Specified Goals
Q1: Provide an example of how you set a very high goal and ultimately achieved it
- Keywords: real case, high enough goal, and eventual achievement
- Start with the framework to avoid running out of time — one-sentence summary + STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result)
- Be careful of the curse of knowledge; avoid the other party not understanding the basics, for example, participating in a competition, how prestigious that competition is
One sentence: Won the third prize at the municipal level in my first entrepreneurship and innovation competition
- Situation: First time participating in an innovation and entrepreneurship competition, with over 1,000 entries schoolwide (awarded 120), recommended to the municipal competition where I won third prize (among 70 awards), invited to participate in a past excellent entrepreneurship product exhibition (top 30)
- Task: Win the award through this competition to obtain a scholarship, and try to lead the team to realize the entire process from R&D to competition to sales
- Action: After registration, I first completed the overall framework on my own, achieving a breakthrough from zero to one, then realized my current capability was limited in certain areas and began looking for partners: sought expertise from Fudan University software engineering to improve functions, consulted experienced schoolmates who had participated multiple times to draft competition documents, got advice from previous provincial-level participants on competition details, and engaged a communication university group to beautify promotion materials. The project team divided into four groups: development, documentation, medical editing, and promotion. I oversaw all teams and was the main force in development. Development continued adding new features and organized internal testing. Documentation reviewed and adjusted products and led the on-site defense. Medical editing organized members to proofread many medical materials. Promotion coordinated overall style and final review.
- Result: Independently achieved product launch from the development side, learned a lot about frontend and deployment in the process. Management-wise, learned to handle multiple parallel tasks, arrange and coordinate group work, and manage members’ interest distribution so everyone benefited. Finally, won the municipal third prize and subsequently received the school first-class scholarship.
Problem Solving
Q2: Describe a situation where you had to gather relevant information, identify key points, and decide which steps to take to achieve the desired result.
- How to ensure information sources are comprehensive?
- How to retrieve large amounts of information in a short time?
One sentence summary: Conducted preliminary research for the input method project, planning for the quarter and the year
Situation: The goal was to first research and understand the mainstream input methods currently on the market, form differentiated ideas, and preliminarily implement basic functionality to achieve a breakthrough from zero
Task & Action:
- Widely downloaded and used popular input methods, summarized their current problems, mainly excessive ads that are not refreshing, heavy reliance on network, and privacy leak risks
- Reviewed publicly available market research reports, understood current market trends, discovered that everyone is investing in AI and mostly dominated by giants, but no one is doing especially well in the niche area of medical input methods. Although our development capability is limited, we can enter from this small niche, perfect targeted features, while users can still use one input method for daily use and another for work.
- Regarding revenue, considering development capacity, we abandoned ads and decoration income, relying mainly on functional income.
Result: After half a year, we have developed our own converter able to transform any materials into wordbanks and processed more than 200 mainstream materials with it. Meanwhile, we have accumulated over 50 core users and have been invited to participate in exhibitions.
Learning
Q3: Give an example of how you acquired a skill and transformed it into practice.
- Programming skills: first studied through online courses on MOOCs, then coded by myself, referenced others’ projects, communicated with friends, and sought guidance from mentors.
Teamwork
Q4: Summarize a situation where you took initiative in a team activity, acted as a leader, and ultimately achieved the desired result.
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Keywords: leadership, teamwork, initiative
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Areas: interpersonal conflicts such as interest distribution, business difficulties such as not being able to handle something
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Why can I be a leader? Because I have a comprehensive and high-level understanding of the entire matter; to some extent, I could complete it alone, but I seek people who are better in specific aspects to better realize those parts.
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What defines a leader? A leader must have a holistic goal for the team’s objectives; members may only see a fragment, but the leader must see the big picture. A leader is like a captain, always clear about the ship’s direction. The leader must find suitable people for specific tasks and constantly monitor feedback to ensure effective and quality completion, acting like the team’s caretaker, taking good care of all members so everyone can perform at their best.
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How to persuade others to join the team? Two directions: practical benefits and high ideals; different individuals focus on different aspects, but both must exist. For instance, if a member wants quantitative credits from the project, emphasize benefits accordingly and require core output. Another member may want to learn and expand their network, so emphasize learning opportunities but not assign core tasks as their interests aren’t deeply linked with the team.
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How to divide work? Initially assign simple tasks based on resumes and interests, test their traits and capability through work (soft indicator: enthusiasm; hard indicator: output), after repeated tests decide if they fit the position; those unsuitable will be asked to change roles.
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How to view interpersonal conflicts: Because resources are limited and many share the pie, conflicts arise; the solution is labor-based distribution, agreed in advance and adjusted post-feedback. For example, in the last competition, the documentation group felt their effort deserved more awards, but actual prizes were limited, while the promotion group had less workload but received many awards. Though pre-agreed, reality diverged from expectations; respecting reality, next time increase documentation group’s award ratio.
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How to handle team members’ disagreements or conflicts? Persuade with reason and supported by empathy. First respect rational correctness; if a problem and solution can be rationally recognized, reach consensus. During this, some may feel targeted or inadequate; provide private care and encouragement.
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Biggest team difficulty: Interest distribution as above, and also members uncertain about their tasks; held small meetings, gave examples, proposed drafts for expansion and improvement.
Q5: Provide an example proving you can cooperate with others to achieve an important goal.
- Consider team interests, understand teammates’ circumstances and strengths and weaknesses
- What was the cooperation like? Who was responsible for what? Why the division? What was the outcome?
Q6: Provide an example of how you used facts to persuade others to reach a consensus with you. (Assessment: Persuasiveness)
- (1) Regarding decision-making: Why persuade others to accept your opinion? What are both sides’ viewpoints and bases, pros and cons? Why is your view better? Where do you get your objective facts from? Are they truly persuasive?
- For example, for this exhibition, some members didn’t want to participate because of long travel and limited reporting (no quantitative credit), but I believed it was an effective exposure opportunity, useful for training our promotion team practically in poster making and street marketing, and to verify our current sales plan feasibility. The downside was participants had little short-term return. I didn’t force participation but sought the support of willing members; if none existed, recruited local members temporarily.
- (2) Regarding interpersonal matters: In communication, if the other party is emotional or resistant and rejects your opinion, how do you view and handle it? Did you make concessions during persuasion? Communication requires listening; only by understanding the other’s demands and maintaining calm and friendly state can conflict resolution be facilitated.
- In fact, after clear pros and cons, everyone knows their limits; so far, I haven’t encountered emotional situations, so I hypothesize my approach: stop arguing, stay calm, wait until both parties calm down, restart discussions, first consider the cause of their emotional response, ask or let them express it; only when emotions resolve can problems be solved.
- (3) During implementation, what persuasion strategies did you use? What was the specific process? What are the key points to successfully persuade others? If unsuccessful, what would you do to try to achieve the expected goal?
- The key is to persuade with reason; whoever’s idea benefits the team long-term should be followed. I am often persuaded by members myself. My persuasion is not due to special skills but because I present facts, which naturally clarify the situation. If they understand but do not act, it means the plan doesn’t fit that person, so assign it to someone else.
Creativity
Q7: Provide an example proving that one of your creative ideas was crucial to a project’s success.
- Keywords: innovative thinking, realizing creativity
- The idea for the wordbank creation tool: the key was to make it simple and fast; conventional methods require users to code, but we created a website to compress the original process to complete one book in 2 minutes.
Q8: Provide an example of how you evaluated a situation, focused attention on key issues, and achieved good results.
- During the competition, the most critical parts were not development or promotion but documentation work. Different targets mean different issues. At the current stage, facing customers, the key issues became functionality and promotion.