Please tell us about a time where you failed at something; what was the situation and how did you react? (200 words)

A recent failure which has proved to be an excellent learning opportunity was in my General Secretary role for the Negotiation Society. This was my first committee role involving securing sponsorships and communicating with large organisations, whilst also balancing my academic workload. 

It was initially challenging as I frequently reached out to selected targeted organisations who requested that I draft a proposal, which often took me 2 hours to draft. I received 5 rejections to my proposals after spending countless hours on them. This was quite demotivating initially. However, by changing my outreach approach and revising the way I drafted the proposals, I managed to secure sponsorships from Vantage, Corporate Law Academy and The Commercial Law Academy.  I am proud of this achievement as it proved the importance of tenacity to me.It also proved how far determination, hard work, and resilience will take you. This also had a personal impact as I knew the difference the sponsorships would make to the members of the society. As a result of this, the members of the society have benefitted from enhanced social and career events and better career support through the TCLA platform which was immensely satisfying for me to see. 

Our thoughts

Positives

• Really strong opening sentence.
• I like that the applicant picked a genuine failure, rather than trying to pass off a veiled success as a failure. This shows self-awareness.
• Questions about failure are designed not only to test your self-awareness, but also to ascertain whether you’re able to react positively following failure (which ties into resilience). In light of this, it’s good that the applicant stresses that they effectively surmounted the initial failure, and provided evidence to support this. 

Potential points for improvement

• I don’t think the answer clearly sets out how the applicant “reacted” – it explains that they continued to pursue their objective of securing sponsorship, but is very vague about what this involved (“changing my outreach approach" isn’t particular clear). I would have given more detail here.
• The question doesn’t specifically ask what the applicant learned or why they are proud of the achievement, so dedicating 1/3 of the answer to this (see the final few sentences) might have resulted in a rejection in other circumstances. It almost reads like the answer has been copied/pasted from a similar (but not identical) question on another application form.