Scholarship / Chevening - Networking skills (Empathy as a good skill for networking) [4]

Hi, I am planning to apply for the Chevening Scholarship and having a problem with writing the essay. Please read mine and tell me frankly about the contents, grammatical errors, or any other advices about it. Thank you!

Q. Networking skills

I believe that strong networking skill comes from the sincere empathy with others. When someone fully understands you, you would feel like to rely on that person and this leads to strong network.

I learned this at school after I contributed to changing the student council which was operated by only a few students to a place where all students can participate in. When I took on a leader of the publicity department, my goal was to make the student council attractive enough to engage many students in it. So I conducted a survey to the colleagues about the ideal image and role of the council and found plenty of new idea such as that many students had wanted to include their campus activities in the scholarship evaluation criteria. I definitely understood and empathised with their situations. With a firm will to reflect the voices of the students, I made the chief professor a proposition and could revise the criteria. This made it possible for the student council to gain the students' trust resulting in high participation rate.

After this experience, I always have tried to stand in others' shoes and this has brought on a great performance at work. As a person in charge of international cooperation, I once managed a training course targeted for foreigners for 2 weeks. Since their culture was different from my culture, I thought they might have felt a bit strange to stay in my country. So I decided to experience their culture myself such as meals, clothes and language. The trainees were impressed by my endeavour and they also began to try my culture actively. With the bond of friendship between us, they could accomplish the training course successfully and gave a very high score in the satisfaction evaluation. This good relationship has accelerated more active cooperation between two organisations.

During the Chevening year, I will be able to meet a lot of students from all over the world and it will be a great opportunity for me to learn other cultures including that of UK which I have really desired to know. Through experiencing the differences and comprehending, I will positively try to explore good idea or system which can be also introduced to my country regarding the disability employment. Moreover, I will apply this to my job on returning to my work and implement appropriate cooperating projects with other organisation.