“Screw Up” Night @ Robert College

In March 2018, we organized an event called “Screw Up Night” in Robert College. This event was inspired by our alumni Deniz Cengiz, who also organized this in her new school, University of Rochester, and was very happy with the feedbacks.

As the Social Entrepreneurship Club, we are in contact with a lot of social entrepreneurs and there is a common message that we have heard from every single one of them: “You will surely fail and a real social entrepreneur will learn to be okay with that. Just don’t give up.” Having the encouragement to fail and learning to cope with ambiguity is a very important skill especially for our student body as we are encouraged to compete with each other and taught that failure is something that we should try to prevent at all costs. There are times when people experience stress because they are afraid to fail, afraid to “screw up”. However, an environment where people can casually share the moments they failed at something will both help people not make the same mistakes and show them that failure is not the end of the world. So, yesterday was the night to embrace failure.

We listened to amazing stories from Mr. Welch leaving 1000 people under rain due to his miscalculations to our club member Aybala by accident plagiarising the whole essay that she wrote at 3 am. At the end of the day, having seen we are not alone and everyone can ‘screw up’ sometimes, we knew that everyone was feeling better with their failures, more understanding towards them rather than angry.