Cross Culture Internship 2017 - Motivation Letter

Hi all,

I am applying for above mentioned program and for this I have to submit a letter of motivation, describing your reasons to apply for an internship in Germany, your expectations (experiences and learning) as well as the period most suitable for your participation.

My written expression is poor, I know and this is not very well written. Ideas are welcomed how can I improve it. Feedback and mistakes highlighting will be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Deadline is tomorrow!!!! :(

A development doesn't occur itself, you need to make it happen

I remember the time when I used to visit my village after shifting to a town nearby. My mother always used to receive many local women coming to our house just to see how school had changed her children. They always used to say to my mother that they also wanted to send their daughters to school like us. This always made me ponder that getting an education was not a less than a blessing and that educated people had the duty to change lives. When I reached in my 10th grade I started teaching to young girls at home who used to live nearby. Due to poverty, they never had been gone to school. Although it was very challenging as I was very young and doing my own studies, I did not give up and continued tutoring those six girls for 8 months. This perspective shaped me a responsible person at such young age and made me realized the true importance of education. When they properly started reading and writing and they promised to teach other children of their community who cannot afford to go to school. That moment I felt successful at creating a cycle of giving to the community which was always been my first priority.

Importance of challenges and try to ignore often to not to be challenged in life but challenges make you explore your abilities. When I started my first job as a copywriter in Adreach advertising agency, initially it was very hard for me to survive because I was the only female in the organization and this can create many obstacles in a country like Pakistan. However, I took this as challenge and yet with my continued hard work and dedication helped me to convince my supervisor to give me more responsibilities. My boss selected me from my department as a researcher for a campaign run by the Ministry for Youth, Punjab, Pakistan. During this period, I became more adaptive and confident of myself; I always gained appreciation for my work.

I am a person who believes that every opportunity nourishes you as a person and become one to help others. I found that education is one sector that can really bring change to this world. Currently working in Lahore Grammar School where my focus is to develop minds that can bring change. For this, I have taken initiative to start helping session for each class in a week, in which each class hold activities for local community for the purpose of bridging the gap between different religious classes within society through involving children. Recently our students of grade five provided an informatory session to children from marginalized religious minorities on environment. Whenever I see activities every week I learn about commitment, positivity and process.

Being a person who never got lucky or given opportunity to go abroad or other places in order to gain new experience and meet new people. I have had to struggle with disappointment in the past. I remember and still I always get inspire by people who go to places and new opportunities which help them to learn many new skills and open new doors for them.

During in a university's project, I had to lead the project's team and conduct an event about youth involvement in education in Pakistan. When I thought I had to communicate a large number of people for this, I almost rejected to do that. But when I found I have no way around to get away from this, this taught me to start overcoming my uneasiness and gradually I mastered this skill of communication. I met so many open-minded and friendly people that encouraged me to establish professional contacts. The event was a huge success as it targeted the youth and how their role can be important in education for creating a better society. This event helped many other students to meet and collaborate with other students. Now communication and networking is a strong aspect of personality.

I am always interested in working with community-based projects. While working with CHIP Training & Consulting Company, I was assigned as a focal person for the project of UNDP Pakistan on provision of trainings to more than 360,000 polling staff on exercising their powers in order to prevent disruption and fraud in polling stations for general election 2013. This task had much more work than I expected; from report writing and monitoring to venue booking etc. In such short time we could not hire new employees for budget constraints. So, I contacted few people who I knew were good at multitasking and speak local language to communicate all training's related information to participants and other different administrative tasks. I trained them to follow deadlines in order to avoid piling up of work. During monitoring of trainings in different cities of the country, I made many new contacts from government officials, representatives of media and civil society etc which I definitely used for different tasks of the project and will continue to use. Two months of nerve wrecking hard work paid off in resulted of the timely completion of such big project in short period of time. This experience definitely taught me importance of networking and problem-solving skill more than anything else.

