This article examines student perspectives on academic failure during the first year of postsecondary education. We focus on students' personal definitions, responses to, and strategies for embracing and bouncing back from failure in their first year. In this study, students understood academic failure as a negotiation between self and institution. They articulated clear definitions of failure and offered a variety of strategies and approaches for managing it. Despite this, participants described early failures as destabilizing for their academic futures and highlighted social and institutional dynamics as determining how they approached current and future failures. We ask how institutional and pedagogical approaches might change if we incorporate student experiences of failure and their insights into the structures that govern higher education. The study will be useful to those interested in student perspectives on failure as well as those involved in development of first-year experience interventions.