There is “we” in “ I screwed up”: A night of tales
The Rutgers University Chapter of the Society for Women in Marine Science (RU-SWMS) hosted an event on October 29th, 2025, called the “I Screwed Up” Event. The premise of the event was to discuss our “I screwed up” moments, which we defined as a moment during our professional or scientific career that was unintentional and made you think “oh no, I screwed up!” or “I really messed up”.
It is important to talk about these issues as women, especially in our field, as women are often taught to be ‘perfectionists’ and it can be “taboo” to talk about mistakes. This is why we wanted to have this event for our chapter, especially in a safe environment where we could have open discussions and talk about our mistakes and how we overcame them.
To start our meeting, we had some guiding ideas, which included questions such as:
“Have you ever been in the lab and destroyed/ contaminated a sample(s), were you able to recover them, how did you work around it?”
“Do you have a memory of breaking equipment or thinking you broke equipment, how did you work around it?”
We heard a lot of stories from our members, which included tales of ruining laboratory samples and issues with coding and how our members overcame these issues. Then, we transitioned into topics that included talking about imposter syndrome and what our members were most afraid of when beginning their academic/professional career. Our members of all career stages talked about how they face imposter syndrome and how they try to move through it, and also talked about how it’s okay to make mistakes. Plus, the faculty in the room talked about how they still often make mistakes. All of our members were able to share their experiences and relate to one another.
After these questions, we then transitioned to making vision boards of our goals and accomplishments for the upcoming year. The thought was that after all of our members went over their mistakes and how we overcame them, we could transition into forward-facing goals and what we wanted to see for ourselves academically and personally in the future. Overall, this event was an excellent way to bring our members together and to both have honest conversations about being a woman in our field and discuss our goals for the future.
Thank you to the larger SWMS Organization for funding our event!
