I like Wharton’s essay questions for 2011: They’re well-thought out and fairly interesting. Incidentally, the first question about designing a course is a must-answer to my mind. Email me at eric@fulfilament.com if you want to know why.
Anyway, here’s question number four:
Discuss a time when you navigated a challenging experience in either a personal or professional relationship. (600 words)
This isn’t a mind blower or anything. You’ll see it on many business school applications. But there’s a crucial word in the question. And it’s NOT “challenging.”
It’s “navigated.”
Many students will be tempted to seized on the ‘challenging’ aspect of the essay. They’ll go in to incredible detail about the situation, describing every aspect of what happened.
Of course they’ll explain how they handled the situation, but in my experience they’ll miss crucial elements of what the word “navigated” means.
To get “navigated” right, you’ll need to explain your thought process when faced with the challenge. You’ll need to explain how you felt about the issue initially – the emotional response to having a barrier in front of you. But you’ll need to intelligently answer how you developed a strategy to overcome that barrier.
Your strategy will need to be well thought out, multifaceted and, well, strategic. Then you’ll need to discuss every element of how you put that strategy into place.
Finally, you’ll need to tell what worked and what didn’t and what lessons you drew from the experience.
You have a good word count for this essay so there’s time to develop a narrative here. But you need to hit the navigation theme really well to make this work.
Feel free to email me with any questions eric@fulfilament.com!
