Hi everyone! My name is Kate, and I’m a first-year MRADS student majoring in electrical engineering. I’m also an MRADS affinity group leader, recruitment team member, and social media assistant, so I’ve had the opportunity to experience MRADS from many different perspectives. This has taught me a lot, but the most important thing I’ve learned from MRADS so far is the real meaning of success.
Everyone has a different definition of what success is, but we often operate under the idea that success is a measure of the tangible things we’ve achieved: how many awards we’ve won, promotions we’ve received, or projects we’ve completed. My senior year of high school, when I was applying to college, this interpretation of success was at the forefront of my mind. It seemed like all that mattered on these applications were my lists of achievements, the number of extracurriculars I’d been involved in, or my GPA. After I was accepted to UMich and started my application to MRADS, I expected their criteria to be more of the same. I quickly realized, though, that MRADS didn’t look for the applicants who had the longest list of accomplishments. They looked for the applicants who had a passion for learning, who were curious about research, and who would bring a new perspective to the community. It didn’t matter if you didn’t have any research experience in high school as long as you had an ambition to do research in college. In fact, I and most other MRADS students started our freshman year with no prior research experience at all.
This was the first time I began to think of success as something other than an objective measure. MRADS wasn’t focused on what we had already achieved, but on what we could achieve in the future. This new definition of success wasn’t really solidified, though, until I actually started my research. Like many college students, I’ve always dealt with some perfectionism; at first, I carried this tendency with me to my research. In the beginning, it was easy to think that I needed to do everything right so that I could come out of the year with one of the tangible accomplishments that I had valued so much. The truth, though, is that research isn’t about creating the best-looking graphs or writing the most polished paper. At its core, research is about answering questions. And for an undergraduate, research is about learning, whether you’re learning about your field, research as a whole, or even your own interests and goals. Our Director, Dr. Ragan Glover, calls the first year in MRADS a “skill-building year,” which is exactly what it sounds like: a year for building skills and learning how to “do” research, without being afraid of mistakes or failure. There’s no expectation for a first-year student to know how to do everything right away; even my research mentors in the lab emphasize learning from my first research experience.
It’s easy to compare your accomplishments to others’, especially at a school like Michigan where it seems like everyone is constantly achieving. Participating in MRADS, though, has taught me that my success can’t be compared to others’. Success looks different for everyone, and it’s not as measurable as it may seem. In your first years of college in particular, your success doesn’t depend on tangible achievements; it’s defined by your willingness to learn and to grow.
