Trouble with Kaiser Permanente Secondary Question

[ScrubswithnoSleeves]

Hi All,

The first Kaiser Permanente secondary question is as follows:
"During your career as a physician, you will potentially encounter many obstacles and be required to overcome many challenges. Resilience is a prerequisite for success in medical school and beyond. Describe your experience with a situation that had an unfavorable outcome. How did you react, and how might you have responded differently? What did you learn about yourself?"

I am having trouble deciding how to answer this question. It seems different from a standard "overcoming adversity" question because it is specifically asking for a situation where you failed but then did not react well/ correct the mistake. My problem is it does not seem like you can respond with any situation where you came out on top in the end. The only things I can think of are family disputes.

Am I overthinking this? It seems difficult to appropriately address this prompt.

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[Osminog]

The point of the question is to gauge how willing you are to recognize your own failures and how reflective you are about them. Throughout your medical education and career, you will find yourself in situations where you won't "come out on top in the end." There will be situations where you end up on the very bottom and have to do damage control.

I'm guessing you haven't succeeded in everything you've done up to this point. Write about one of the times you weren't successful and reflect on it.

Don't write about arguments with your family members. That probably won't come off as professional.

 

[ScrubswithnoSleeves]

I mean I have certainly failed a lot, but I can't think of many times where I failed and did not correct my mistake.

 

[ciestar]

Overcoming adversity doesn’t even have to be about failure. For mine, I wrote more about overcoming a rough childhood and poverty to even be in a place to apply to medical school.

 

[Osminog]

@ciestar is right. The situation doesn’t even have to be your fault. It just needs to have had an unfavorable outcome.

 

[LizzyM]

This is why pre-writing or having a set response to "adversity" or whatever is not a strategy that will help in every situation.

Break this down into four questions. Answer the four questions. Rinse and repeat with a different unfavorable outcome until you have one that seems to be the best. Have you ever been turned down when you applied for something you wanted and that you thought that you were qualified for? Have you ever been refused a favor that you thought was a reasonable request? (Not being permitted to shadow a specific doc, for example.)

1. Tell me about a situation that had an unfavorable outcome. (that usually means that you did not get what you wanted or that the outcome was less desirable than what would have been optimal)

2. How did you react when you got an unfavorable outcome?

3. How might you have responded differently? (better or worse than you reacted... there isn't a specific expectation that you reacted badly in question 2)

4. What did you learn about yourself?