Chevening Palestinian Territories - Networking Question

You should have the ability to build relations for your success in life in general. From my experience, relationships are everything! I would not succeed in reaching out to the head of the biggest private sector companies to solicit their support for my idea and my direction to hold a totally new kind of events in my country and convinced them to sponsor this event without having strong mix of skills; networking skills are the most important among them.

Building relations is somehow easy as long as you have the key networking skills but maintaining those relations and connections are really the difficult part.

First of all I had the ability to identify who is important to build a relation with. This importance emerged from the contributions those parties will add to your work, study or whatever you are doing in life. Every contact matters in this formula, as this contact may lead you to another one who might be more important and more capable of helping you in your destination.

The second important issue is how to keep a long term relationships. From my experience during university and working life, the most interesting secrets behind keeping a long term relations are:

- Being positive and ready to give as much as you can: If you started with helping others, others will help you in return mostly.
- Respecting my connections' commitments and time: During my role as a sponsorship team leader, I used to depend more on emails as a tool of communication with the decision makers within sponsor's entities since it's faster for both parties. When urgently needed for face to face meetings, I used to arrange for maximum 10 minutes meetings and be well prepared, direct and clear regarding the purpose of this meeting and the desired results of the meeting.

- Being appreciative for having this relation and thankful.
- Keeping a continuous contact with important connections even after the completion of your work together.

One more example from my working life regarding the importance of connections, I managed to achieve more than fifty percent saving in the transportation costs for one of the humanitarian projects I managed because of the help and support of former colleagues who direct me to the key and biggest transportation service providers in the local market. We went through a very competitive bidding process that ended up with a competitive deal. The savings out of this deal was used by the project management in implement other useful activities for the project direct beneficiaries.

If I managed to be a CHEVENING scholar, I will spare no effort trying to build real and true relationships, starting from the university campus including students and teachers up to the most important organizations that support and believe in building and developing my country.

@N15052016

Hi Nadin,

As I was reading your essay, I realized you included mostly on benefits of networking. I would suggest adding specific examples of your networking in your daily life in this essay to show how you are well connected.

Hope this helps.

Hey Nadin, I believe that you misunderstood the prompt requirements. You were not being asked to discuss the method by which a network is developed. While it is admirable to see that you have the ability to explain the importance of networking and how to develop it, you are just wasting the reviewers time at this point. Just go direct to the professional networking experience that you have had either in your professional or civilian life. Do not refer to your academic network as that is not really applicable in the real world setting that the Chevening scholarship demands. Keep in mind that the network you speak of needs to be real and usable because you will be expected to not only use that network, but also build upon that network in order to share its benefits with Chevening and the other scholars past, present, and future.