Quot;a Significant Part Of The Mms Experience Will Be Honing Your Ability To Work Admission Essay Sample

In my first year of undergraduate studies I lead a team of 13 members to develop and run a project as part of a national competition organized by SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise), to win the national championship title. I succeeded in leading a team to earn the great honor, but my team faced great external and internal difficulties along the road, including a situation that happened at the beginning of the project but finally was resolved successfully.
In China, less than 50% of garbage bins possess “recyclable” and “non-recyclable” symbols in order to separate waste products. Even for the labeled garbage bins, labor is still needed to categorize all the garbage in them (into more specific sub-classes of garbage so as to recycle); this process is time and labor intensive. On the other hand, in China, many poor children cannot afford to buy textbooks and pay tuitions for primary and secondary schools; they need helps. Could these two serious issues be resolved together? I thought so. I came up with an idea and took the initiative to form a team to make the idea a reality. At the very beginning, many people wanted to join my team, and every team member that joined was very confident in me, and my blueprints. The selected team thought I had demonstrated leadership and good thought and so, my blueprint and its implementations were followed.
The project took place at my college and another local area college. My team made some changes to all the garbage bins at these two colleges, using some of the initial funds granted by SIFE China and also the sponsorships from the two colleges. After our changes were implemented, each garbage bin had four sub-bins, and the symbols on each sub-bin were much clearer and more direct. I thought the labeling would save time when organizing the garbage by hand. We communicated our project goals with local labor responsible for removing garbage, and they were very happy to learn about our initiative and were willing to pay some money in exchange for their saved time and efforts. In turn, these proceeds would be used to pay for textbooks and tuition for local poor children.
All my team members were faithful to the project until we were surprised by a challenge after 3 days of implementation. We found that people were not following the new garbage classification rules we set to classify their garbage, so all the garbage in each sub-bin was not classified at all; the situation was even worse than the situation before we made the changes. Very soon, the administration of the two colleges and the workers responsible for reclassifying garbage began to push us very hard; they began to cast doubts on our project and blame us. Time did not allow each of us to come up with an idea about which way to go, because the longer we stayed, the worse the situation became. All the garbage bins in these two colleges were open to receive garbage for 24 hours, and we could not replace the garbage bins due to the high costs. I could feel that each team member was going through high pressure; I too was burdened by high pressure. Some team members began to feel exhausted, and even discussed whether this project was really feasible.
Faced with this extremely serious and urgent situation, I immediately came up with several resolutions and called a meeting of the whole team late at night,. We had to raise morale in the project and to discuss resolutions immediately. After a thorough discussion, the resolution we finally selected was promotion and recovery. Since time was quite limited and many tasks needed to be finished, I divided the whole team into 3 task forces; in each task force I appointed a core team member that I valued the most as the leader, to specifically keep an eye on other team members’ faith and morale and directly report the progress of tasks to me.
The first task force used social media (social network sites) to tell people what we were doing, and to call attention to following the new garbage classification rules. Since the target audience was college students, we could easily access those people by leveraging our connections through social media. For the second task force, the team members dealt with on-site promotions. They spent 3 hours producing a short video to introduce our initiative and call for participation. The third task force helped reclassify the garbage in the garbage bins, so as to reduce the increased workload resulting from the changes we made. This task force was doing this at 11 p.m. every day, for one week.
As the leader, I supervised each task force and also participated in the tasks. This served the purposes of monitoring progress and maintaining morale. I kept in touch with all involved parties, including the colleges and the labor reclassifying the garbage. My team’s very prompt work paid off. The situation improved dramatically and became very stable after 1 month of intense promotion; it really seemed as if everyone was following our new garbage classification rules. Our project saved a lot of time and our total proceeds in four months was over $5000, donated to local poor children for school and supplies. I learned a great deal from this experience. Sometimes we may encounter some challenging situations within a team, as the leader I must be sensitive to external factors and internal factors to detect whether there is any potential for problems within a team. Further, a prompt and precise reaction is also very crucial for a leader to resolve any problem arising within a team.
The insight I learned will help me immensely at Fuqua. The collaborative skills I mastered will enable me to be a team player and a leader in-group projects. The experience I had organizing social and ecological causes will serve me as I try and improve the community of Durham. Furthermore, I have learned that perseverance pays off and sitting down to reevaluate our plans is sometimes a necessary course of action. Perseverance will aid me in difficult courses and group projects alike. In sum, I believe that this experience in particular will make me an excellent team member for group projects at Fuqua.