Tell us about a time when you learned from failure - UofT One Idea Application

I should prepare better

In my third year of high school around Christmas time, the school was planning on holding its annual festive assembly. Three people including me, who were on the tech crew for the school, were responsible for setting up the event. I was specifically in charge of consulting with each group that was performing and gathering the songs, as well as finding out what lighting cues they needed. I decided that it would be easiest to meet with each group that signed up and talk to them in person about what they needed. During a meet with everyone, I stated that each group should schedule a meeting with me so I can gather what I need from them and we can set a day to practice. What I failed to do was give clear steps and instructions about how to contact me. This lead to only a couple of meetings and not being able to practice with any of the groups. When the day of the assembly arrived, there had been very little preparation and the assembly was disorganized. Looking back, I realized that I should have had a better system to set up a meeting as well as being more clear and concise when explaining. I took this experience and used it to become much better at being clear and concise when planning, as well as being able to give better instructions. For example, in my final year, I was in charge of meeting with each group for the assembly again, but this time I created a spreadsheet online and emailed it out to each group detailing times for meeting and practice. This made it a lot easier for each group to schedule a meeting, along with making the assembly go off smoothly.

Here is the thing about this presentation. You said that there were 3 of you in the group. That means, there were 3 of you responsible for meeting with the participants of the program. The failure to contact you is a non-issue since there were 3 of you who could have been contacted in several ways to arrange the meeting. This is not a failure based solely on your shortcomings as a leader. This is a group failure. So it does not work so well as a time when you failed as a person. There are 3 people to blame, not one person.

What you need to do is focus on some character building failure, time management failure, social failure, academic failure, or something similar to discuss. It has to be a failure that rested solely on your shoulders. That way the learning experience becomes one that emanated from your actual failure to perform a task that nobody else could help you with. You need to show a sense of maturity or developed insight into your capabilities as a person based on a personality or mindset altering event or time in your life.

@Holt
Thank you. I see what you mean and will try and think of something that rested solely on my shoulders

Merged:

Tell us about a time when you learned from failure - UofT One Idea Application

During my fourth year of high school, in my tech design course, throughout the first half of the course, I would find myself falling behind due to procrastinating. The quality of my projects was going down, and so was my mark. I decided to talk with the teacher about how to start improving again and realised that my procrastination was a symptom of doing well during the start of the course, and then thinking that I could put things off since I thought I knew I was going to do good. Upon discovering this, I decided to start practising more at home and start asking questions when confused in class, as well as asking my peers to review my work before handing it in. I used this experience to become better at managing my time by finding different strategies as to how I can easily manage it, along with not being afraid to ask for help and knowing when to ask for help. For example, when the final project came around, we were tasked with creating a condo to be put on a lot. I was able to break up the project into steps and create a timeframe for each step. This made it easy to manage my time and know when I was behind and needed help from either my teacher or my peers. In the end, my mark improved not only in the tech design course but also in some other courses due to me being able to better manage my time.