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.
With a 3-campus structure and one of the most diverse global peer groups, INSEAD attracts applicants with strong cultural intelligence. But in any learning curve, there might be assumptions, faux pas, or strategies that might have led you down a path of failure.
None of the failures is final.
It is a feedback on changing direction.
If you can honestly own up to a failure and then extract wisdom from the event, you would stand out in the competitive INSEAD MBA application pool.
Set the Context – Opening Paragraph
Any complex narrative needs to set up the context. For deal negotiations, the line, “As a business negotiator from Brazil, I worked with <y> - my Korean employer,” sets the context and indirectly hints at the applicant’s cultural fluency to be assigned a cross-cultural negotiation role.
Cultural Dissimilarity – First Lesson on Deal Making
Failing to read the style of negotiation prevalent in a Latin American country is what I have quoted as a learning curve that cost the applicant a deal. And the assumption didn’t arise from textbooks.
The applicant’s experience anchored his assumption that a liberal style of negotiations – directly with the primary stakeholders, even bordering on dominating the conversation, was sufficient to close the deal.
I have used a used a W-pattern essay strategy, where the first half of the essay is all about the applicant’s winning streak with the line:
By negotiating in Spanish and Portuguese, depending on the stakeholder’s nationality, I found receptive ears to <y’s> plan on generating jobs, and sponsoring Science and Math education programs in return for accessing the Latin American market.
Without wasting any words, I quote the applicant’s belief:
Since Latin America has a belief in a dictatorial style, over the length of consensus-building that is a trademark of a democratic government and corporate cultures in South Korea, I mimicked the Latin American ethos with Colombian negotiators
These beliefs need not be accurate, but by quoting the belief of the applicant, the failure of the deal in the 2nd half would become evident.
Stress Statement
The best way to answer an MBA application essay question is by quoting parts of the essay prompt.
I have added “tremendous stress” to answer the essay question.
When they walked out, I was under tremendous stress to make a comeback. With long periods of pauses, I slowly but steadily began talking to key influencers in the team.
Stress is the keyword, and the failure arose from an assumption the applicant made about a negotiation style.
He generalized the style by region, without breaking down the country's geopolitical developments.
That is the wisdom, the applicant is extracting from the deal failure.
By sharing his wisdom, I am showing the applicant’s intellectual readiness – a trait that is highly valued at INSEAD MBA.
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 failure as a theme.
