Hi everyone,
I want to apply for Australia Awards Scholarship to study Master of International Business in The University of Melbourne and The University of Sydney. I would very much appreciate an honest review, feedback, and comment for my essay on why I applied for my courses and institutions so I can better my essay. Also, it is now 2,547 characters (the limit is 2000 characters) and hence any feedback of how to make it more concise would be also appreciated. Thank you so much!
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE YOUR PROPOSED COURSE AND INSTITUTION?
The choice to study international business was driven by the situations I experienced during my past two and half year's career. As a private sector-led development professional, I work with businesses across Indonesia's agriculture value chain and support them designing and implementing strategies that can equally benefiting poor farmers in rural eastern of Indonesia, while still delivering commercial returns to the companies. Once, I tried to engage Starbucks and other coffee buyers (including roasters, exporters, millers, and collectors) in providing good agricultural practices assistance for coffee farmers in Flores Island, Nusa Tenggara Timur. The rationale was clear - farmers increase income through better productivity and coffee buyers can get more coffee as a return. It was a win-win offer. However, the idea did not go through. Nor Starbucks or other buyers were willing to invest and assist the farmers.
From this experience, I learned that the ever-growing efforts to engage more businesses to partake in achieving the global sustainable development goals (SDGs), in my case poverty alleviation, are many times hampered by the lack of business acumen among development professionals, including myself. Indeed, I clearly understand the poor farmers situations and am passionate to help them but stimulating the private sectors to do it and make it part of their business calls require deeper business analysis and business skills. For this reason, I believe that a master study in international business will be a highly valuable add for my career that will enable me to work more effectively as a development worker.
In term of institution, I chose The University of Melbourne and The University of Sydney because both institutions have great reputation, respectively ranked 26 and 60 globally for business and management courses, which I think will translate to high quality learning experiences. They also offer various courses in business strategies and decision making, areas that I am particularly interested in because I want to learn how strategies within a firm are made and implement and look for opportunity to make the SDGs embedded in those strategies and become the new-mainstream-way of doing business. One thing, however, that makes The University of Melbourne stood out compared to The University of Sydney is that it allows me to specialize in international business, while developing my understanding of the policies governing the world trade and investment system through its courses in International Relations program. I believe this mixture of business and trade policy topics will be an advantage for my career too because in this globalized world, the livelihood of poor communities in the global south is also affected by decisions made by companies and customers in the global north through international trade, as the livelihood of poor farmers in Flores also affected by decisions made by coffee buyers and customers in developed countries.
Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,797 
4780 The essay uses too many words to describe what you want to say. Compress the professional situation in your presentation. You don't have to enumerate every Tom, Dick, and Harry that you spoke to. That is of no importance to the reviewer. It just takes up precious character count. Those dealers you spoke to in the parenthesis can be removed without affecting the overall presentation of that paragraph. Additionally, you don't have to signify that you have been working 2 1/2 years. That will be automatically seen by the reviewer in your additional documentation. Again, it's a waste of character count. In fact, a professional writing editor can write this essay for you in 3 properly developed paragraphs, very well under the word count maximum. Why does it need 3 paragraphs?
Par. 1 - Introduction to the topic / backgrounder / basic motivation for course choice
Par. 2 - Why The University of Melbourne?
Par. 3 - Why the University of Sydney?
That is how the essay should be formatted. Each university must be discussed on its own educational merits based on what attracted you to the course and your academic goals that the university addresses. The university choices cannot be based on the same criteria. You need to individualize your university choices to show that you actually took the time to consider all aspects of the course curriculum, university technical training, and its applicability to your line of work within your country.
