Kellogg MBA Events - October 2025
In October 2025, Kellogg School of Management is hosting 7 MBA events, comprising 3 virtual events and 4 in-person events.
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Unresolved Trauma: INSEAD Highly Stressful Situation Essay
Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)
It is a myth that financial insecurity will solve the ills of all our lives. It certainly solves one problem – ‘insecurity’, but the feeling never fully disappears even when one reaches the top of the socio-economic ladder.
Business School
MBA Admissions
Consensus Building: INSEAD MBA Highly Stressful Situation Essay
Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)
Any stress emanating from an entrepreneurial experience can be expressed through financial constraints, technological restrictions, or market dynamics.
The market dynamics is a broad bucket that can also include user behaviour.
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MBA Admissions
Challenging Stereotype: INSEAD Highly Stressful Situation Essay
Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)
The stress in an applicant's professional career might arise from the conflict between their beliefs and the conflicting evidence a new finding presents.
Most applicants shy away from sharing such professional examples where their initial belief was challenged.
They don’t want to show that vulnerability.
Business School
MBA Admissions
Deal Failure: INSEAD Highly Stressful Situation Essay
Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)
Applicants hesitate to mention their missteps in the highly stressful situation essay. Although there is a separate strengths and weaknesses essay, INSEAD has removed the requirement to mention failures from the application essay questions.
Failure – A Common Reason for Stressful Situations
The stressful situation is an excellent space to mention a failure.
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MBA Admissions
INSEAD MBA: Highly Stressful Situation Essay (Impostor Syndrome)
Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)
The INSEAD MBA application highly stressful situation essay could be made personal with trauma and life events that offer the admissions team a perspective about you outside your professional career.
IMPOSTOR Syndrome – A Rarely Used Essay Theme
But a theme that is not often used but has been consistently cited by high achievers is the ‘IMPOSTOR Syndrome’.
Business School
MBA Admissions
MBA Resume Mistake 1: Overdoing Unique Achievements
This is the #1 mistake I see while editing resumes of high-performing applicants. These are your typical Type A candidates who truly have achievements in the top 1 or top 5%, but they also have experiences as individual contributors that are not as significant. But it had a huge impact on the learning curve and their growth as a specialist.
I see 3 insecurities that are driving the exaggeration.
MBA Admissions
2:3 Strategy - How to Improve Admission Chances to Harvard and Stanford MBA
This Strategy is not for those who are only targeting HSW schools. That is Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. The Strategy applies to anyone who thinks that HSW schools are stretch schools and require considerable planning.
Let’s go back to the 2:3 or the 3:2 Strategy
2:3 or 3: 2 Strategy
Typically, applicants target 5 to 7 schools. Of the seven schools, 5 are schools in the top 10, with 2 or 3 from Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. A big mistake that applicants make is to target Harvard and Stanford in one round itself.
MBA Goals Essay - Choose one of 7 Identities
We are deeply influenced by our identities, and they are not stagnant. The biggest predictor of a person’s likelihood that they would volunteer for a cause is the identity they strongly believe they belong to.
When you mention your plan in your MBA Goals Essay or how you will contribute to the school community through school clubs and consulting engagements, deeply think about which identity resonates most with you. The authenticity in your writing will show if you care about your identity.
MBA Admissions
MBA Essay - What is a sense of Belonging
There is a broad set of literature on what it means to ‘belong’ from psychological development to cultural engagement to inclusive language to other niche inclusion and social psychology principles.
At its core, we feel a sense of belonging when the culture, team, or group makes us feel heard, connected, and supported.
We don’t feel a sense of belonging when there is a threat to our safety, identity and culture.
In this MBA essay writing tip on how to capture a sense of belonging, I cover:
MBA Admissions