“Hey, guys,” my officemate doesn’t even look up from his laptop, “does anyone want to go to the co-op this weekend?” The Minnesota Climbing Cooperative (“the co-op,” for short) is his climbing gym of choice. It’s a little more affordable than the Bouldering Project (my home gym), but with generally more difficult route setting, and super flexible hours–perfect for the weird time demands of graduate school. The rock-climbing bug has swept across the US in the past decade, seeming to hit academia especially hard, and my tightly-knit cohort is no exception. Bouldering (shorter walls, no ropes) has been an on-and-off presence in my life since senior year of high school, and I’ve really committed myself to the sport in the past year.

There are a number of proposed reasons why rock climbing has become popular among academics recently. My own peers cite the previously-mentioned flexibility; you’re often only limited to your gym’s opening hours, and indoor bouldering can be done independently, when schedules don’t align. Some report the mental benefits of climbing, that joyful movement reduces stress, improves sleep, and clears your mind. Having a social life and identity separate from being a scientist is a significant factor for others. Not to mention, it’s nice to use one’s problem-solving skills away from the office. 

For me, the one draw to climbing that eclipses all others is that climbing forces me to fail. Alex Honnold, a professional climber perhaps most well known for starring in the 2018 documentary Free Solo, regularly speaks about how climbing has changed his perspective on failure, noting in a 2024 interview that “as a climber, you mostly fail almost all the time.” In this way, climbing allows me to practice resilience. Despite being crucial to science, knowing how to fail is a skill that is, at best, not taught to prospective academics and, at worst, implicitly selected against in PhD admissions.

An entire series of Beyond posts could be written about the present state of graduate school admissions in the US (in fact, a handful have already been written). Every January, concerns over continual increases in applicants for a dearth of positions fly around astro-academia’s current social media of choice, as departments wrestle with trying to find rigorous, equitable, and sustainable ways to conduct PhD admissions. Entwined in all of this is the changing profile of the average admitted graduate student. In a career that already self-selects for high-achieving, driven candidates, the increased competition for PhD positions creates a pool of accepted students with better grades, stronger connections, and more publications (correlated to fewer research road bumps) than ever before. In short, it means fewer grad students have dealt with academic failure in a big way. Combine this with Gen Z’s tendency toward perfectionism (driven, in large part, by social media), and you’re left with admitted students who are disproportionately inexperienced at dealing with setbacks.

The trouble, of course, is that the qualities which make a successful PhD applicant are different (and, at times, opposed) to those which make a successful PhD researcher. Failure is necessarily a part of science, and incremental improvement is necessarily a part of science. If we knew what we were doing, the saying goes, it wouldn’t be called “research.” As such, the onus is on us as scientists to learn how to deal with normal research failure gracefully, and to rebound with ingenuity. Enter climbing. 

In a typical bouldering session, I’ll start by climbing a few routes I know I can do on sight, to get my muscles warmed up, before spending the majority of my time working on “project” climbs. Projects are the routes that are just at the very upper limit of your ability, the routes that force a climber to improve. A given project will often take several sessions to send (complete), if it’s completed at all before the gym re-sets. Oftentimes, this means iterating on your chosen beta (strategy for the climb), to see if a new approach or technique can help you progress further. Some days, you won’t send anything after the warm-up. In the short term, this makes it feel as though you aren’t making substantive progress, despite putting in enormous effort–a feeling that is all too familiar to anyone who conducts research. As in science, however, you’ll eventually hit a breakthrough. You’ll send a grade (level of difficulty) that was once out of reach, or suddenly climb the campus board (where you pull yourself up with just your hands) with ease, or make dynamic moves more comfortably than you ever thought possible. Goals that once seemed distant are right in front of you.

I’ve always known, if only superficially, that failure was a part of life, but climbing has forced me to better understand that failure and success are not in opposition, rather two types of step on the same path forward, both providing key information on the way. The best way to improve as a climber is to spend the majority of your time falling off the wall. It is in this way that climbing reflects the realities of research, and stands in stark contrast to the trend toward perfectionism that permeates graduate school culture. Over time, this type of repeated failure creates a problem-solving mindset. What was once a devastating setback on a research project now feels like an opportunity to look at things a new way, to excitedly try something new. 

Now, I will be the first to say that failure is not unique to climbing, and I certainly will not delude myself into believing that the mental health crisis in academia could be solved with a chalk bag and sore fingers—not to mention the work the climbing community still needs to do to improve accessibility and inclusion. Regardless, I maintain that any hobby which forces a person to face defeat in order to improve would serve any scientific researcher well. I tend to gravitate toward athletics, but this could just as easily be theater, music, fiber arts, and much, much more. Resilience is a hard-won skill, but we know that resilient researchers know how to fail. So, if a friend invites you to the climbing gym this weekend, I hope you’ll give it a try.

Astrobite edited by Diana Solano-Oropeza and Drew Lapeer
Featured image credit: cottonbro studio via Pexels

Interested in learning more? The link between rock climbing and resilience is well documented:

Ionel et al. 2021: Personality, grit, and performance in rock-climbing: down to the nitty-gritty
Obray et al. 2024: Evaluating the Impact of a Recreational Therapy and Rock Climbing Program on Resilience and Self-Efficacy in College Students
Wheatley 2021: Exploring the relationship between mindfulness and rock-climbing: a controlled study