Failure Essay Question

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.

vex10

Full Member
Joined
Jun 13, 2025
Messages
13
Reaction score
3
Hey does failing in writing a million dollar grant (messed up a crucial component of the grant after writing like 30 pages of it...) for my city's department of public health (really specific community within this DPH) and connecting that to a bigger population I work with and how I have problem solved and repivoted my role/expertise taking feedback from supervisors, my feelings of disappointment but quick pivoting etc. make an interesting failure essay for an adcom?

just want some thoughts.
 
Not sure what "messed up" means. Did you accidentally delete it or omit it and submit without the necessary element or did you you submit and not get funded because the grant was poorly written, or just not scored high enough?

What did you do about this failure? Did you get back on that horse? Did you learn something you could apply the next time you were submitting a grant? I'm trying to figure this out.
 
It's somewhat difficult to parse exactly what's happening based on your description, but you didn't technically "fail" anyone in taking a big swing and missing, especially if there was no expectation that you would succeed in the first place. At this level of education to say you failed an entire population is a little grandiose... and even that is an understatement.

At least, no more a failure than MLK Jr. for not ending racism, or Gandhi for not ending colonialism. Can't solve poverty with the stroke of a pen, as much as I would like to personally believe that.

Many "failures," in their attempts to inspire action in themselves and others, can be more consequential than small "successes" that concede the status quo.

Be proud that you tried. Not a lot of people do. And whoever's up there knows—it doesn't make you a ton of friends either. Good for you.
 
Not sure what "messed up" means. Did you accidentally delete it or omit it and submit without the necessary element or did you you submit and not get funded because the grant was poorly written, or just not scored high enough?

What did you do about this failure? Did you get back on that horse? Did you learn something you could apply the next time you were submitting a grant? I'm trying to figure this out.
Hey yeah, messed up as in I forgot some key financial details and a signature that was important and the entire process was rushed so my supervisors gave me something and wanted me to do it in like a week so i grinded so hard to kind of enmesh myself in the administrative infrastructure for a few days and do my due diligence in research (on top of documents they provided me from past successful grants and our narrative for the grant) and it ended up being rejected a week later by the BJA. I thought of it as a failure since it was a timely necessity as the dept. i worked for within my city's DPH is really poorly funded and they had to fire some ppl to make funds for the purpose of the grant as a result of us not getting accepted (in the past the grant has been accepted) so i felt like i failed a load of ppl. My repivoting was not really within the grant realm, but I understood the mistake I made (a very simple one) and pivoted to strengthening my department's national ties to other DPHs in other states amongst other "higher" impact activities for the dept. that indirectly helped us strengthen our ties to other state programs that could get us funding in the future.
 
Last edited:
It's somewhat difficult to parse exactly what's happening based on your description, but you didn't technically "fail" anyone in taking a big swing and missing, especially if there was no expectation that you would succeed in the first place. At this level of education to say you failed an entire population is a little grandiose... and even that is an understatement.

At least, no more a failure than MLK Jr. for not ending racism, or Gandhi for not ending colonialism. Can't solve poverty with the stroke of a pen, as much as I would like to personally believe that.

Many "failures," in their attempts to inspire action in themselves and others, can be more consequential than small "successes" that concede the status quo.

Be proud that you tried. Not a lot of people do. And whoever's up there knows—it doesn't make you a ton of friends either. Good for you.
Thank you! yeah I have moved on from it, but I do think its a valid topic for the failure essay. What are your thoughts? I just don't want the adcom to think of me as a bot or someone without a personality if i write about this, but it was meaningful for me.
 
