Hard work and perseverance are essential in any aspect of my life. Answering Chevening question.

Leadership and Influence Question for Chevening Scholarship

As an achiever, I always believe that hard work and perseverance are essential in any aspect of my life. Those two qualities mould people to be more talented, more experienced, and more skilful in doing their jobs. Believing this enables me to face challenging situations and keep going on to achieve my dreams.

I have always been developing myself to be a better person. Being a leader and an influencer to myself has begun since I was very young. My parents have always taught me to nourish my self-discipline. They encouraged me to do my best as they keep telling me to do something I love which will influence others in positive ways. Because of that, I joined in some organisational activities.

I realised my passion for teaching when I was a teenager. As a result, I served as a Sunday school teacher in my church. It was so much fun to be around children and helped to shape their characters. At that time, I was assigned to handle a class for 6-8 years old and there were around fifteen children in our class. After three years of serving as a Sunday school teacher, I had to take a break as I needed to put all my concentration to face Indonesian National Examinations when I was in my last year of Senior High School.

I enrolled a course in Soegijapranata Catholic University in 2009. As I have always liked the study of English language and literature, I earned satisfying Grade Point Average. My lecturers deemed that I had quite a potential. They trusted me to participate as a member of The Faculty Student Board. In this organisation, I was assigned to be the Programme Coordinator for some faculty events because of my management skill. Moreover, I also represented my faculty as their Ambassador in doing the promotion for both the faculty and university. On top of that was my involvement as the Head of Committee of two big events: Creative English Competition, where we invited Senior High Schools throughout Semarang city to join some competitions and attend our exhibition of the programs we had in the faculty, and National Student Seminar on Culture and International Languages, where we invited undergraduate students throughout Indonesia to present their fresh ideas about the related topic. In this National Student Seminar, a well-known Indonesian traditional dancer, Mr Didi Nini Thowok, became our keynote speaker. As a recognition of my effort and dedication for the faculty, I was awarded the Award of Achievement. I was also awarded the Award of Excellence for being the Best Graduate of the course I enrolled.

Now, in my current position as a teacher in Mondial Junior High School. I have been trusted to be the Coordinator of some events. Lately, I organised two Student Gathering events in our school. In these events, students and teachers showed their talents in dancing, singing, playing musical instruments, and performing musical plays.

Theodora, your essay is not very strong. It only contains college based leadership and influencing representations. This does not help your application because there are no management skills involved in your activities. There is a lack of conflict, decision making, and explanation to subordinates that would qualify this as a professional leadership and influencing activity. While you did represent a professional aspect of leadership and influencing, it was so short and irrelevant that it you may as well have skipped presenting it altogether.

This is not about amateur achievements, this is about your ability to lead a department or team towards a successful resolution of a given professional scenario. this could have been better represented in your capacity as a coordinator at the junior high school. That is the only part of the essay that could be revised to create a more prompt responsive and clear representation of your leadership and influencing abilities.

As a coordinator, the title already implies leadership and the work description, automatically conveys the need for influencing skills. In order to create a more competitive essay, you should remove the first 2 activities in the essay and then focus on presenting an event that you had to coordinate amidst some obstacles that required you to use influencing skills in order to successfully mount an event, complete a project, or successfully achieve a work objective. This just might be able to prove that you have the ability to become a leader and influence within your profession in relation to your country's development in the future.

@Holt
Thanks for your suggestion. This really means to me. I am working on it to improve this.