LBS MBA Essay 2: What Makes you Unique (200 Words)
Interestingly, what makes an applicant resourceful could also be a curse when the person doesn’t know when to quit and seek help.
Quitting a path of problem-solving is considered a weakness in our culture, where every tale of persistence and resilience is praised, while ‘seeking a mentor’ or ‘seeking help’ is seen as a weakness in all quant-heavy cultures (Finance and Technology).
Bringing self-awareness into problem solving or a career transition is the biggest difference between a successful and an unsuccessful applicant.
The obvious strategy that most applicants use in the goals essay is an awareness of the skill gap.
Applicants can take a step further and show self-awareness of the limitations of their resources to tackle a problem.
Case Study: Self-Awareness (Lack of Resources)
One applicant, who was bringing rural healthcare services to women, quickly realized the limitations of not having sufficient funds to start rural healthcare centres. Her self-awareness on the funding cycle, the disbursement time, and the time it took to build infrastructure – typically 1-2 years is precious time to let women in rural heartland suffer. A spike in seasonal diseases made the decision easier. She started a hub and spoke model where her only investment was in mobile vans to collect samples and dispatch them to towns and cities nearby for testing.
The applicant’s self-awareness about her limitations helped her search for an alternative solution.
The biggest challenge that I face as a consultant and an editor is to guide clients to reach that level of self-awareness to take corrective steps or improve the narrative to include examples where self-awareness is clearly demonstrated in the essay.
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.
Reach out to Atul Jose to collaborate for your LBS and T20 MBA or Master's essays