How did the consequences of this failure affect you? Big-ticket grant-writing is difficult, but I agree if someone allowed a novice to write a big-ticket grant without help or oversight, it's not your failure. Can you explicitly tell me what failed? Was it your oversight? Was it hitting deadlines? Was it your explanation or lack of detail (answering questions required of the grant)? Was this mistake avoidable? How do you own this?
 
they helped me tons with all the narrative and prior grant (same one that got accepted), but it was my inability to methodically read the website and grant requirements to 1. include a document that they had given me and 2. not realize that one big component of our narrative for the grant was missing and instead replaced with something we had already requested beforehand in previous acceptance of the grant, which was a huge mistake that I got feedback for from my supervisors (not harsh but still a wake up call). It was embarrassing I would say, my supervisors took responsibility, of course, but I still felt like I had failed in a way. It was definitely an oversight and including a narrative from a previous grant.
 
Thank you! yeah I have moved on from it, but I do think its a valid topic for the failure essay. What are your thoughts? I just don't want the adcom to think of me as a bot or someone without a personality if i write about this, but it was meaningful for me.

Substantively, I think you were set up to fail by being asked to fulfill a mission-critical task for the institution without the time, guidance, or wherewithal to actually execute it.

Procedurally, if the grant is as important as you say it is, it probably would not have been assigned to you in the first place, but suspending my disbelief for a second, there would still be like at least 5 additional employees up the chain responsible for coordinating, receiving, and processing the funds disbursed associated with the grant that would be expecting constant communication from stakeholders anyway... in government, every dollar is basically spent before they ever receive it, so awards like this become financial games where you just match dollar amounts to numerical buckets.

It would be really weird for anyone up this chain to be notified that a new employee was put on this grant project so close to a deadline. It would be bewildering, as a state officer, to have missed a signature somewhere in the 40-page-long agreements we sign and have that be the reason that a multimillion dollar grant is not disbursed...

I'm an applicant so I'm not claiming to speak from the perspective of an evaluator here, but are you sure this is what you want to highlight?

I know that the latent message you're trying to send here is that you can only fail this hard when you're really important... but this isn't like a "whoopsie, got a W because I didn't know how to study, I'm such a silly goose," apparently, several people were fired from their jobs and potentially thousands of individuals expecting to receive healthcare from a program funded by this grant now have you to thank for a blatant oversight. Like, yes, you do have to be important to fail this hard, but you also have to be responsible—and based on the way you are describing this, it seems like you did not appreciate the basic seriousness of what you were doing.

I think it can come across as tone-deaf if the ways in which you "make amends" for this have absolutely zero benefits to the aggrieved parties. Several team members were fired and you weren't, even though you made an error that impacts the core of the services your department offers very early in your tenure there? It kind of just sounds like somehow you failed upward and were given even more opportunity to benefit from networking without actually doing anything. I come from government, after all, I know strengthening ties can mean having a drink with someone, or literally just acknowledging them in the sentence I just uttered.

I don't know. I'm not saying that this event was not significant, if formative, for you. I'm just saying it is a difficult narrative to control and you might not have the context in the application to give it the explanation it probably deserves. From the outside, having experience both grant writing and serving in government, there's a lot to this story I'm thinking is either missing or manipulated. You wouldn't happen to have an influential parent or relative, would you?
 
gotcha, ok that makes me reconsider
Substantively, I think you were set up to fail by being asked to fulfill a mission-critical task for the institution without the time, guidance, or wherewithal to actually execute it.

Procedurally, if the grant is as important as you say it is, it probably would not have been assigned to you in the first place, but suspending my disbelief for a second, there would still be like at least 5 additional employees up the chain responsible for coordinating, receiving, and processing the funds disbursed associated with the grant that would be expecting constant communication from stakeholders anyway... in government, every dollar is basically spent before they ever receive it, so awards like this become financial games where you just match dollar amounts to numerical buckets.

It would be really weird for anyone up this chain to be notified that a new employee was put on this grant project so close to a deadline. It would be bewildering, as a state officer, to have missed a signature somewhere in the 40-page-long agreements we sign and have that be the reason that a multimillion dollar grant is not disbursed...

I'm an applicant so I'm not claiming to speak from the perspective of an evaluator here, but are you sure this is what you want to highlight?

