B

A loud banging noise suddenly rang out in the lab I had recently joined as a graduate student, and I realized I was to blame. When placing tubes into a centrifuge ( 离心机) , I had failed to make sure they were perfectly balanced. My mistake was clear the second I turned it on. I couldn't switch it off until the cycle finished, so I stood there, frozen, praying the machine wouldn't fall off the desk.

Having always been a top student, I expected excellence from myself. Any misstep, in my view, was a sign that I might not be cut out for this work. But the lack of a clearly defined curriculum in graduate school meant I did not always know the rules. Suddenly, I was expected to build everything from nothing, trying to steady myself on a rocking boat.

As the months went on, the mistakes piled up. When my first attempt at DNA extraction failed, I feared I might never get it right. The fear deepened when a couple more attempts failed. Even though such moments are a normal part of graduate school, I had trouble accepting my errors and moving on. As I kept making mistakes, it felt like all eyes were on me, judging me. The fear grew so strong that I began to pull back and stop trying so hard. I didn't want to give others evidence of my incompetence.

Then, one night I had a dream. That dream showed me something I hadn't been able to grasp in waking life: I needed to treat myself with the same understanding I would offer a dear friend. If a friend had made a mistake, I would have told them to take it lightly, and even to welcome it as a necessary part of learning. That realization led me to change my reaction after something went wrong. I also started to log my mistakes so I could learn from them. I would note whether there was something I could have done differently. Then I would move on.

As I became more comfortable with the idea of making mistakes, I opened up with peers and professors. What I heard from them was striking: Almost all of them had committed mistakes-small or large. The reality is, we are all going to mess up. I now realize that's OK, even necessary.