You are told (me first) that a student who comes out of school has no work experience. If one can of course rightly complain about its practical non-existence, since it is really necessary, it is a question of distinguishing your professional experience, existing or not, from your other experience, the one you gain access to thanks to your mistakes. And unless you do nothing with your days, you necessarily make them, which is a real experience.
You already have to imagine what experience is compared to the acquisition of knowledge. If you work on a project, you will be confronted with both successes and mistakes that will lead you to the success or failure of your project as a whole. While it is generally agreed that your successes are positive, your mistakes are generally viewed as negative.
In reality, it all depends on what you do with those mistakes and therefore on your state of mind. You can indeed choose to lament your failure, which means that your mistakes will not help you at all. On the contrary, you can also become aware of their interest: following a certain course of action that leads to a mistake can make you realize that you have misunderstood certain aspects of your project. But what about the next time you may have to make the same mistake again?
Tragic Mistakes
Necessarily, one never chooses one's mistakes, they are never conscious. When they lead you to tragedies, like a drunk driver running over a passer-by, you may realize the importance of not doing it again, but it's usually too late to avoid the wrath of justice. So I do not apologize for the mistake at all costs and it is always a question of being as careful as possible: anticipate as much as you can, it will save your ass most of the time.
Inevitable mistakes
If your willingness to anticipate is a positive and very useful approach, you will never be able to anticipate everything for sure, so you will make mistakes, as we all do. You might as well make :
- limit mistakes to the extreme consequences,
- learn from your mistakes when they are inevitable.
This has to become a new mechanism and the best way to move forward intelligently by learning from your mistakes is to avoid making them over and over again through a multitude of opportunities.
The more you multiply projects, the more you will be confronted with new situations that will allow you to discover new mistakes that you should not repeat, as well as situations you have already seen where you can more easily avoid your previous mistakes.
This is exactly what happens in business, but it can be the same for any other project: a job to be completed as part of your studies can therefore be just as interesting an experience as an experience in a company, and it is this awareness that can help you know what to talk about, for example, in a job interview. On a daily basis, not making a mistake again will help you avoid stress and loss of time.