How to stop beating myself up over mistake?

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imsimplynothere

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I just started a PhD program at a strong school, but was recently doing research as an undergraduate. My mentor at my old inst. thinks I'm this exceptional student with a lot of potential. He's always going on to me about how I'm one of the top undergrads he has worked with. I completed a series of studies in the lab, which we're now submitting for pub. However, a month ago I noticed that I made a mistake in a prompt that participants read in the latter study. Fortunately, this mistake didn't seem to effect the results (we replicated our previous findings and found what we we're hypothesizing). However, I feel as though I've let my mentor down. Although it wasn't ideal, he said that it likely wouldn't be a big deal and that the paper should be fine. However, he's always thought of me to be this exceptional student, but now I feel like a failure more than anything, especially since it was such a careless error that more attention to detail could have prevented. I've been making good progress in my new program, but my mistake is still bugging me quite a bit. Thanks for listening... or rather, reading.

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Recognize the circumstances surrounding why the initial error was made in the first place, do your best not to repeat the mistake in the future. Get more peer editing in the future before sending something out into the public sphere for consumption. You made a mistake in undergrad which doesn't appear to have had any impact on the results of your results. Own your mistake, recognize it and move on. Beating yourself up over it doesn't achieve anything for yourself and only distracts you from your current goals and progress. If you need to make a formal apology to your mentor do so, otherwise live and learn.
 
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