Scholarship / Bringing people together - Chevening scholarship advice on the networking essay. [4]

Chevening is looking for individuals with strong networking skills

, who will engage with the Chevening community and influence and lead others in their chosen profession. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your networking skills, and outline how you hope to use these skills in the future.

Personally, networking is comprised of building relationships with people as I go through my career. I find it very deserving and necessary creating a very strong network for the success of any career. While at school, many students after class always left the study rooms but I always opted to stay behind and make some consultations from the tutors so as to have a clear line of sight of where I stand and were I desire to be in my profession and it's through this that I got my first training opportunity in 2016 through a recommendation of one of my lecturers to Uganda National Roads Authority.

In 2019 after my last semester around May, I wondered how I was going to fit into the working world as we awaited the graduation ceremony and the first thing that came into mind was the internet. I was able to find a couple of information of the available Surveying companies which I visited and luckily got accepted into Spot Surveyors company. I acquired lots of experience that got me the confidence to start seeking for greater options. I graduated in December 2019.

On acquisition of my transcript, I started to apply for various jobs but did not get called for any. Luckily enough on one of the alumni functions at my high school, I got an opportunity to speak to many friends of mine and so happened that one of them had the same career path as I. He offered me a placement at National forestry Authority which I worked as an assistant surveyor and while at the authority, we developed a culture called "Kabokisi" which translates as a piggy-bank and was aimed at creating an investment and social club. And my great desire for soccer prompted me to join the NFA soccer team for the corporate league competitions which are annually held between all corporate companies in Uganda and this gathered various professionals and I got to interact with many people and this helped me create a wider clientele as many tasked me to carry out their cadastral surveys for their Property. From so doing, I got so much experience and hence credible enough to join the Institution of Surveyors of Uganda (local governing body) which has supported my continuous career development through CPDs.

Meanwhile, I always update my social pages like LinkedIn which connects me to professionals across the globe from which I get opportunities to attend their seminars and conferences. With all the experience I achieved, I was able to start on my process for getting certification from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, UK which is still underway.

I am now part of the Southern Rotaract club of Kampala that brings together people of different professions and locations and this has consequently widened my network which I believe to extend to the Universities that I am going to attend through joining the sports clubs and other professional clubs and attend seminars and conferences to learn and share ideas.

Scholarship / A project-surveyor - help to apply for the Chevening Masters scholarship. [2]

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. (100-500 word)

A great leader can take others' hands to become agents of positive change. During university, I was chosen to be the deputy finance minister for the Student Surveyors of Kyambogo University in 2017 through which I made many decisions of both positive and negative impacts and later as the Surveyor's representative on the Kyambogo University Students Engineering Committee.Trained with Uganda National Roads Authority (2017) with little or no power to make decisions on the project then joined National Forestry Authority for Graduate training under which I engaged in forest-surveys and conflict resolutions during surveys. After a couple of months as an assistant surveyor with Newplan Engineers, I requested to be moved to the position of Project Surveyor who is always the team leader on most projects which they agreed to due to my patent achievements. As a leader at age of 23, my first experiences in that position were incredibly challenging and full of struggle due to the intimidation by more experienced people that I was to lead. I started making decisions so as to become a better surveyor, and in the process, I gained an incredible amount of empathy and learned alot especially about risk-taking, client-care and team building. It laid a strong foundation for all the incredible achievements attained in my career.

As project-surveyor, I have faced a couple of challenges due to the complexity of humans since my work mainly revolves around handling vulnerable project affected people and rural communities which involves judgement-call decision demanding situations with the outstanding having been the occasion during one of the data-collection activities of the Oil pipeline Survey and valuation assessments in which the surveyors were congregated by hostile people due to concerns of trespass arising from inadequate sensitization done by the community liaison officer. They were sat down and dispossessed of their survey equipment creating tension amidst the team. As the leader, I intervened and conciliated the crowd. I justified our existence and apologized for the inadequate communication flow between us and the community which provided answers to their queries. After about twenty minutes, they said to us "Okay, you can go ahead." I sighed with relief and the team went on to work that day without any interruptions till completion and the community too was happy and supportive. From then on, the team learnt how to deal with such situations and avoid them by practicing the communicate-first approach. I introduced the stakeholder-engagement protocol for Resettlement Action Plan Projects before access to someone's property for survey and assessment which the company adopted in its mode or operation and has since then been used on many other projects and the results have been positive. Since then, my superiors have always engaged me in all project decision-making process and this has given me more confidence and urge to grow my career and be a better person in my profession which got me thinking about pursuing a masters degree in Land surveying.

One at a time.