Failure

For the first two to three years at Mines, I felt like I was always failing. Whether it was literally failing a class [1], failing myself when I didn’t understand things in CS, failing to make friends, failing to stay healthy or otherwise.

This may come as a surprise since I often portray a calm and collected persona, but for those three years, there wasn’t a semester where I didn’t think about dropping out or transferring schools. But I kept going.

The OreCart Story

My greatest failure (but perhaps one of the greatest learning experiences) came via the OreCart. The OreCart is a free public shuttle service provided by Mines and the City of Golden. At the time of writing, it has three routes that usually go around Golden 6 days a week.

In the late summer of 2023, Mines and the City of Golden came to us via Innov8x and the McNeil Center (lovely people!) to develop an app that would track the OreCarts so that people could know when they were coming and plan accordingly. This was an incredible opportunity for any students interested. We thought it was the most real app that you could ever make in college, in a class or club. It was a mini startup.

We had a core team of great, great, engineers. Since I was the ACM president at the time, we had the full support of our club and recruited more students to help out. The team developed the app for an entire year. One sentence doesn’t do that justice, but that’s what happened. We had weekly meetings where we were building real software and real, custom hardware solutions. Dorian developed and 3D-printed an entirely custom hardware unit that would go in the buses. Alex linked into that with a tracking system within our UI that he had mostly made. Tyler and I led the team and would step in for any big issues.

However, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows forever. We had two major leadership changes in the Mines administration (one per semester) which brought with it conflicting priorities and timelines. Being the busy students we were, we didn’t get as much done as we could have or should have. I think both parties can take the blame.

Coming into the summer of 2024, we had all gotten internships, some thanks to the OreCart project itself. We were working on improved hardware and better real-time OreCart tracking in the app interface, since our current solution wasn’t quick enough to be usable. We had budgeted the 3 months of summer to finish the project.

One morning, Tyler and I got an unfortunate email from Mines administration: they wanted the app done immediately. I asked them: how soon is immediately? I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but it was literally as soon as possible. Tomorrow. Next week. In the next two weeks. The City of Golden had just received a massive amount of federal funding that they would use as leverage to say: get it done, people want this.

With all of us working internships, this wasn’t going to happen. We had a plan, and it was up in arms. We stopped all development anyways because we were unsure of the future of the project. When Mines got back to us, they had the City of Golden behind them. It seemed a foregone conclusion that we were getting slated. Tyler and I battled for weeks to keep the project: we were trained by investors and entrepreneurs to deliver a presentation proposing that our app would be the solution [2].

Perhaps the slide that undid us was asking for ~$100k [3]: this was a generous estimate toward hiring full time engineers, which is what it would’ve taken to finish the app. They got back to us, telling us that we would’ve beat Downtowner, but Transit was so much cheaper and easy to integrate. So, the end. Tyler and I broke the news to the team, especially Dorian and Alex, who had put their hearts into this for a year.

How to get back up

This is always the hardest part. After so many failures in a row, it just gets exhausting. This sounds cliché, but you have to get back up, even when you feel lower than you ever have before. That’s when you find out your limits and go beyond them.

Talk to people you trust. That’s what friends are for; picking each other up when you fail or feel down! I guarantee there is someone, whether it’s family, friend, coworker, etc, they will care.

Failure doesn’t define you, it builds you. It doesn’t say anything about who you are or who you’re always bound to be; it’s just an opportunity for you to learn and change. Every time you learn and change, you widen your perspectives and horizons.

In the case of the OreCart project, it was an unforgettable college experience. We helped many people (including myself) get internships as a result of it. We learned how to actually engineer things, more than school or clubs could ever teach us. We even learned the cutthroat nature of startups and battling for business.

I’m not bitter. As a joke sometimes, I will be, but ultimately, it’s in the past. It hurt a lot at the time but knowing that we had done everything we could is enough for me now. Knowing that I learned and changed so much from this project for the better is enough.

Failure brings new opportunities too. My old “cofounder” Tyler and I are still working on new startups today - and we can go in with more confidence and our heads held high.

I know it’s tough to fail. And I know repeated failures hurt worse as they add up. But they teach us a lesson and make us stronger. Things won’t always be the way they are.

The light-soaked days are coming. - John Green

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[1]

I failed Calculus II my first semester! Being good at math equating to being a good computer scientist is an old and outdated myth. On a related note, failing a class is much more common that it seems, there’s just a lot of built up and unnecessary shame around it.

[2]

I never signed an NDA, so I feel no guilt in saying we were up against Transit and Downtowner. Having used Transit before, it’s actually a great app. I assume Downtowner is too. We stood no chance.

[3]

I wrote a slide saying that we needed about $100k if the city and Mines wanted the app done as soon as possible, considering we all were working. I take full responsibility for the slide and it’s nobody else’s fault but mine. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.