I know that the latent message you're trying to send here is that you can only fail this hard when you're really important... but this isn't like a "whoopsie, got a W because I didn't know how to study, I'm such a silly goose," apparently, several people were fired from their jobs and potentially thousands of individuals expecting to receive healthcare from a program funded by this grant now have you to thank for a blatant oversight. Like, yes, you do have to be important to fail this hard, but you also have to be responsible—and based on the way you are describing this, it seems like you did not appreciate the basic seriousness of what you were doing.

I think it can come across as tone-deaf if the ways in which you "make amends" for this have absolutely zero benefits to the aggrieved parties. Several team members were fired and you weren't, even though you made an error that impacts the core of the services your department offers very early in your tenure there? It kind of just sounds like somehow you failed upward and were given even more opportunity to benefit from networking without actually doing anything. I come from government, after all, I know strengthening ties can mean having a drink with someone, or literally just acknowledging them in the sentence I just uttered.

I don't know. I'm not saying that this event was not significant, if formative, for you. I'm just saying it is a difficult narrative to control and you might not have the context in the application to give it the explanation it probably deserves. From the outside, having experience both grant writing and serving in government, there's a lot to this story I'm thinking is either missing or manipulated. You wouldn't happen to have an influential parent or relative, would you?
Gotcha thank you for the detailed response and your thoughts. No, I don't have an influential relative or anything of the sort, I just got the position through applying and reaching out due to my work with a community population. Community partners told me to reach out to join the unique work in that dept. and I did so. I do believe the grant was not in my purview of things I was capable of even fathoming writing at the time, let alone reading the documentation and previous grant narrative to then apply it to this new one. Qualifications-wise I was lacking, I do admit. Yet, my supervisors did review the grant writing while I edited and sent them the final copy and we ended up submitting it and realized only that missing documentation afterward. Regarding the responsibility yes I took full responsibility and even ended up taking some time off of serious projects/proposals as such and repivoted into a new territory. Have I since gone back to grant writing, honestly the answer is no, not because I am scared of doing so, but because I have found value in using my own skillsets in connecting with other state health departments and doing smaller reportings of policy changes my dept. can model kind of.

I'm still not sure if a school would go so in depth to look at my experience moving from this "failure" in the way you excellently did, and I am a person who likes to take risks, but now I am debating whether it is worth it to write it like this. If you pm me I can give you way more details about this grant, since this is a public forum of course!
 
gotcha, ok that makes me reconsider

Gotcha thank you for the detailed response and your thoughts. No, I don't have an influential relative or anything of the sort, I just got the position through applying and reaching out due to my work with a community population. Community partners told me to reach out to join the unique work in that dept. and I did so. I do believe the grant was not in my purview of things I was capable of even fathoming writing at the time, let alone reading the documentation and previous grant narrative to then apply it to this new one. Qualifications-wise I was lacking, I do admit. Yet, my supervisors did review the grant writing while I edited and sent them the final copy and we ended up submitting it and realized only that missing documentation afterward. Regarding the responsibility yes I took full responsibility and even ended up taking some time off of serious projects/proposals as such and repivoted into a new territory. Have I since gone back to grant writing, honestly the answer is no, not because I am scared of doing so, but because I have found value in using my own skillsets in connecting with other state health departments and doing smaller reportings of policy changes my dept. can model kind of.

I'm still not sure if a school would go so in depth to look at my experience moving from this "failure" in the way you excellently did, and I am a person who likes to take risks, but now I am debating whether it is worth it to write it like this. If you pm me I can give you way more details about this grant, since this is a public forum of course!

It's OK, the details don't matter.

What I hope to impress upon you is that you need to carry with you a protective skepticism and think critically about your own participation in systems you don't understand and cannot function adequately inside; systems that do have the capacity to harm others materially. These are not learning experiences; they are games being played with people's lives.

This is going to draw at least a few cringe responses, but it's been my experience that physicians, yes, physicians—under heavy workload can and will ask you to do things in the hospital that are inappropriate. It's 1000% your responsibility to have boundaries. Boundaries aren't for other people to "respect," they're internalized algorithms that you use to determine your own behavior given some set of circumstances.

