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My Warwick MBA Entrance Essay #4: Describe One Major Accomplishment & One Major Setback…

One of my major accomplishments is raising the philanthropic capital to fund Multi-Activity-Centers, to implement psycho-social support programming designed to provide non-formal education for three-thousand displaced youth, in the Za’atai refugee camp, at the height of the Syrian Humanitarian crisis, 2013. The partnership consisted of a private family foundation, two government umbrella organizations, a provincial teacher’s federation, and a private philanthropist. This was truly an exercise in stakeholder management. Success required control and synergies of environments both external and internal to Save the Children; creating positive relationships with stakeholders through the appropriate management of their expectations and agreed objectives. I learned that stakeholder management is a process that must be planned and guided by underlying principles, requires extensive resource capacity,and extensive relational skills, none more important than sincerity.

One setback I faced, when I moved to Toronto post undergraduate degree, I worked for a company and was laid off. It was the height of the global economic recession. I lived with my sister with no money. I job searched. A mature man but newly educated, I searched for a management role,despite the mass consensus of typical cohort graduates that I was under qualified. I looked for six months. Circumstances became bleak, in the fifth month; I had to sneak on the subway daily, with soaking wet shoes, holes in the bottoms, and walk into job interviews with accomplished people and explain that I was their next rising star. I did this near fifty times. It was most difficult the fiftieth time having forty nine attempts behind me. I prevailed. I learned to believe in myself…

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