Scholarship / User Experience Designer's Career Plan in Financial Industry - Chevening Career Plan Essay [2]

Hello EssayForum community! I am a Chevening Scholarship applicant for the year 2019/2020. I would really appreciate some suggestions on the below essay. Thank you so much!

Chevening is looking for individuals who have a clear post-study career plan.

Please outline your immediate plans upon returning home and your longer term career goals. You may wish to consider how these relate to what the UK government is doing in your country.

Currently the 16th largest economy in the world, Indonesia is predicted to become the 7th largest economy by 2030. However it is seeing the biggest economy gap between its population and experiencing high rate expansion of working-age population.

My main career vision as a User Experience Designer is to bring research and design together to increase financial inclusivity, especially among small-to-medium business owners. Hopefully by doing this they will be able to utilize financial technology to maintain sustainable and job-creating growth, thus contributing to evenly spread economic growth.

About 2 years ago, I have had the opportunity to work freelance for a Chevening alumni who was in the process of establishing a peer-to-peer lending startup company. I was offered a full time position but I didn't accept since I didn't have the necessary technical skill. Now, after 1 year of its release, company X has disbursed over USD # million to # small-to-medium enterprises across the country.

Upon returning home after completing Master's degree in the UK, I wish to kick off a research and design team in company X and incorporate all the knowledge and skills I will have gained to reach its goals.

I wish to implement design thinking to optimize experience in company X for smartphone users. Nowadays smartphone has penetrated almost 40% of Indonesia population. There are thousands of people managing their online shops with just a mobile device. By penetrating the mobile market, I will be able help company X achieve its goal to increase the number of borrowers from micro enterprise category and at the same time getting more people to invest their money at the touch of their fingertip.

After 2 years of working for the financial technology industry, I will move on to tackle new challenges in the banking industry by taking a role as a service design lead in Bank Y. Bank Y specialises in small scale and microfinancing borowing & lending. However currently the bank is seeing low adoption rate towards its digital banking initiative. I wish to increase this number using the knowledge and experience I have gained from company X.

I believe all that short-term career plan will help me move closer towards my long term career objective, which is to establish a user experience consultant company that specializes in financial industry. By gaining wide and varied range of skills and attributes, I would be able to help more financial institutions in Indonesia to reach more customers.

At the same time I want to provide my research and design service to liaise social/creative enterprises who receive the Collaborative Grant of DICE program from the British Council. Hopefully by contributing to this program I will help ensure the success of UK government's plan towards Sustainable Development Goals in emerging economy of Indonesia.

Scholarship / User Experience Designer's Study Plan in the UK - Chevening Study Plan Essay [3]

Hello EssayForum community! I am a Chevening Scholarship applicant for the year 2019/2020. I would really appreciate some suggestions on the below essay. Thank you so much!

Outline why you have selected your chosen three university courses, and explain how this relates to your previous academic or professional experience and your plans for the future.

*Please do not duplicate the information you have entered on the work experience and education section of this form (minimum word count: 100 words, maximum word count: 500 words)

Kingston, Central Lancashire, Brighton University

During my study in Information Systems major, I have learned a great deal about how information technology can help an organization achieve its goals. My experience leading in lab sessions and assisting 4 classes in Web Design and Development course as a teaching assistant has aroused my interest in that particular subject. I decided to pursue a career in digital product design, enrolling in an internship program at a UX consultant as a means for me to self-learn until it lead to my current full time job as a User Interface/User Experience Designer.

However, I have found that my education background has not provided me enough with specific technical knowledge about designing user experience, especially on the research part. The concept of user-centric design is still a new thing and there is no specific master program in Indonesian universities. Therefore I believe with vast choices of UX Design program, the UK will be the right choice for me to study and expand my global network further.

My first choice of major is User Experience Design course in Kingston University. Their program attracted me because it is developed in consultation with their industry panel consisting of giant technology companies, which will allow me to get my hands on best practices, and give me updates on new cutting-edge technology trends. All their taught modules are project-based and assessed by practical coursework with deliverables such as mock-ups, functional prototypes and design systems. This really replicates the type of work and deliverable I've been dealing with in my job, and hopefully this will help me improve my working process.

My second choice of major is User Experience Design course in University of Central Lancashire. This program fascinates me primarily because of the subjects they offer. I will be studying about UX Away from the Desktop, which is a growing need in this era where more users are online from their more affordable mobile devices rather than desktop. In addition to that, there is also a subject about IT Projects and Programmes, which is closely relevant to my nature of work and would help me enhance my workflow that revolves around IT projects.

