Tell me about a time you failed.

Junior year, I took over as president of our investment club after a hard handoff — the previous president had let attendance slide and our pitch competition with [rival school] was eight weeks out. I came in convinced the fix was a more rigorous pitch process: longer write-ups, mandatory peer review, weekly office hours. I rolled it out in week one without much consultation.

What happened was attendance got worse. By week three, I had four people showing up to a club of thirty. The senior I'd inherited the role from pulled me aside and told me bluntly: I'd diagnosed the problem as a quality problem, but the actual problem was that members didn't feel ownership. The new process I'd installed made it worse — it felt like homework, not membership.

I rolled most of it back. I kept the peer review but turned it into a rotating role members signed up for, kept the office hours but made them optional and social. More importantly, I split the club into three pitch teams with student-led captains, so the ownership lived with the members instead of with me. We lost the pitch competition that year — that's the real failure — but attendance was back to 25+ by the end of the semester, and the team that took over from me won the next year.

The lesson was that the diagnosis matters more than the fix, and that I had a tendency to default to "more process" when the right answer was "more ownership." I've watched for that bias in myself ever since — it shows up in group projects, in internships, anywhere I have a leadership role.