Failure and success

Many people have heard the phrase, "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

However, it is easier said than done to learn from mistakes and failure. One of the most important parts of being an engineer isn’t intelligence, skill, or even personality; it’s perseverance and determination. Here is a story of resilience, hard work, and persistence from our very own Professor Juno at Virginia Tech.

Professor Juno is currently teaching Computer Science and working towards their PhD. They studied computer science education as an undergraduate and continued to pursue a PhD while teaching Computer Science. 

To them, success can be defined as anything you want to put your mind to. Success looks different for everyone; for some, it can simply be pursuing their degrees, while for others it might be learning and successfully understanding all the material. Juno defines failure as something that can stem from not trying or even trying all alone. 

As an educator, Professor Juno has seen instances when a student may be struggling and either feels scared to reach out or simply doesn’t have the time. This is where failure occurs, in part due to not only a lack of accountability for their own learning, but also due to the educator not necessarily cultivating an environment in which students have no reservations about seeking help. Here, both the student and educator would need to work together for a successful outcome, at least in education.

According to Juno, they have experienced rejection throughout their academic career. Their work in broadening participation spaces and DEI accessibility, which is often undervalued in the current community of engineering and computer science, has in part led to rejection. Additionally, with the rise in AI, it is increasingly competitive to gain funding for research projects without ceding to artificially including it in their work. For Juno, a difficult aspect of this failure was hearing from conferences that state that they value diversity and accessibility, yet aren’t satisfied with how their research would benefit the general public rather than the minority they state they want to value.

Instead of giving up, Juno received advice from their peers and advisors. 

“Do you know how every PhD person finds their niche and area of expertise? When they give you comments on something from their area of expertise, you take those comments and think about them. And when they give you feedback outside that niche, you take it with many grains of salt.”

Sometimes when we receive negative feedback or response, it’s important to recognize who or why they believed those things. Sometimes failure can result because the audience doesn’t recognize or prioritize what you are working towards.

The peers also stated that, when rejected, you have to just keep putting in effort. When they were in undergrad, they were very committed to an issue that became their first real paper that was eventually published at Respect 2025, a Computer Science conference focused on accessibility and equitability. However, before it was finally published, the paper had been rejected five times. It was originally a 200-page senior thesis that they had started in the Fall 2023. The paper consisted of a survey of minoritized students across the computer science field and their recommendations.

While Professor Juno stated that they were told it was “the most comprehensive senior thesis this department has seen in the last 10+ years”, the manuscript was unfortunately not uniformly praised. That did not stop them, though; they continued to go to conferences and stuck to their convictions. As a PhD student, they told me, “Don’t let anyone tell you that your research is not worthy of students, and by extension, the community that you work with is not worth your time because they absolutely are. I work with neurodivergent students now, and I think that is really, really important.” Though failure is part of the growing and learning experience, never let anyone invalidate the ideas, motivations, and opinions you have.

Professor Juno also left some final pieces of advice to aspiring computer scientists. Firstly, don’t stop reaching out to people. If someone says no, keep trying until you find someone who says yes. Not only that, reach out to your peers and professors in other departments. Take classes in different departments that could help you in your own endeavors. Communication, collaboration, and leadership are just as important as any other skill you could learn in college. And numbers don’t define success at all; focusing on what you like and talking to more people is what can be defined as success.