Writing about a frustration experiences in MBA Essays

This is not a general question, but at times the MBA admission committee does ask such kind of questions to find out what disappoints you and how you managed to overcome the same. They are keen in knowing, if ever you have faced any frustration how have you dealt with the situation and what lesson did you learn from it. You need to be very selective while picking up a specific situation across your career where you faced disappointment, disenchantment or frustration. Be careful to ensure that, your essay should not spotlight on your distress, frustrations or disappointments within your selected story, rather it should focus on your attitude, approach, leadership and actions that made you overcome the painful episode.

Always try to minimize the negativity in your essays. Having discussed the situation, ensure that you move on to positive actions and results. Your reasoning process, decision making skills, maturity, ability to overcome hurdles, proficiency in handling setbacks, strength of purpose and moral righteousness could be just a few of the possible critical factors that you can highlight in this essay. You can further focus on the reasons of your frustration, whether it was because of personal issues, professional demands or probably because of your incompatibility at your work place because of differences in culture or the work style. For example – You are on an onsite project and you face difficulty adjusting yourself in the work culture or communicating with the people over or might be because you are unable to adopt their work strategies. Having given the context, describe what methods did you adopt to deal with the situation. The way it helped you to get rid of your frustration. What beneficial lesson did you learn from the experience? Also inscribe how the challenge helped you to develop some more interpersonal qualities in you. It is essential that your essay should ultimately progress towards a success story where you changed the situation for your betterment.

Suggested structure for your essay: Once you zeroed down on your anecdote, follow the SAR (Situation, Action and Result) framework to delineate your frustration experience anecdote. First explain what the situation was. There you should discuss the case, environment, challenges if any and your reason of diasppointment or frustration. Example: Hostile team member or work environement or unreasonable targets.

Then discuss what action you took in that situation. Discuss and justify your action. Exhibit rationality. You can also discuss the challenges you faced during the course of action. Then conclude with results, like what was the outcome of your actions, such as cooperative team-members or better workplace. Discuss what are the skills/strengths you used in this case and how this incident has helped you augment your present skills and develop new skills and abilities.