Cross culture internship is an opportunity I was looking for years. I would like to work in Media & Culture field from May to June for three months. I am sure that it will not only let me experience a new culture but gives me opportunity to enhance my global perspective by working and collaborating with people of different backgrounds. Upon my arrival in Pakistan after internship, as I will be thrilled with all the new experience, skills and knowledge gained in Germany would help to apply in my country because development doesn't occur itself, you need to make it happen. In future, I want to work in media to produce educational and cultural programs for children in Pakistan as there is little to no focus. This program will also help to enhance my perspective towards professionalism, establish contacts and provide opportunity to work on new ideas. Meeting people from different professions to different ethnic, cultural and religious groups made me more opened and I will hope that this program will definitely provide opportunity to flourish this more. I am sure that my leadership skills and vision will get more balanced, nuanced and result-oriented as a result of this program if I succeed in being selected for the Cross Culture Program. I hope that CCP will give me better chances to not only access to opportunities in the local industry in Pakistan as well as creating ones for people of the country.

Aasma, I don't think that you really understood what the prompt requirements were for this letter. A motivation letter discusses the development of your interest in a particular problem that you wish to resolve through the cross culture internship. The essay that you wrote tells a lot of backstory on your part but it is irrelevant backstory. There are only a few main points that must be presented in this essay. These points are, as per the prompt:

1. The reasons why you are applying for an internship in Germany
2. Your expectations regarding the program
3. The most suitable time for you to participate in the program.

Out of the 3 requirements, you only got 1 response right and that is when you feel that you can successfully participate in the program.

In the first paragraph, your reasons for applying to this internship should tie in directly with your advertising experience. The story you told about tutoring children unable to go to school is irrelevant to the prompt requirement as you can see. You need to focus on responding to the 3 prompt instructions and nothing more. So, tell the reviewer why you feel that your current work will benefit from your exposure to the Media and Culture field of Germany. What does advertising have to do with this line of interest on your part?

During the discussion of your interest in the program, you should be able to better represent your expectations regarding how you hope the program can help you and in turn, explain how your participation can help the other participants in the program through a clear cultural exchange activity or simply interacting with one another. The discussion about the time of your participation should be the closing statement just as it is now.

Kindly revise the essay to better reflect the above requirements. From there, we can continue to edit the content for relevance and importance to the essay expectations.

@Holt
Thank you so very much for your output. I am going to revise and post it in while. Thanks again.

@Holt
Mary, can you give feedback on this paragraph? Much thanks. I had no time to sit properly and write down.

I have planned to implement my learning for generating awareness through effective use of media for educational purposes which reflects my work experience in both education and media sector. Memory of watching Sesame Street is fresh in my mind. Its high production value, content creation, ideas execution amazes me. I haven't seen any program like this on television in Pakistan for educational means. However, media has become developed a lot in Pakistan but primarily its use is only restricted to news sharing and personal level. I strongly believe that usage of such tools can promote fundamental tenets of the society, promotion of culture and influence how practitioners act and interact in the future in order to seek new and innovative methods to use and apply media and education to transform the both fields in the future.

Aasma, here is the first rule of writing any sort of paper, always sit down, relax, and then write. Do not rush through it. When you rush, you end up writing gibberish or paragraphs that do not clearly connect in the discussion. Now, when you revise this letter, I want you to do exactly that. the first thing that you have to do is explain that you saw Sesame Street as a college student. The age as of when you first watched the show is important here because you are talking about production values that made a mark on you. Therefore, you need to have been of college age or already working as a professional by the time you saw the program. Do not say you were 3 years old when you first watched. if you do, I will have you revise the whole letter. Keep the presentation of your age appropriate to the reasons that you were amazed by the show that will make you think about creating something similar in your own country. Then create a connection with the production values that you saw on the show and how you believe that an internship at a German television company or something similar can help you learn how to copy the presentation style, but geared for a Pakistani audience. That should help to fix that paragraph.