LBS MBA Essay 2: What Makes you Unique (200 Words)
Adaptability and Resilience are now the most bastardised traits that applicants highlight as their uniqueness.
In psychological contexts, there are nuanced differences between coping with stress vs adapting to stress, vs. remaining resilient throughout a stressful scenario.
In our modern workplace, where technology, markets, and strategies change at a spectacular pace, understanding the difference between each term, even if it is for an essay, would help you choose the best example for your uniqueness narrative.
Coping vs. Resilience vs. Adaptability
Coping is an individual’s acceptance that they don’t have the tools, mentorship, or strategies to manage an adverse outcome.
Resilience is an individual’s persistence through an adversity, with or without the support of mentorship, that could help the person come out of the adversity. Most of the time, the person is pushing through the negative outcome without fully recognizing their weakness, the factors that caused the outcome, and a life lesson that could help them prevent such an outcome in the future.
Adaptability mostly refers to Psychological flexibility, where the person accepts the adversity, remains present in the current moment, evaluates the problem, and commits to an action that could help the person come out of the adversity. The full awareness of the situation helps the person find life lessons from the negative outcome.
What makes Adaptability important for Uniqueness?
What makes adaptability a unique trait is that the person is fully aware of the uncomfortable internal experience while remaining focused on actions that have no guarantee of overcoming the adversity. The mindset helps the person push through several wrong starts and helps them find a solution for themselves, the client, the team, or the community.
Case Study: Adaptability in Career
One applicant found adaptability as a unique trait when his Olympic hopes died from an injury. The pivot from training every day for the goal he loved as a kid to training every day to be a technologist had many parallels. With a humanities background and a spark of Math genius in high school, the awareness of his strengths and the disappointment of his crashed dream didn’t deter the applicant from finding his footing in product development. When his peers were let go during the great shakedown of AI in 2024, he earned two promotions. The uniqueness of his trait was in his adaptability.
Case Study: Adaptability in Product Management
Facing setbacks was not just a personal virtue. The team’s 5-month testing of an LLM model was disrupted by the entry of DeepSeek. Without rushing to blame anyone, he took ownership and pivoted the team to test the open-source model for their banking product.
Eventually, the team chose a mix of two models. For any other leader, testing and choosing between LLM models at a breakneck pace would have been a highly stressful scenario, as the choice of the technology had a direct impact on the release of three products that were dependent on the testing. But the applicant’s adaptability was a standout quality that was highlighted in the recommendation letter as well.
Read F1GMAT’s LBS MBA Essay Guide, where Atul Jose, the Founding Consultant of F1GMAT's and the Author of F1GMAT's essay guides demonstrates how to write the uniqueness essay, with adaptability as a theme.
Reach out to Atul Jose to collaborate for your LBS and T20 MBA or Master's essays
