I failed Electrical Machines.
Not a quiz. Not a lab. The course.
At the time, it felt catastrophic. Electrical Machines wasn’t just another subject in my program, it was the program major. The kind of course that decides who belongs in electrical engineering and who doesn’t.
When I saw the result, my first thought wasn’t about credits or re-registration. It was simpler and crueler: maybe this is proof I was never meant to be here.
I remember exactly where I was when it sank in. Sitting alone, laptop open, refreshing the portal even though I already knew the outcome wouldn’t change. Around me, life went on. People laughed. People planned internships. People moved forward. One grade became louder than years of effort.
No one prepares you for how silent failure is in engineering. We talk endlessly about resilience, but only after success. We celebrate the comeback stories once they’re neat and inspiring. What we don’t talk about is the moment before that, when failure feels like exposure.
I kept replaying things I had heard in that department, how Electrical Machines was a “weed-out” course, how people joked that it sorted out who was really cut out for core electrical work. Sitting there, I didn’t hear it as a joke anymore. I heard it as a verdict.
What surprised me most was how common my story was once I finally said it out loud. Seniors admitted they’d failed courses, too. Friends shared transcripts they’d hidden for years. Professors told me about multiple classes they’d barely survived. The myth that “real engineers don’t fail” dissolved the moment I stopped protecting it.
Failure didn’t disqualify me, but silence almost did. If you’re reading this while staring at a result you wish you could erase, here’s the one thing I want you to do: separate your performance from your potential.
A grade measures what happened in one system, at one time, under one set of constraints. It does not measure curiosity or persistence, which, inconveniently, are the exact skills engineering actually requires.
I passed Electrical Machines the second time. But more importantly, I stopped letting one subject decide whether I belonged in the field at all.
