Hi all. This is for the career plan question for Chevening Scholarship. The prompt is as follows.
Chevening is looking for individuals who have a clear post-study career plan. Outline your immediate plans upon returning home and your longer term career goals, considering how these relate to UK priorities in your country.
There are a lot of UK priorities for my countries, however, the one that is suitable for my goal is Economics and Public Sector Management. Can you tell that from reading my essay? Or not? I feel like my essay is still vague and not clear/specific enough when it comes to the plan. So your feedbacks are much appreciated and welcomed. Thank you in advance.
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With maladies that have been going on, Indonesia is still far away from true democracy that it aspires to achieve. Questionable transparency coaxes people to blame government officials, but people sometimes neglect the fact that Indonesia is a very populated, large archipelago, which makes implementations and enforcements onerous. It has always been my dream to be involved in the nation's development process in the field that I am most able in, Business and Economics; I want to make sure that Indonesia's ambitious development goals are not merely wishful thinking, starting from myself. However, I don't have prior experience in development-aid organizations that allows me to comprehensively understand how our government body works. Although it is why I want to pursue further study in the courses that I have chosen previously, people may still see my lack of experience as an issue.
A friend who is in the industry, and is currently in a project to improve accessibility of clean water to all islands and rural areas of Indonesia once told me, in order to understand how the whole anatomy of Indonesia works, and to know what action plans to recommend, we have to take a "dive" into it rather than observes from the shoreline, as there are lot of immaculate planning and donors involved. There is only so much we can grasp through exchanging information, which prompts me to "take a leap" as I believe more is learned by doing the actions.
With that in mind, my first objective is to gain sufficient industry experience. My immediate plan would be to return to my home country and seek employment with management consulting companies in advisory or consultancy division, as it pertains to my entrepreneurial vision and my end-career goal of being an expert/consultant. I understand that securing a position in renowned management consulting companies can be very competitive, which is why during my master's, I intend to distinguish myself from others by participating in student organization that will polish my leadership skills.
As a consultant, I will be directly helping the development of many organizations and companies in Indonesia, whereby it will prepare and ready them for the soon-approaching ASEAN Economics Community/AEC, consequently impacting both our Macroeconomics and Microeconomics. Moreover, this position will also allow me to network with many influential people, including business owners or government officials. After 5-7 years of sufficient experiences in the industry, with the networks and skills that I have established, my next objective is to become specialist manpower in public agencies and municipalities, especially the ministry of industries and development.
With the experiences that I will obtain, I can contribute a lot to the development of Indonesia, from helping more Small-to-Medium-Enterprises survive the competitions, easing aspiring entrepreneurs to do business that will boost local employment, to even improving social-education and rural development. In the future, I see myself creating an organization of my own where I can continue to serve Indonesia, and help its social and economic development to the best of my ability.
Nafysa, the career plan that you have listed for yourself at the moment has an extremely generic and lazy feel to it. The generic feel is because you talk about your plans in general terms of helping your country. The lazy feel is because you have not set a time frame for your career advancement. So it seems like you are saying that you will advance in your career when you get around to it. In the meantime, you have some tentative plans for what you will be doing to eventually get to your end goal. That is not how this kind of essay is formatted.
What you need to do so that the essay will become more focused and deliver a solid image of you as a leader, not necessarily of your country, but at least your profession, is to outline your career goals in a yearly bracket manner. That means, you will need to come up with your short term and then long term plans for your career. The normal time span of a short career plan is 5 years. While the long range plans can range anywhere from 10-20 years. I find that mapping out your career for 5 years and then 10 years best suits these types of scholarship prompts.
You have already mentioned how you plan to enact your career. The essay shows a clear understanding of your career path and how you plan to achieve it. All you have to do is divide the plans within the two groups I mentioned above. Adjust your closing statement to reflect the final plans you have for your career. However, avoid saying "With the experience I will obtain" because that means you are not looking forward enough. Rather, you should say something like "Eventually, I see myself becoming the head of my own..." That will close the essay with a stronger and more imaginative message.
Hi Nafysa :-) I do not believe that you need to refer to Sri Mulyani Indrawati as your role model for your career prospects. You are not being asked whom you are modeling your career after so this paragraph is really not necessary in driving your response along. I tried removing this reference in a word program and then reading your essay again and I find that skipping this paragraph in totality brings the full focus of the reviewer on your career plan. Which is the aim of this essay. So, I believe that you can remove the opening paragraph without affecting the content of your statement.
For the benefit of those who may not be familiar with Mckinley, I suggest that you offer some sort of quick overview regarding the work that this company does and why you would ambition to work for them. Assume that the Chevening reviewer has heard of the company but has no idea what it actually does. So explain the goal of the company and how working there will be integral to your future career plans.
The rest of the essay is a definite improvement over the first version.You have really spelled out your short and long term plans for the reviewer's consideration. That is a definite plus for your application. I hope you can revise the portions that I suggested soon. I will always be here to help you polish the content of the essay :-)
