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.
For the applicant who started a media company to cross the partisan cocoons that algorithms created, the solution involved hiring journalists with conservative and liberal ideologies.
Persona instead of Fact Statements as the Opening Paragraph
Instead of starting the essay with a fact statement, I have created three personas and captured their thinking with the line:
“At the Thanksgiving dinner, Uncle Pete made a case for Trump; Aunt Eva believed in Vice President Harris, while Uncle Phil preferred a moderate for President – echoing the talking points of the YouTube influencers they subscribed to. “
Motivation behind the Venture
For an entrepreneurial applicant, without revealing the motivation behind the venture, either solving a large societal problem or prioritizing a certain demographic as the beneficiary, the stressful situation that arose would look less persuasive.
The need for the venture arose because the applicant noted that people rarely consumed news or opinion pieces outside their ideologies.
I strategically used a fact statement:
“Only 3% subscribed outside their echo-chamber”
Finding the Common Ground for Consensus
Another big challenge for me as an author was finding the common ground to prioritize policy, priority, or beneficiary that both liberal and conservative viewers/readers agreed on.
The welfare of veterans was a theme that cut across American politics.
The wars supported by the American government internationally, while deprioritizing the welfare of veterans, were the hook I used in the middle.
Stress Statement
Once I showed how the two ideologues found common ground with one cause, “welfare of veterans”, I introduced the stress-inducing developments.
The pursuit to suppress the news was the cause of concern for the applicant and also revealed a silver lining in the ideological tug-of-war.
I revealed the negative and positive aspects of censoring news with one line:
Our legal team had to challenge several calls to censor the news, and for the first time, we realized that left and right reached the same conclusion
Narrative Style
I have used personas in the opening paragraph to turn the essay into a journey of recognizing the different ideologies a single family inherits. By transitioning from a family to a world problem, the essay captures the universality of the problem.
I also wanted to show the applicant’s purpose, responsible leadership and cultural fluency (awareness and study of international conflicts), traits valued at INSEAD in tackling a global and universal problem.
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 Consensus Building as a theme.
