Hi, everyone. I am applying for the graduated school and just finished the essay recently.
I will be very appreciated for advising my answer!
The question:
A significant part of the program involves honing your ability to work effectively within a diverse team. In a professional, volunteer, or academic setting, describe how you overcame a challenging situation within a team. What role did you play? What was the result? What did you learn about yourself?
My answer:
My team mates and I took part in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship contest in my country. This competition was open to graduates and undergraduates alike. The competition required us to come up with a business plan for a unique idea and we then had to sell the idea to a business person so that they would invest in it. The competition ran for over half a year (6-8 months). 15 teams enrolled in this competition, with a maximum of 12 members per team. There were 12 members in our team which included a Russian woman, this is unusual in my country. I was the youngest member of the team. I joined the competition because of its nature, gaining funding to establish an idea / company. Further, I thought this would be a good opportunity to meet with other outstanding students who could expose me to new ideas. Each of the teams delegated a manager and these were always from industry. The idea was for the students to apply what they had learned to industry.
There was great diversity in the team and we all had to learn to work together and appreciate the strength of the various team members. The team included a Doctor of Electrical Engineering, a computer scientist, an artist and a variety of business people. I found the eclectic mix worked well as this brought a number of unique ideas to the project, but when we first met, we had establish ground rules because of the number of diverse ideas and approaches to the problems. For example, the engineers tended to be very practical and would dismiss ideas that they deemed were impossible from their logical viewpoint whereas the business ideas were more creative, but often lacked the detail and could be very difficult and costly to implement. I found that I acted more as a bridge between the creative personnel and the practical people.
I found that the best approach to ensuring the smooth running of the team was to "massage" each of the groups egos - this would ensure that we had a constant supply of ideas and then had to consider how these could be effectively utilized. Through learning to manage expectations and taking on both practical and theoretical considerations, we quickly found our unique idea and the team learned to work in harmony. They came to appreciate that although each of their ideas may seem outlandish to each other, I introduced the concept of breaking down the issues and working through the pros and cons of each of them until we had a workable solution that was both practical but also unique and interesting from a business perspective. Managing this collection of personalities gave me great confidence as I came to appreciate that I could manage people and get everyone to listen. I found that the greatest skill I had was my quantitative training; I have learned to take a holistic approach to problems so that I have a keen understanding, and then break it down into manageable components. My professors mantra was "the devil is in the detail," I have taken this to heart and found that it worked well.
When this diverse group came together, there was the potential for problems, but good leadership and communication skills led to us working with a great deal of synergy. I think that my managerial skills will be an asset on the MMS program because I have an appreciation of taking problems as a whole and then strive to look for the best fix by utilizing everyone's strengths as opposed to attempting to bang a square peg into a round hole.
Through my input and guidance, as well as managerial acumen, the team was able to develop a synergy and we came up with the idea of developing a nano generator that could be fitted to cell phones. The achilies heel of cell phones is the battery technology. Phones have been creamed with a host of power hungry technology, thus it is rare to get through a full day if the phone is in constant use. The idea of the nana-generator was to develop technology that will utilize human energy, pressing the phones surface and storing the energy that this created; this is somewhat like hybrid technology being used in cars today. The team did well with this idea and I got through to the last 20. As part of the competition, we had to evaluate team members as did my peers. We were ranked on our contribution and how important we were to the team; I along with 2 other team mates progressed to the finals.
I entered the competition with the express purpose of learning from a great deal from my peers and enhancing my own skills and understanding of how to be competitive in a business environment. What I did learn though was to have more faith in myself. I found that I could work well under pressure and could rally the team members around. I also have great patience and ambition; when the project started, I initially thought the differences between the groups of people were insurmountable, however I was determined to get something from the competition and was not prepared to bow out without trying. To achieve this, I exerted authority over the group and eventually won over this disparate group of individuals and helped them to develop confidence in themselves and also to embrace team work which would be beneficial to the group as a whole. This project has taught me to have faith in my abilities, but also to listen to others and take on any advice that they can offer in order to help me to meet my end goal. Although I went in with a view that because I lacked practical experience I had little to offer, I have come to appreciate that everyone is unique and has something different to offer, me included, therefore it is important to try with a chance of failing as opposed to giving up without trying. I did not make it to the final of the competition, but I left having learned that I was an invaluable member of the team with much to offer and would be an asset on any team. I am a great team player and a very effective communicator, but have a keen insight into what is required in business. Due to my perseverance, I am certain that I will reach my goals in the future.
Hello,
It really amazes me how you could write a 1,000 word essay and still not answer the prompt. What this school hopes to learn about you from this essay is what are some of your leadership styles. What roles do you assume on a task? What strategies do you employ to help resolve issues? They want to read specifics. Stating " I have learned to take a holistic approach to problems..." outdoes really mean anything. You need to really flush out each step of this project for this to be an effective essay about challenges you faced. They want to read detailed specifics and more importantly exact steps you took to remedy real conflict as it arose. If you do this, it will be a great essay. -AAO
Hope this helps.
