KAIST encourages scientific inquiry with best 'failure' awards

Official poster for KAIST Failure Week / Courtesy of KAIST

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea's leading science and technology institute, plans to organize an event to encourage its students to embrace failure and fuel their morale, according to the university, Wednesday.

The school said KAIST Center for Ambitious Failure (CAF) will host the first KAIST Failure Week from Oct. 23 to Nov. 3. The two-week event consists of an exhibition, student presentations and special lectures to inspire students, highlighting that they will inevitably encounter failures and challenges but reminding that there is also good in such experiences.

The event's highlight is on Nov. 1 when CAF hosts the Failed Tasks Showdown Contest featuring students sharing on-stage how they screwed up. Held in a standup comedy format, the segment will be emceed by student body ICISTS inviting young scholars who are unafraid to share their bitter failures in private romantic affairs or career-related activities.

Audience members will vote on the contestants to select the most popular failure, the most heartbreaking failure, a failure that needs most cheering up and a failure that was most wisely solved.

CAF said the contest has been arranged to allow the students to joyously share their failures inside the school that at most times teems with competitiveness and pressure.

"It will be an event where students can crack jokes, burst with laughter and sympathize with their peers in a psychologically comforting way," the school said.

The Failure Week will be kicked off by Capture the Failure Moment, a photo exhibition for students who captured moments that convey a sense of failure. The participating photographers' works include a chair fallen backwards on a lawn which was compared to a fallen person in need of someone's help or a treadmill where runners may not actually advance forward but their sweat will somehow pay off.

A droplet accidentally left inside a sample collector which ruined a whole research project and a treadmill that seems to be going nowhere are the subject in some of the photos which students thought delivered a sense of failure in their everyday lives, to be to be exhibited during KAIST Failure Week. Courtesy of KAIST

CAF said it has received from students some 360 such photos and shortlisted 30 that it deemed portrayed the most sympathetic moments. The shortlisted photos were previously obtained by CAF in June when it studied "photo voice," a research project in which it tried to find psychological voices of 31 students who had participated in the research.

The final day of the week will see professors from Barnard College of Columbia University in the U.S. and Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul who will host KAIST Failure Seminar and teach how to deal with failure in a healthy manner.

"KAIST students may be regarded by the public as brimming with achievements and successes but they cannot escape tasting the bitterness of failure," said Jo Sung-ho, director of KAIST Center for Ambitious Failure. "The event will show them how to discover new perspectives and turning points."