Essay for applying to MasterCard Foundation Scholarship at University of Edinburgh (Review required)

1.We want to hear what excites you and what you are passionate about. Please write about a topic that is important to you and how this reflects your personal values.

live changing ideas

While growing up, my experience and personal engagement with people in local communities afforded me the opportunity to understand challenges encountered in rural settlements, towns and cities in Nigeria. Vast majority of the population lives in poverty and experiences hunger, poor living standard and limited access to power. In my quest, I realised people have talents and skills that can be harnessed to tackle these challenges and positively contribute to the three pillars of sustainable development (economy, society and the environment). However, these potentials are not effectively utilized due to lack of qualitative education. Most individuals emanate from low income households; as a result, people are overwhelmed with the daily struggle for basic needs of food, shelter and clothing. This has ensued the country to be classified as a poor nation.

Having understood these challenges, as a proponent of social development with the desire to make a change, I would like to contribute to the grass roots by advocating and encouraging an innovative idea driven environment. Qualitative education is a major requirement to achieving excellence, improvement of living standards, interdependence and biodiversity. This is the reason I am interested in pursuing a Master's degree in Sustainable Energy Systems; an educational experience I believe would equip me with the required expertise to influence an impact.

I am an individual with enormous creativity and ability to propound live changing ideas. Extremely passionate about initiatives that motivate people, talent and skill development that can be tailored towards desired career paths.

Olanrewaju. you seem to have misunderstood the prompt. What you wrote is a personal statement regarding the development of your interest in your chosen course. I do not see any passion in what you have written because you have not made any move towards contributing to a social change in any of these sectors. That would show a degree of passion due to the complexity of your involvement in this cause.

There are no personal values reflected in your essay because of the lack of passion in your presentation. Your passion stems from a personal value that you are trying to instill or promote through this cause that you are passionate about. The two must either intersect or connect in the presentation in a manner that allows for one to support the other.

There are several samples of the Mastercard Foundation passion essays that you can read at this forum. Have a look at those samples so you can have a better idea of the type of passion and personal value that you can present in your response. This current essay version doesn't really work well with the prompt. I hope you still have time to change the essay in total.