Embracing Ignorance and Failure Promotes Research Excellence

Abstract

Pursuing research as an undergraduate student deepens and enhances both your college experience and your post college plans. Whether someone hopes to go to graduate school, medical school, or into the workforce, the lessons you learn during a research project will further your abilities and potential. In this essay, we reflect on four lessons that we learned during our first full-time nine-week research project: (1) Do it, (2) Learn to thrive at the interface of knowledge and ignorance, (3) Embrace failure, and (4) Build confidence for the future. We use our experiences to identify key areas of growth, both personal and professional, that we gained as we moved from class-based students to researchers exploring at the edge of current knowledge.