ripped to pieces in a matter of minutes.

However, you can’t let your emotions get in the way of your work. If you let the criticism get to you on a personal level, it’s not going to help you on a professional one. I know now that constructive criticism is actually a great thing if you allow it to be, and it has since taken my work to incredible levels, as can be seen in two prime examples of my own finest failures.

My first example is my literature review, which started as a simple endeavor, but eventually turned into a monster of a piece that needed to be taken down about ten notches to actually be worth reading or publishing. My project looks at feral cat management from a social perspective, and I had first delved into the ecological aspects of management, and then followed up with the social aspects. The document was about 21 pages of writing (not including references) and it had no real story. The draft was passed back and forth between me and four supervisors to no end, with constant revisions to incorporate everyone’s opinion. Every time I sent a new version, I felt like a failure. I just could not get it right. In the end it looked as if Frankenstein had written a literature review and sent it in for publication.

After submitting the document to a journal, it was quickly annihilated in the review process. The only saving grace was that the editor thought the topic itself was important enough to publish, and so I was granted the opportunity to resubmit it once I had made extensive revisions. It was a hard thing to hear, but it wasn’t unexpected. In fact, it gave me an opportunity to start over with a blank slate to rewrite the entire thing into the story that I felt best represented my project. My supervisors seemed much more impressed with this version, as did the journal, and it was eventually accepted for publication.

My second example comes in between that time, while I was working on a poster to present at the School of Biological Sciences Postgraduate Symposium. I was under the impression that a poster would be easy to put together, but I quickly learned that it is a true challenge to summarise a portion of your PhD and make it understandable to anyone at a glance. I presented my first version to the other SSG members and received an unexpectedly large amount of constructive criticism.

 It was embarrassing, and the fact that my poster had managed to confuse everyone in my own lab was horrifying. It felt like I had failed yet again at something I thought I was good at. I stumbled away from that meeting quite defeated, but I gathered myself up and I completely reworked the poster for a second time. I showed it to my supervisors this time, but it now had the opposite problem. I had taken out so much of what I had thought was confusing, and instead managed to make a very vague display that lacked any real information about the story. Once again, I felt humiliated. How I could mess this up twice?

I took it away for a third time…and then for a fourth time, and then a fifth time, and finally, for a sixth time. Each revision felt like another failure, and another thing I just couldn’t get right. By the time the sixth version was completed, I was spent. I just hoped that people would now somehow understand what I was working on.

Surprisingly, my poster ended up being one of the winners that day. It was surreal to be considered good enough to win after weeks of feeling like I had failed at every turn. I was certainly pleased, but to me the win went out to everyone who took the time to look at my work and give me the constructive criticism that I needed to make it a success.

It is a humbling experience, and it takes time to recover from feelings of embarrassment and failure. However, everyone who has done a PhD has felt that way at one point or another. The trick is to not let it get to you, and to continue to push through. At the same time, stay true to your own vision. Take notes on what people feel could be improved upon, and then figure out how best to incorporate each of those points into your next version. No one knows the story you want to tell as well as you do, but trust that they will help you to tell that story a little bit better each time.