My last choice of major is User Experience Design course in University of Brighton. Located in the digital media cluster city of Brighton, this university would offer me to specialise in the areas of discipline that interest me the most. Moreover, for the final major project module, I would get a chance to be placed with a UK digital media company, which would give me the priceless experience to learn with world wide industry expert.

All the courses I mentioned above will surely help me advance my technical skill for User Experience Design, especially because they are designed to mimic real life industry of software process flow and prepare students to pursue a research career in user experience design. In addition, I will be able to increase awareness of the importance of human-centered design in Indonesian corporations.

Scholarship / Building Network for more Human-Centered Design Products - Chevening Networking Essay [2]

Hello EssayForum community! I am a Chevening Scholarship applicant for the year 2019/2020. I would really appreciate some suggestions on the below essay. Thank you so much!

Chevening is looking for individuals with strong professional relationship building skills, who will engage with the Chevening community and influence and lead others in their chosen profession. Please explain how you build and maintain relationships in a professional capacity, using clear examples of how you currently do this, and outline how you hope to use these skills in the future.

network between UK and Indonesia

Building network has always been something I practiced ever since my undergraduate days. Being a freelance designers early in my career, the only way for me to acquire jobs was by word of mouth.

But I did not really appreciate the power of networking until I have graduated my bachelor degree. At that time, I had a chance to work with my university's Most Outstanding Student, on his newly established startup. Then, since he was happy about my work, he introduced me to his then-colleague, Mr. A, a Chevening scholar who was on that occasion starting his new venture on peer-to-peer lending, called XYZ. Mr. A was looking for a designer for XYZ.

At the time, Mr. A was developing his website platform for XYZ. Since it was really early stage, he asked me if I could enhance the website's user experience. Soon I started to develop user persona to get feedback from. XYZ is targeting investors from Indonesia, who are tech-savvy, and have a certain risk profile. Since some of my former clients fit the profile, I asked them to participate in a usability testing. As a result, we got a lot of feedback from my former clients, which later was used in the next development stage of XYZ's website. At the same time, my former clients also became early investors in XYZ. Long after I took off, about 1 year after its release, XYZ has disbursed over IDR 135 billion (~USD 9 million) to 295 small-to-medium enterprises across the country.

Networking has also helped me tremendously in my current job, enabling me to initiate research project tasks that would otherwise could not have been materialized. During my internship in a UX consultant, I was in charge of supporting a training activity, from planning, logistics, documentation and being a part of the workshop sessions. I met a lot of people from different disciplines who participated in the workshop. About a year later, my current company wanted to develop a product for the market. However, since this was a new product, our company didn't have users to test our prototype on. Since I have been keeping in touch with the training participants from the training in the UX consultant, I asked them to participate in our user study. From this I was able to develop an exhaustive research which eventually helped my current company better understand their users. This pilot research became a start of many projects that we launched later on. At the same time this research also helped the training participants to practice and revisit what they have learned during the sessions a long time ago.

I believe if I were given a chance to be a part of Chevening scholars, I would be able to utilize network I will have built in both Indonesia and the United Kingdom, so that product development companies and users alike could benefit from each other through feedback, thus helping to build more human-centered design initiatives out there.

Scholarship / Taking Initiative at the Workplace - Leadership Essay for Chevening Application [3]

Hello EssayForum community! I am a Chevening Scholarship applicant for the year 2019/2020. I would really appreciate some suggestions on the below essay. Thank you so much!

Chevening is looking for individuals who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.

to practice my leadership skills on a bigger scale

My first leading experience happened during the first year of me working at my current company. At that time, our client requested a feature from us. In the beginnning it looked like a pretty simple and straight forward feature, just like any other feature, however after a few meetings with one of the clients we realized that the requirements given were very vague, and we were not even sure that the clients knew what they wanted.

Time was moving fast, multiple meetings were held but we did not produce any meaningful progress, even though the deadline was nearing. The design prototypes we handed out to them never seemed to address the problem. Amidst team's frustration with the condition, I suddenly remembered about a research methodology I learned from my experience in the previous company. This methodology always helped my previous company find the root cause of problems they were facing. However none of the business analysts in my current company had any experience with the methodology.

With this knowledge, I took the initiative to convince and influence the product owner, business analyst and designer in my team to work together with client using this methodology. I explained to them the benefits of this methodology and how with great teamwork, this would find the root cause of the problem and solve it using a proposed feature. Eventually product owner trusted me to lead the project on this particular feature.

