LBS MBA Essay 2: What Makes you Unique (200 Words)
An applicant is unique when their multiple lived experiences through professional and personal roles create a unique profile that is unlike any of their peers.
Most applicants choose to cite professional roles from their full-time or volunteering roles and articulate the influence of their diverse experiences on their thinking and decision-making.
The 1st lived role that differentiates an applicant are narratives that capture two roles.
Case Study: Lived Professional Experience
An applicant, a doctor who served in rural communities, pivoted to a policy role where he advised the city council on improving access to healthcare for low-income families. A surprising parallel existed for patients in rural communities and low-income families, with ‘trust’ in healthcare service at an all-time low. The policy rejection rates from insurers and a history of misdiagnosis were the cause of the discontentment.
The solutions that the applicant suggested came from his experience coordinating with insurers and offering diagnoses for the patients. The follow-up visits were broken, and the policy solution addressed this crucial gap and created a new incentive to allow patients to seek coverage for follow-up visits, regardless of the gap between the first and subsequent visits.
Anyone with only exclusive policy experience would not have brought the perspective of a doctor that the applicant’s lived professional experience offered.
The 2nd lived role that differentiates an applicant is in volunteering.
Case Study: Volunteering Experience (Empathy-Based Solutions)
An applicant from a military family, who created a digital app to report symptoms of PTSD, shared the tendency of veterans to underreport their symptoms. Many such underreporting was cultural, and many were from a lack of insight into what counts as symptoms of PTSD. Only with a haptic feedback mechanism that measured stressors, which correlated with PTSD biomarkers, could the applicant tweak the App and improve reporting. Later, when he volunteered for a non-profit offering counselling for veterans, the App offered in-depth reporting on the biomarkers – an insight that was quoted by lawmakers.
The 3rd lived role that differentiates an applicant is personal.
Case Study: Personal Experience (Flexible Work Culture)
An applicant who is the only caregiver for her ailing father offered a perspective on flexible working hours that were not driven by a day in the office but based on hours every day in the office. This was an unusual request at first, where an employee could choose to work from the office 2 days a week or choose to work four half days in the office.
The flexibility gained company-wide support as working mothers could spend time overseeing the homework or drop their children off at school.
The tweak in policy arose from a necessity, but the applicant interviewed working mothers and built consensus before approaching the senior leadership.
Consensus building outside a professional context is a unique trait when an applicant talks about improving the working conditions of peers or any narrative around change in culture.
Read F1GMAT’s LBS MBA Essay Guide, where Atul Jose, the Author and Founding Consultant of F1GMAT's essay guides demonstrates how to write the uniqueness essay, with resourcefulness as a theme.
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