Scholarship /
Leadership offers wide spectrum to develop, implement and persuade people towards a positive change [7]
@Xti02
Dear Christi,
Thank you so much for your valuable feedback. I really appreciate the time you invested in correcting the grammatical errors in my essay.
This is the updated version of my essay. I hope you won't mind having a look at it. If there are any further errors, I would be grateful if you can point them out. TIA :)I always believed that leadership offers a wide spectrum to develop, implement and persuade people towards a positive change, particularly of mindset. It is challenging to be a female engineer in Pakistan, where the gender gap on an industrial level is extremely high, and women holding a small percentage in the technology sector. The increased gender gap has made engineering termed as a 'male only' or 'male-dominated' sector, in the country. This further leads to the male counterparts contemplating female engineers to lack leadership skills.
My first leadership experience came from being promoted to supervise a team of technicians during my first job at "company name" in 2014. I was given the responsibility to supervise a team of ten technicians, where my main tasks were to lead the team while conducting site surveys and closely monitor the team's performance and work progress during the project implementation phase.
This came as a huge opportunity to enhance my leadership qualities; however, I was challenged when three members of my team refused to work under my leadership. They consider it as inappropriate to work under a woman's leadership, thus raising questions about my eligibility as an engineer and a leader. Moreover, they found it difficult to take guidance from a female engineer, where they consider themselves superior to me for the sole reason that according to them I belong to an incompetent gender group of the community.
During this phase, I kept myself motivated to persuade a much-needed change in the mindset of my team whilst not letting the work commitments to compromise. I believed in proving my competency as a leader by my actions, therefore I remained focused towards my responsibilities. I efficiently distributed the tasks among the team based on their skill-sets, motivated the team throughout the project phase and successfully mediated team disputes.
As a result, my team was successful to complete the project milestones within time. My first success helped me to change the mindset of all those people who initially had doubts about my leadership qualities. Later, I was successful in completing numerous projects with the same team until my tenure ended with the company in December 2015.
As it is very uncommon in Pakistan for a girl to work at odd locations, I encountered with another leadership challenge earlier this year during a site visit with my team at "company name" when an onlooker passed inappropriate remarks to me. This made my team members uncomfortable and distracted from work, however, being the team lead I urged them to remain focused as work completion should always remain our highest priority.
Pakistan is in an extreme need of a mindset change, as this conservative approach of the society towards women is not only widening the gender gap but also affecting the prospective careers of aspiring female engineers.
I look forward to setting an example for all the aspiring female engineers of my country by becoming a Chevening scholar, a program which inspires and empowers future leaders.
