At the beginning of my second year at the University of Cincinnati, I decided to change my career trajectory. Through the wins and failures of my first year, I had discovered I had a passion for marketing, a curiosity around the psychology of how people think, and a skill in analytics. I switched majors from speech pathology to marketing. As this class was centered around how some of the greatest failures can lead to some of the greatest wins, this seemed like the class for me. It allowed me to explore the field of marketing, I was able to look at different marketing techniques and how companies dealt with failure and then moved on to succeed. These were all valuable things for me to learn, but the best part of this class was what we learned about failure and the skills we acquired. Due to the fact that the class was centered around failure, it was a recurring theme in our lessons. One of the biggest takeaways from the class was for me is that failure is not the opposite of success, instead it is stagnation. There is always the possibility of success if you take the risk and try, but there is a 100 percent chance of failure, if you are afraid to try at all.
In the spirit of trying something new, we did a “bucket list project” over the course of the semester. The project entailed myself, and each of my classmates choosing something we wanted to learn, and create a video showcasing our progress over the semester. For my project I chose to learn to play guitar, because it was something important to me and I have always wanted to try, but had put it off as I was unsure about my success. I grew up singing with my mom in church, in the car with the radio, and at any other random opportunity that presented itself. My mom can no longer play guitar because of her arthritis, so I thought that I would learn to play guitar so that we could sing together again. Each week my class would learn new success strategies, that we could incorporate into our video projects. These success skills were not just for my video project, or even for my future marketing adventures. They have become life skills that I will continue to use both here at UC, as well as all of my future endeavors. I will remember that you have to take the risk and try to reach the goal or accomplish something. That you shouldn’t always play it safe as you learn from your mistakes, to make future attempts GREAT.
Below I have the final video for my bucket list project: