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Chevening is looking for individuals who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.
(minimum word count: 100 words, maximum word count: 500 words)
Leadership is the courage to change the status quo of dissatisfaction and actively create a new pattern.
I was elected as the leader of a voluntary teaching team in my sophomore 6 years ago. However, the teaching project had many problems at that time. Firstly, many volunteer teachers lacked of responsibility and they often couldn't go to the elementary school as planned. Secondly, the teaching courses were arbitrary and pupils were forced to receive those fragmented knowledge. I even doubted whether they had learnt anything from volunteer teaching courses. Thirdly, the randomness of the whole project made it difficult for volunteers to generate the sense of value and accomplishment, they became more irresponsible, which forming a vicious circle.
I couldn't stand the situation and made up my mind to implement reform. The first thing I did was to update the training content. I added
some new things such as the poor living conditions of those children, what they most needed, how to teach them and so on. And I created a serious atmosphere and made volunteers feel like a solemn sense of ritual, thus increasing their sense of mission. Then, I took the initiative to discuss with the schoolmaster about the teaching courses , only to find out students' demands and set up courses based on their needs, rather than volunteers offered courses at random in the past. Finally, as the team leader, I often accompanied volunteers to go to the school to encourage them.
At last, the school's satisfaction with volunteers had significantly improved, over 90% students liking courses. And volunteers' sense of responsibility had also increased obviously. The attendance rate is almost 100%, and even all seats were occupied in the closing ceremony, and I clearly remembered there were only a few people last time.
Leadership is to be able to take advantage of one side's strengths to make up for another's weaknesses and help both achieve a win-win situation.
I volunteered to go to a remote village in Guangdong, China for poverty alleviation. During the period, Zhejiang University (top 5 university in China) students came to do an environmental investigation, but they lacked rural practice experience and were initially at a loss. In combination with the characteristics of college students and the needs of village development, I led them to do two things: First, I invited them to carry out theme activities for the village pupils based on their excellent experience. They told their own stories about how to enter a famous university and introduced the experience of studying in their university to those children, motivating them to go to college ( Many children there had never thought of going to college and they could drop out of school at an early age). At last, not only pupils started to yearn for college lives, but also university students were full of the sense of accomplishment. Second, I persuaded them not only to do an investigation, but they could also do something practical for environmental protection. After many negotiations, they became quite happy and actively raised money online to purchase garbage bins (At the time, the garbage on sides of the road often piled up and smell, severely affecting the lives of villagers). They raised 1,500 yuan in the end and 17 garbage bins were purchased, covering both sides of the main road. All wastes were thrown into the bins and the environment became better.
leadership is to influence others with practical action and professional knowledge and then guide others to change both in action and thought.
In the past two years, I have been working in rural education improvement, continuously influencing more rural teachers with my leadership. As a project executive, I am responsible for deciding and planning where, when and how to build a rural library. I have guided more than 1000 people (including local teachers, students, parents, volunteers from PayPal, Peking University, NVIDIA and so on) to build more than 30 rural libraries since 2017 and passed new educational ideas to them during the activity. It's often the case that people thought the school library should have been built by workers rather than teachers and children and they didn't think they had ability to finish building a library in a day. However, at the end of the day, most participants couldn't help but sighed, "We just spent 6 hours to finished it, how surprising!" "Kids' abilities are far beyond my imagination!" "Your organization is so rigorous and efficient! "and so on. That's what I did, breaking their old ideas and making them realize they can do far more than they thought according to their one day's experience. A good start helped me gain local teachers' trust so that I could influence them more deeply with my professional knowledge by some trainings and communication about how to use the library, how to read children's books and even how to communicate with children. Many schoolmasters and teachers have changed a lot both in action and thought. For example, with my insistence and persuasion, the principal was willing to arrange two reading classes for children every week; With my encouragement, teachers began reading stories for rural children and even try new teaching methods sometimes.