My first time shadowing in the ED, at ~19, I met the attending for the first time at the transfer bay, as a drunk patient was arriving with a laceration across his forehead, something like 6 or 7 inches across. The attending shuffled the patient into the hallway only a few feet away from the door, asked for a laceration tray, and asked me if I knew how to tie a surgeon's knot. I said no. My heart at this point is absolutely beating out of my chest: I had never seen so much blood before, and was trying hard not to pass out. Once he tied two or three knots, he looks up, smiles, and says "OK! Let me know when you're done," and drops the needle holder and forceps in my hands and just straight up leaves. I literally just met this guy. I was a stranger off the street, not even credentialed at that hospital—I made contact with him through a resident I knew who had rotated under him. I was in such disbelief I even stepped to the side to see if he had really rounded the corner, or if this was some kind of test.

Let's just say you'd think I had Parkinson's as I took hesitant bites out of this patient's face, who was wide awake and could see the sheer terror in my eyes, even through a mask. When I finished, the doctor pulled me aside and called me a plastic surgeon in training. I spent the next 5 minutes hyperventilating; and the next several months feeling like I'm playing a game of charades—performing procedures I shouldn't have, with only verbal instructions on what I should be doing.

10 years later, I have grown to see this situation differently. At the time, I thought I must have demonstrated a lot of competence for a licensed physician to trust me like this. I thought that the experiences I had were happening because I was just that smart and it must have been clear to everyone around me.

The truth was that I was being exploited. It was a safety-net hospital, and everyone there—the nurses, the doctors, the staff—knew they were dealing primarily with homeless patients who didn't have the wherewithal to even complain. Many of them were desperate for any treatment. It would be years before I'd come to realize what was really happening. It was funny to the attending: he had me slice open sebaceous cysts, debride osteomyelitis, and perform digital rectal exams. I was being hazed for laughs while I felt I was holding a life in my hands.

At the end of the day, you must realize that your actions have consequences, even if your actions are performed under the pretense of learning. Though you may think anything you're asked to do is appropriate by virtue of who is asking you to perform it, it is up to you to uphold professionalism and think about the patient's best interest, even when the physician (or, I guess in your case, supervisor) you're speaking to is not.
 
gotcha, ok that makes me reconsider

Gotcha thank you for the detailed response and your thoughts. No, I don't have an influential relative or anything of the sort, I just got the position through applying and reaching out due to my work with a community population. Community partners told me to reach out to join the unique work in that dept. and I did so. I do believe the grant was not in my purview of things I was capable of even fathoming writing at the time, let alone reading the documentation and previous grant narrative to then apply it to this new one. Qualifications-wise I was lacking, I do admit. Yet, my supervisors did review the grant writing while I edited and sent them the final copy and we ended up submitting it and realized only that missing documentation afterward. Regarding the responsibility yes I took full responsibility and even ended up taking some time off of serious projects/proposals as such and repivoted into a new territory. Have I since gone back to grant writing, honestly the answer is no, not because I am scared of doing so, but because I have found value in using my own skillsets in connecting with other state health departments and doing smaller reportings of policy changes my dept. can model kind of.

I'm still not sure if a school would go so in depth to look at my experience moving from this "failure" in the way you excellently did, and I am a person who likes to take risks, but now I am debating whether it is worth it to write it like this. If you pm me I can give you way more details about this grant, since this is a public forum of course!
Again, this is a collective failure, and I'm not sure that's what is expected from the prompt. The details are important for discussion about how to wordsmith your essay, but adcoms are more swayed by personal failure where you own (not share) the mistake. No, we're not going to investigate your story; this is not an inquisition.

Spanish Inquisition Time GIF


@Goro points out the qualities of resilience and determination. I also emphasize adaptability (what did you do the next time?) and responsibility (the consequences of your mistake), which translates to your acceptance of professional failures.
 
