"In reflecting on your successes, what do you consider your greatest personal achievement and your greatest professional achievement?"

07-Mar-2024

This essay is written to answer the above question for application to a BCG recruiting event.

As an engineer without a surplus of confidence, I will try not to let my nature, high standards and fear of hubris get in the way of answering this question. Lets start with personal achievements.

I have yet to win an Olympic gold medal, but I have an array of sporting personal achievements I am proud. As a keen cyclist, runner and sometime rower, the achievements I am consistently most proud of isn't winning a race, but putting the work in to get to the start line. If a cohesive team can be formed in the process, even better. I am proud of the team culture I inspire and work towards.

An example would be learning to row. Despite being a keen, amateur athlete for five years, I had yet to turn my hand to rowing. At 162 cm tall, it doesn't make use of my natural talent, however I found love for the repetitive nature of the sport. My team mates were just beginning their journey into sport, so had little idea about what it takes to do sport sustainably to a high level, especially with regard to nutrition and strength work. For my team of new sportspeople, I taught them the importance of nutrition, how to eat and what to eat to support training needs, whilst simultaneously ensuring a healthy attitude towards balancing rowing, a particularly time intensive sport with a cult-ish repuation, with other life stresses - such a thing can exist! I recognised that a balanced attitude encourages long term retention and sustainably high-level commitment by new athletes to our collective goal.

As a result of my work in retaining a cohesive team through creation of a supportive environment, my new rowers flourished. At the prestigious end of year competition, taking place over four days at the start of June, our boat completed the rare feat of winning all of our races, being awarded a specific honourary trophy known as a blade. Everyone in the boat pulled hard, but I take responsibility for and am extremely proud of sowing and cultivating the seeds for us to pull together as a team and win.

The professional achievement I am most proud of is persisting with my PhD. It is not as glamourous as talking about winning the Page Prize for coming top in my class in the first year of my undergraduate degree, but requires many more skills of greater importance than passing exams.

I am proud of not quitting when things were hard, with a low rate of progress. I started in the pandemic, I was alone. My PhD is computational, I am alone. My research group is not a cohesive group that believes in social activities. I spent 2.5 years alone, believing myself to be deficient for finding this a challenge. Slowly, I acquired the self-belief to realise that my environment was the main problem, not me. If I could change my environment, perhaps I could fall back in love with research, or at least enough to finish my PhD.

So instead of quitting, I adapted. I researched, who is in my field, where do I want to visit, and made steps to form a collaboration with a professor at Stanford University, with numerous awards and accolades. I overcame my imposter syndrome, and finally pressed 'send' on my cold email.

No response. My imposter syndrome came back. I waited a healthy couple of weeks before bothering her again. Sent a follow up email.

Again, no response. This time I waited another two weeks, reasoning that 'in demand academics were very busy', then sent a third email, much more concise.

No response. Yet I still really wanted to talk to this person. I found out where she would be, at a conference in continental Europe. I applied to go to the conference.

I was at that time located in the Bay Area, USA, so I travelled for 2 days to get to the conference in rural Austria. I presented my work, and afterwards I stood in front of her and asked her, as I had in my previous three emails, to collaborate. She said yes. I write this from her lab.

Persistence is rewarded, persistence in continuing with my PhD via arranging said collaboration is the professional and personal achievement I am most proud of. This required recognition of my own needs, then taking steps to create an environment for myself in which I could flourish. In the process, I levelled up my self-belief and self-reliance and now I work with multiple, decorated leaders in my field. Persistence is key.