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.
But INSEAD’s Highly stressful situation essay is a perfect essay to demonstrate the cognitive dissonance you experienced, the maturity you demonstrated to tackle the new evidence and the insight you gathered from the evidence.
Setting Context – Professional Role
For the applicant, who was the product manager for an AI product, the challenge was in questioning her experience of growing up in a single-parent household as a black woman.
I set the context of her role with this line, “As the Product Manager, my role was to spot biases in all our machine-learning algorithms.“
Provocative Opening Line
The biases of a community, person and most recently Generative AI should be carefully used in the opening line.
The faulty conclusion Generative AI generated during tests reveal such a bias.
Use such provocative opening lines, only if you are from the same ethnicity the conclusion is referring.
"African American fathers are more likely to stop child support than any other ethnicity in the world. I recommend quoting a premium at 20% over $R."
The conflict between the applicant’s lived experience that validates the conclusion and her research that revealed a shocking insight is the ‘tension’ that I created in the essay.
Essays that create doubt in the mind of the reader immediately elevates the storytelling. They will be invested to see what happens.
Historical Biases and Need for Human Intervention in Generative AI
In the insurance industry, the biases from the 19th and 20th centuries continue to keep black communities with low coverage. When approval of insurance and calculation of premiums depend on AI, the originator of biases and prejudices could be an algorithm capable of spreading biases at scale, unless human intervention corrects the bias.
Offering historical context on the origin of the bias was crucial for the essay to connect with the reader.
I have strategically placed the ‘facts’ in the middle with the line, “In 1881, one of America's largest insurance companies, citing a high black mortality rate from poor health from malnutrition, and living conditions, began putting a clause that reduced the value of policies held by Black Americans by 2/3rd”
The applicant’s live experienced influenced her assumptions, but I subtly pointed out her ‘responsible leadership’ – a trait that is highly valued at INSEAD MBA that motivated her to dig deep into the data behind the conclusion.
Stress Statement
The best way to convey the ‘stressful’ experience is to directly quote them in a line, preferably in the middle.
I have used the line, “I felt tremendous stress to validate the statement and let the conclusion be part of our insurance approval framework.”
I have used a used a W-pattern essay strategy, where the sequence of events switches between doubt, insights, doubt and finally a resolution that shows the applicant’s skills in managing a highly stressful situation.
Read F1GMAT’s INSEAD MBA Essay Guide, where Atul Jose, the Author and Founding Consultant of F1GMAT's essay guides demonstrates how to write the highly stressful situation essay, with Challenging stereotypes as a theme.
