26A

My most memorable failure was in my first semester in UF. I transferred last year from Santa Fe College and the experience is a very different one. Back when I was in college I knew exactly the amount of time I had to put into a class to get the grade that I wanted. Now in UF, I have to almost double the hours I need to put into a class. In my first semester at UF. I was not aware that the academic course load was on another level. I was expecting some difficulty but not what it turn out to be. I was taking 15 credits in my first semester. Three out of the 4 classes I had were core classes. My core classes were Principles of Finance, Management, and Marketing. The first week of class was okay. Even though some of the professors were intimidating, I still was pretty confident. However, after the first test for each class, I was disappointed. I had a D in my first finance test, a B+ in marketing and  B in management. Since I’m not a student that is used to getting Bs and Ds, I was angry at myself. I could not believe that my first real academic experience at UF was going to be such a bad one.
What I learned from this experience is that I have to study more for classes in UF. Not only my core classes were significantly difficult, but some of the elective classes I had to take were also challenging in many ways. I also learned that in the future when I get to a graduate program, I have to study even more because it only gets harder as time goes by. As for my classes, I ended up getting not the grades that I wanted but at least something better in comparison with my first tests. I learned that by studying harder and showing some interest in my classes is the only way to have better grades in UF.
Failure is one of the things in life that I hate the most. I hate failure because it is something I’m not used to. However is something that is part of life and until some point, it is going to happen. Failure brings more negative things than positive things in the short term. However, in the long run, one day we might reflect on why that specific time we failed was beneficial for us. When I fail at something, I try to remember that it is only for the good. Success is not always guaranteed. I deal with failure by accepting what happened and move on. Then I try to go back and think about what I could have done better. What could I change to avoid that embarrassing situation. When I fail, I feel crushed. I feel that I don’t want to do anything. I usually try to be alone by myself for some time and reflect to control my emotions. This class has changed a lot of my perspective on failure. That is because, in the entrepreneurship world, nothing is perfect and guaranteed. The only thing that we are guaranteed is failure if we don’t do anything about it. I also learned that in order to have success we have to risks. For example, Rony(the chicken restaurant owner)came to class to talk about his chicken restaurant had failure at the beginning. However, he persisted and the situation got better for him. Failure is another way to educate us one way or another.