Matt Kaufman Sees Growth, Not Failure

Dear incoming honors students,

Hello! My name is Matt Kaufman. I’m a sophomore member of the Honors College, currently in between majors, and a member of the 2018 Presidential Scholarship Award Cohort. But enough about me. I want to congratulate all of you! You’ve all made it out of high school, been accepted into the BGSU Honors College, and begun your story as a college student! You’ve officially started your life as a young adult, and that in and of itself is a hard-fought battle that you have already won.

As you read these letters and other informational material, you will find no shortage of praise for the Honors College at BGSU. It’s been a prestigious model for many other universities’ honors colleges since its inception, and the sheer amount of opportunities which it provides to all of you is invaluable, to say the least.

That’s not what I’m writing this letter about.

I want to write this letter about something you might not hear all that often when first embarking on you journey through secondary education. You see, one of my great joys in life is getting to know other people. I like to understand what a person is thinking, know what makes them tick, and learn what thoughts rest on their mind the most. That being said, after two months of talking with many other students and staff in the Honors College (and throughout the rest of the university) as well as taking time for some self-reflection of my own, I can with full confidence share the information that I am about to share with you. It’s not something that’s talked about a lot, but it’s something I know that I would have liked to have heard before I started my college career:

While you are in college, you are going to fail. We all are going to fail at some point, and that’s perfectly okay.

Hearing those sentences might scare you, and that’s understandable. Most of us have a very negative stigma towards failure. We might see failure as an ultimate end; something we hope will never happen and something that we dread when it finally arrives. Failure can appear to be menacing and degrading, but by far, the most common misconception we have about failure is that it defines us.

However, that’s exactly what all of these ideas are: misconceptions. Like I said before, failure is inevitable for everyone. As honors students, we often feel like we’re always being viewed under a magnifying class with all of the deadlines, projects, and other responsibilities we are expected to fulfill. It’s easy to think that one slip-up will push us to the back of the pack and make us less deserving of our honors status. That’s atelophobia my friends. It’s the fear of not being good enough, and almost every honors student has dealt with it at some point.

In truth, our failures don’t define us. If they did, the names and deeds of people like Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and Walt Disney would have never seen the light of day. No, failure is not what defines your worth, but how you recover from your failures.

There are only so many ways to put the phrase “learn from your mistakes”, so I hope you indulge me in my interpretation of the phrase. As you may have already noticed, people often use the word “career” to describe the time we spend in college, but I prefer to look at the college experience more as a collection of short stories. In this case, it would be easy for many of us to place failure at the end of our stories as the bitter resolution to our tragic tales. The true key to success in college (and in life), however, is to view our failures as the inciting incident in our stories. Rather than closing the chapter, failure should be seen as a catalyst. It’s the pivotal event that propels the protagonist (that’s you) into action! It is from that point that we can grow past our mistakes, learn from them, and further solidify our own inner strength (and unless your story is a Shakespearean tragedy or a George R. R. Martin novel, chances are, you will most likely not die along the way).

Yes, we all will stumble during our time in college, but what we will be remembered by is how we continue to persevere in spite of the obstacles we face. As the old Japanese proverb goes, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” If nothing else, the most general goal of going to college is self-growth, and we can’t grow if we don’t make mistakes. You are not any less valuable because of your failures. If anything, the experience of failure makes us all stronger and wiser people.

While I’ve made it clear that failure isn’t something that we should fear, I also understand that not all of us are as well-equipped to deal with our failures on our own at this age. I know I sure wasn’t my freshman year. It’s for that reason that you all are so fortunate to be members of the Honors College. One of my favorite parts about this community is just how caring and understanding every single student, professor, and advisor is. They all know that you worked your hardest to get here, and they want nothing more than to see you succeed.

The important thing to remember is that you deserve to be here (honors admissions are not taken lightly, you know)! Every single person you will meet in the Honors College deserves to be here, and they have all had their fair share of failures. I can promise you this: if you ask, every student and staff member in the Honors College will always try to help you soar past your failures like they did theirs in whatever ways that they can. From my experience, no other college or community like this can be found at this scale anywhere else on campus. I, as well as many others, would not be where we are today without the Honors College’s sincere devotion and guidance towards our growth and success as individual people.

Before I wrap up, let me make it abundantly clear that I’m not a big fan of quotes. I know I’ve already used one (and frankly, I couldn’t tell you why I don’t like them), but I normally have never really found myself too drawn to them. However, I want to end this letter by sharing a quote from a song with you which I believe perfectly surmises the nature of the Honors College and the notion that all of us will grow past our failures together:

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone

Welcome to BGSU.

Sincerely,
Matt Kaufman