This methodology is called Sprint, where we tried to identify solution to a problem and tested it out to real users within 5 days. We all mapped out the problem, tried to come up with a bunch of solutions, prioritized which solutions were worth to try, built few prototypes from the prioritized solution, and tested the prototypes to users. During the Sprint, I encouraged all team members to contribute in building the right solution. We ran into a problem that there were too many solutions that seemed to be the right one, but I quickly solved that by appointing the product owner to have the final say. In the end, the clients seemed happy with the prototype we tested out to them, and we successfully developed and deployed the feature that solved the right problem.

From this experience, I have learned that being a leader is not a matter of being someone in an higher authority position, but rather being able to influence other people to solve an ongoing problem. I hope to practice my leadership skills on a bigger scale if I am chosen to be a part of Chevening scholar.

Graduate / Motivation Letter for MSc Human Computer Interaction in Universität Siegen (3 years of experience) [2]

Masters of Science application essay

Hello EssayForum community! I am looking to apply for MSc Human Computer Interaction in Universität Siegen for Summer semester 2020. I would really appreciate some suggestions on the below essay. Thank you so much!

Dear Sir or Madam,

With this letter, I am applying for a position in the Masters of Science, Human Computer Interaction program, offered at Universität Siegen. I wish to combine the 3 years of experience I possess as a User Experience Designer with the knowledge I will gain from this program to pursue my goal of becoming a Usability Expert.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of countryName. During my degree, I was active in many facets of university life. In fact, my interest to pursue a career in UX in big corporations stemmed from the internship programs that I completed during my study. First I was involved in the IT Application Delivery team at bankName and second with a UX consultant with clients coming from the banking & insurance industry. In those internships, I personally contributed as an interface designer, to digitally transform the application process for unsecured loan and bancassurance products.

I currently take responsibility as an all-rounder designer at companyName, a countryName oil and gas company. Being a company that just started its journey towards UX maturity, our team became the in-house pioneer in spearheading user-centric approach to design. I helped kick-start a project to build the design language system. My contribution includes information architecture, low-fidelity prototype of the platform, writing content, building UI kits, and manage resources for the platform development. On top of that, I also became involved in facilitating and contributing assets to design thinking and design sprint workshops. Besides those, my day-to-day job also includes facilitating design sharing sessions to other project teams, conducting design heuristics evaluation and delivering concept interface designs to new projects.

Before my current role, I was responsible for the UX process from start to finish of a project management application tailored for the making of AAA games. I mostly delivered interface designs for features with clear requirements and conducted usability tests. However the usability tests were not so thorough considering the limited tools, resource and time provided.

After experiencing the many facets of design roles, I realized that I get more joy when working on the UX research part. Moving forward, I want to become more specialized in UX research and its implementation in the industry. And my progress is somewhat decelerated by my lack of education and experience in the field. The Human Computer Interaction program at Universität Siegen addresses the next step in my professional career development.

The courses on the basics of HCI will lay the foundations of UX and help me explore other research methodologies that I never acquired in formal education. The choice of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning & Collaborative Work particularly interests me. Even more, the combination of interdisciplinary contexts subjects such as Introduction to E-business and Information Management would help me gain an understanding of the internet economy and the importance of implementing the right information management framework.

The emphasis on research activities such as projects, seminar, and mandatory master thesis will be beneficial in preparing me before entering the workforce. Lastly, the prospect of participating in an internship program is an excellent way to apply what I will have learned in the course, as well as adopt best practices from technology companies in Germany.

My decision to pick Germany as the country destination for my Master's study came from a lack of equivalent professional programs offered in both my home country (countryName) and the country I'm currently living in (countryName). As well, we all know that Germany is home to many reputable and sophisticated companies with world-class practices, where there is a huge demand for people in UX roles. This would be a perfect ground to establish the next step of my professional career.

After obtaining the master's degree, my career goal is to work as part of the UX Research team in one of the renowned consumer goods industries in Germany, such as automotive and electronics. I have also started learning German in my spare time, so that hopefully by the time I graduate I will have been able to speak German with full professional proficiency, and able to contribute my work in German companies.

With all of my experience listed, I am in search of bringing my career to the next level. The subjects offered in this program are specifically in line with my professional goals. Additionally, the research activities, internship program, and mandatory master thesis provide a great opportunity to apply the knowledge I will gain. I am certain that the knowledge and skills learned from my professional experience and university would make me a valuable addition to the Masters of Science, Human Computer Interaction program offered at Universität Siegen.