The Application Process

So I'm knee deep in essay writing and am struggling with questions around failure/things you wish you had done better. I don't want to sound like I'm writing strengths disguised as weaknesses (oh I just work too much--obviously a fake), but I genuinely haven't had any professional failures (Judge's "most spectacular failure" question is killing me--spectacular is such a loaded word).

The failures I have had (because we have all had them) are either smaller, trivial things (not reading over a poetry final one last time before handing it in, which ended up resulting in an A- instead of an A in the class freshman year--still bogus and not "real" but stands out most in my mind as a real failure), or too personal to discuss in mba aps (relationships, physical fitness, etc). What do you do when you just haven't had any professional failures? I accidentally sent an email to someone important without updating some numbers--that stands out to me because I freaked out after I realized it, but no one noticed and there wasn't any negative consequence for it. I think it's easier to disguise less strong strengths as stronger than they are, but it sounds petty and whiney to try to turn a not-quite-failure into a failure. Any advice on this??

Make sure you give admissions officers a sense of what you learned from the failure - that's a critical piece of this essay. I'd actually almost say that the impact of what you learned as a result is more important than the failure itself.

But that's exactly my problem--I know bigger is better/more impressive, but I haven't had any big professional failures. How do you make a mountain out of a molehill without sounding petty/obnoxious? Can you talk about not getting a job offer you really wanted?

Equine99 wrote:But that's exactly my problem--I know bigger is better/more impressive, but I haven't had any big professional failures. How do you make a mountain out of a molehill without sounding petty/obnoxious? Can you talk about not getting a job offer you really wanted?

You might be very lucky all the years!!

Any accident?

Any crush?

Stranded anywhere?

Car out of Gas at the middle of nowhere?

Missed keys of house/car/office?

Someone died in front of you?

Some old beggar on the street in a cold winter night?

There can be many incidents you could have done something but some hidden force inside you stopped you to act that way.

Hope it gives an idea. ... anyway an A instead of an A+ is not really failure!!

If you don't have any professional failures, try finding a personal one, or maybe something related to some project of community service you tried to initiate and failed.
In case you still have nothing, it's not too late to make a failure on purpose

Sounds like you might have failed to take risks, which is why you lack any good failure stories. Maybe you can name an example of something you regret NOT doing. That could be compelling because you could talk about what you would do now and what prevented you fro doing it then.