Hello EssayForum community! I am a Chevening Scholarship applicant for the year 2019/2020. I would really appreciate some suggestions on the below essay. Thank you so much!
Chevening is looking for individuals with strong professional relationship building skills, who will engage with the Chevening community and influence and lead others in their chosen profession. Please explain how you build and maintain relationships in a professional capacity, using clear examples of how you currently do this, and outline how you hope to use these skills in the future.
Building network has always been something I practiced ever since my undergraduate days. Being a freelance designers early in my career, the only way for me to acquire jobs was by word of mouth.
But I did not really appreciate the power of networking until I have graduated my bachelor degree. At that time, I had a chance to work with my university's Most Outstanding Student, on his newly established startup. Then, since he was happy about my work, he introduced me to his then-colleague, Mr. A, a Chevening scholar who was on that occasion starting his new venture on peer-to-peer lending, called XYZ. Mr. A was looking for a designer for XYZ.
At the time, Mr. A was developing his website platform for XYZ. Since it was really early stage, he asked me if I could enhance the website's user experience. Soon I started to develop user persona to get feedback from. XYZ is targeting investors from Indonesia, who are tech-savvy, and have a certain risk profile. Since some of my former clients fit the profile, I asked them to participate in a usability testing. As a result, we got a lot of feedback from my former clients, which later was used in the next development stage of XYZ's website. At the same time, my former clients also became early investors in XYZ. Long after I took off, about 1 year after its release, XYZ has disbursed over IDR 135 billion (~USD 9 million) to 295 small-to-medium enterprises across the country.
Networking has also helped me tremendously in my current job, enabling me to initiate research project tasks that would otherwise could not have been materialized. During my internship in a UX consultant, I was in charge of supporting a training activity, from planning, logistics, documentation and being a part of the workshop sessions. I met a lot of people from different disciplines who participated in the workshop. About a year later, my current company wanted to develop a product for the market. However, since this was a new product, our company didn't have users to test our prototype on. Since I have been keeping in touch with the training participants from the training in the UX consultant, I asked them to participate in our user study. From this I was able to develop an exhaustive research which eventually helped my current company better understand their users. This pilot research became a start of many projects that we launched later on. At the same time this research also helped the training participants to practice and revisit what they have learned during the sessions a long time ago.
I believe if I were given a chance to be a part of Chevening scholars, I would be able to utilize network I will have built in both Indonesia and the United Kingdom, so that product development companies and users alike could benefit from each other through feedback, thus helping to build more human-centered design initiatives out there.
Chevening is looking for individuals with strong professional relationship building skills, who will engage with the Chevening community and influence and lead others in their chosen profession. Please explain how you build and maintain relationships in a professional capacity, using clear examples of how you currently do this, and outline how you hope to use these skills in the future.
network between UK and Indonesia
Building network has always been something I practiced ever since my undergraduate days. Being a freelance designers early in my career, the only way for me to acquire jobs was by word of mouth.
But I did not really appreciate the power of networking until I have graduated my bachelor degree. At that time, I had a chance to work with my university's Most Outstanding Student, on his newly established startup. Then, since he was happy about my work, he introduced me to his then-colleague, Mr. A, a Chevening scholar who was on that occasion starting his new venture on peer-to-peer lending, called XYZ. Mr. A was looking for a designer for XYZ.
At the time, Mr. A was developing his website platform for XYZ. Since it was really early stage, he asked me if I could enhance the website's user experience. Soon I started to develop user persona to get feedback from. XYZ is targeting investors from Indonesia, who are tech-savvy, and have a certain risk profile. Since some of my former clients fit the profile, I asked them to participate in a usability testing. As a result, we got a lot of feedback from my former clients, which later was used in the next development stage of XYZ's website. At the same time, my former clients also became early investors in XYZ. Long after I took off, about 1 year after its release, XYZ has disbursed over IDR 135 billion (~USD 9 million) to 295 small-to-medium enterprises across the country.
Networking has also helped me tremendously in my current job, enabling me to initiate research project tasks that would otherwise could not have been materialized. During my internship in a UX consultant, I was in charge of supporting a training activity, from planning, logistics, documentation and being a part of the workshop sessions. I met a lot of people from different disciplines who participated in the workshop. About a year later, my current company wanted to develop a product for the market. However, since this was a new product, our company didn't have users to test our prototype on. Since I have been keeping in touch with the training participants from the training in the UX consultant, I asked them to participate in our user study. From this I was able to develop an exhaustive research which eventually helped my current company better understand their users. This pilot research became a start of many projects that we launched later on. At the same time this research also helped the training participants to practice and revisit what they have learned during the sessions a long time ago.
I believe if I were given a chance to be a part of Chevening scholars, I would be able to utilize network I will have built in both Indonesia and the United Kingdom, so that product development companies and users alike could benefit from each other through feedback, thus helping to build more human-centered design initiatives out there.
