Scholarship / CHEVENING Leadership and influence essay - Leader as a team player [3]

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.

(minimum word count: 100 words, maximum word count: 500 words)

I strongly believe that to be a good leader is not necessary to hold any title, taking a leading position or born to be person. A great leader could be a man who wish to see the tomorrow world better than today and have a strong positive power to inspire team and other people, motivate and make them sharing the same goal.

In 2011, when I was a freshman. There was a big change in admission rule and regulation for undergraduate student in Thailand in the year before. Student in my ages suffer from lack of information and guidance about university admission. To alleviate this problem for junior high school student, I set up a team with 40+ freshmen member to share some experience and provide educational guidance at my high school. The feedback was impressive. Comparing post-test to pre-test result, student had better understand about new admission system and basic information about faculty that they were interested in. I am also happy to hear that generation after me had seen benefits from this campaign and also set up a team to provide help for their junior.

After graduated from X University in the major of Mechanical engineering in 2015, I started to work as a process engineer at X. One of my work was large fan improvement project focus on reducing power consumption of main process fan across all X Cement plant in Thailand and regional country. The conventional ways to assess room for improvement was to go on-site investigation and evaluating machine performance on my own. To make a change, I decide to set up working team consisting of production engineer and technicians from each plant to conduct preliminary site investigation. I held a brief workshop to share an idea of fan performance assessment and point out how much they can save money for their factory. With this way of implementing project, I could not only save almost 700k$/year, but also able to transfer technical knowledge which previously were concentrated in engineering office to teams, encourage them to have accountability in what they're going to save and they can see benefit of improvement themselves. Furthermore, they can apply it to improve others minor machine.

Currently I am working with X as a pilot trainee. Since COVID-19 outbreak, the training process has been halted, and I was sent to work with different department since March 2020. I've seen that many manual data entering process can be automated. Moreover, plenty amount of data collected was not utilized to generate business insight and to support decision making. This unforeseen problem could be a contributing factor in bankruptcy of X which will lead to thousands of job losses in the near future.

Knowledge and experience gained from business analytics program would allow me to participate in rehabilitation team, provide actionable insight which lead to data-driven decision making. And finally, brings X back to the sky to be pride of Thai once again.

Scholarship / CHEVENING Networking Essay - One man show will not work [3]

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. (minimum word count: 100 words; maximum word count: 500 words)

lessons from the others

I always love to meet new people everyday. I believe that one of the fastest ways to grew up knowledge and experience is to learn from other people. Moreover, among the knowledge gained, expanding networking also allow me to reach opportunities that a sole person have never thought.

Back in 2015, when I joined X, I also participated in X progran which is orientation for new employee with different educational background in different business units. The bootcamp not only gave a brief introduction to business units of Siam Cement Group, but also created strong connection between employee. After the orientation finished, I moved back to Head Office and resumed normal working life. However, I still keep in touch with new friends and colleagues I had known from the camp. If there is any occasion they might have come to the Head Office in Bangkok, I often meet them have some coffee and talk about how thing was going. In 2016, when I was a junior engineer, I had been assigned to scale up quicklime production from laboratory experiment. Instead of starting project from scratch, I had recalled that Pulp and paper, which is one business units of X, also used lime in their paper production plant. Here's where networking work, I asked my friends whom I known in orientation for an advice, visited their plant to observe their operation and discussed in detail about advantages and pain points of their process. Within a few days, with help of strong connection I were able to create a modification plan for existing unused plant. Unfortunately, shrinkage in demands caused the project to be suspended.

I had left X in 2018 to pursue a dream of being pilot. I was selected to be one of 100 candidates among almost 3,000 applicants and was granted a scholarship from Y to be trained for airline pilot. I am certain that myself alone would not have come this far without support from student pilot network. I met this connection when I was in recruitment process of Y and Z. The group regularly set up a workshop for knowledge sharing and preparation for each round of recruitment. I also have an opportunity to share knowledge in Physics and general science for those who are not familiar with science. Knowledge sharing atmosphere keep going from the day I got recruited through hard time during commercial pilot training. Even for present days, when each of us are working for different airlines in a difficult period of COVID-19 pandemic, the group is still active.

With these networks and the community of Chevening alumni which I am going to connect in the future, I hope to use the power of networking to recover aviation industry in Thailand (especially Y) and strengthen the growth of international air travel in post-COVID19 situation.