Leadership and influence
Chevening is looking for individuals who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.
(minimum word count: 100 words, maximum word count: 500 words)
Leadership is the courage to change the status quo of dissatisfaction and actively create a new pattern.
I was elected as the leader of a voluntary teaching team in my sophomore 6 years ago. However, the teaching project had many problems at that time. Firstly, many volunteer teachers lacked of responsibility and they often couldn't go to the elementary school as planned. Secondly, the teaching courses were arbitrary and pupils were forced to receive those fragmented knowledge. I even doubted whether they had learnt anything from volunteer teaching courses. Thirdly, the randomness of the whole project made it difficult for volunteers to generate the sense of value and accomplishment, they became more irresponsible, which forming a vicious circle.
I couldn't stand the situation and made up my mind to implement reform. The first thing I did was to update the training content. I added
some new things such as the poor living conditions of those children, what they most needed, how to teach them and so on. And I created a serious atmosphere and made volunteers feel like a solemn sense of ritual, thus increasing their sense of mission. Then, I took the initiative to discuss with the schoolmaster about the teaching courses , only to find out students' demands and set up courses based on their needs, rather than volunteers offered courses at random in the past. Finally, as the team leader, I often accompanied volunteers to go to the school to encourage them.
At last, the school's satisfaction with volunteers had significantly improved, over 90% students liking courses. And volunteers' sense of responsibility had also increased obviously. The attendance rate is almost 100%, and even all seats were occupied in the closing ceremony, and I clearly remembered there were only a few people last time.
Leadership is to be able to take advantage of one side's strengths to make up for another's weaknesses and help both achieve a win-win situation.
I volunteered to go to a remote village in Guangdong, China for poverty alleviation. During the period, Zhejiang University (top 5 university in China) students came to do an environmental investigation, but they lacked rural practice experience and were initially at a loss. In combination with the characteristics of college students and the needs of village development, I led them to do two things: First, I invited them to carry out theme activities for the village pupils based on their excellent experience. They told their own stories about how to enter a famous university and introduced the experience of studying in their university to those children, motivating them to go to college ( Many children there had never thought of going to college and they could drop out of school at an early age). At last, not only pupils started to yearn for college lives, but also university students were full of the sense of accomplishment. Second, I persuaded them not only to do an investigation, but they could also do something practical for environmental protection. After many negotiations, they became quite happy and actively raised money online to purchase garbage bins (At the time, the garbage on sides of the road often piled up and smell, severely affecting the lives of villagers). They raised 1,500 yuan in the end and 17 garbage bins were purchased, covering both sides of the main road. All wastes were thrown into the bins and the environment became better.
leadership is to influence others with practical action and professional knowledge and then guide others to change both in action and thought.
In the past two years, I have been working in rural education improvement, continuously influencing more rural teachers with my leadership. As a project executive, I am responsible for deciding and planning where, when and how to build a rural library. I have guided more than 1000 people (including local teachers, students, parents, volunteers from PayPal, Peking University, NVIDIA and so on) to build more than 30 rural libraries since 2017 and passed new educational ideas to them during the activity. It's often the case that people thought the school library should have been built by workers rather than teachers and children and they didn't think they had ability to finish building a library in a day. However, at the end of the day, most participants couldn't help but sighed, "We just spent 6 hours to finished it, how surprising!" "Kids' abilities are far beyond my imagination!" "Your organization is so rigorous and efficient! "and so on. That's what I did, breaking their old ideas and making them realize they can do far more than they thought according to their one day's experience. A good start helped me gain local teachers' trust so that I could influence them more deeply with my professional knowledge by some trainings and communication about how to use the library, how to read children's books and even how to communicate with children. Many schoolmasters and teachers have changed a lot both in action and thought. For example, with my insistence and persuasion, the principal was willing to arrange two reading classes for children every week; With my encouragement, teachers began reading stories for rural children and even try new teaching methods sometimes.