It's OK, the details don't matter.

What I hope to impress upon you is that you need to carry with you a protective skepticism and think critically about your own participation in systems you don't understand and cannot function adequately inside; systems that do have the capacity to harm others materially. These are not learning experiences; they are games being played with people's lives.

This is going to draw at least a few cringe responses, but it's been my experience that physicians, yes, physicians—under heavy workload can and will ask you to do things in the hospital that are inappropriate. It's 1000% your responsibility to have boundaries. Boundaries aren't for other people to "respect," they're internalized algorithms that you use to determine your own behavior given some set of circumstances.

My first time shadowing in the ED, at ~19, I met the attending for the first time at the transfer bay, as a drunk patient was arriving with a laceration across his forehead, something like 6 or 7 inches across. The attending shuffled the patient into the hallway only a few feet away from the door, asked for a laceration tray, and asked me if I knew how to tie a surgeon's knot. I said no. My heart at this point is absolutely beating out of my chest: I had never seen so much blood before, and was trying hard not to pass out. Once he tied two or three knots, he looks up, smiles, and says "OK! Let me know when you're done," and drops the needle holder and forceps in my hands and just straight up leaves. I literally just met this guy. I was a stranger off the street, not even credentialed at that hospital—I made contact with him through a resident I knew who had rotated under him. I was in such disbelief I even stepped to the side to see if he had really rounded the corner, or if this was some kind of test.

Let's just say you'd think I had Parkinson's as I took hesitant bites out of this patient's face, who was wide awake and could see the sheer terror in my eyes, even through a mask. When I finished, the doctor pulled me aside and called me a plastic surgeon in training. I spent the next 5 minutes hyperventilating; and the next several months feeling like I'm playing a game of charades—performing procedures I shouldn't have, with only verbal instructions on what I should be doing.

10 years later, I have grown to see this situation differently. At the time, I thought I must have demonstrated a lot of competence for a licensed physician to trust me like this. I thought that the experiences I had were happening because I was just that smart and it must have been clear to everyone around me.

The truth was that I was being exploited. It was a safety-net hospital, and everyone there—the nurses, the doctors, the staff—knew they were dealing primarily with homeless patients who didn't have the wherewithal to even complain. Many of them were desperate for any treatment. It would be years before I'd come to realize what was really happening. It was funny to the attending: he had me slice open sebaceous cysts, debride osteomyelitis, and perform digital rectal exams. I was being hazed for laughs while I felt I was holding a life in my hands.

At the end of the day, you must realize that your actions have consequences, even if your actions are performed under the pretense of learning. Though you may think anything you're asked to do is appropriate by virtue of who is asking you to perform it, it is up to you to uphold professionalism and think about the patient's best interest, even when the physician (or, I guess in your case, supervisor) you're speaking to is not.
Thank you for this golden advice, its rare for me to see such advice tbh and I appreciate this so much. I have reframed my essay to speak more personally to my own confusion and the deeper failure being insecurity in looking dumb, and failure being my pride and fear. The example you gave from your own experience was super visceral to me, so thanks for that. I'm shocked that a doctor made you do all that that too at a safety-net hospital using the status of the patient populace to not provide them the best, most qualified care. It is truly revolting! I work w/ same population as you on that front and from the relationships I have cultivated with these people, learning about the poverty cycle they go through just to access sub par care, its demeaning to me when I hear such stories. I hope that the healthcare system can change in the future so that no more have to go through this.
 
Again, this is a collective failure, and I'm not sure that's what is expected from the prompt. The details are important for discussion about how to wordsmith your essay, but adcoms are more swayed by personal failure where you own (not share) the mistake. No, we're not going to investigate your story; this is not an inquisition.

Spanish Inquisition Time GIF


@Goro points out the qualities of resilience and determination. I also emphasize adaptability (what did you do the next time?) and responsibility (the consequences of your mistake), which translates to your acceptance of professional failures.
I have changed my essay to focus on the individual failure for sure, thank you for this!
 
Top