The nature of resumes means that most people only choose to highlight their successes and wins, but rarely the work, effort, and failures on the way. I think this creates an unhealthy culture of idolizing perfection and sets unrealistic standards for what ‘real success’ should look like.
I first came across failure resumes on, jzhao.xyz, an internet inspiration of mine, check out his failure resume here.
My intention behind failure-resume comes back to the principle of humility. In a way, it reminds me that the past wasn’t easy, and isn’t to be taken for granted. And at the same time, it tells me everything’s okay even when things are going sideways. In a culture where everything is supposed to be easy and effortless, where you’re just supposed to be good enough, my failure-resume tells me no. It’s okay that things are hard sometimes.
And my fear of failure, or what I perceive as weakness, shouldn’t stop me from chasing those hard things. Rather, it is the fact that they are hard, that makes them worth chasing.
So in this note, I talk about the downtimes, the struggles, and the pain, in the hopes that I reflect on those moments and look upon them kindly. Not as bad times but as opportunities that have brought me to where I am now.
2023
- 07 June 2023: Rejected from the Open Government Products Internship
- Maybe my timing was wrong, I did apply for the August batch, when I could only be there from July to September
- Or maybe I messed up my coding interview by not checking for performance. Oops? Not bad though, this was the first coding interview I’ve ever done, and I got a decent 75% overall.
- Sometime in April: Rejected from the Summer of Protocols
- This was a real blow because the work over at Happily Ever After, I thought was super aligned to the work - given that we’re essentially trying to build self-organizing healthcare.
- Also I spent a lot of time reworking my entire website for it, but I suppose that is useful in any case
2022
- 11 November 2022: Rejected from the Polaris Fellowship by EF