Leader must be flexible, adaptable, able to communicate ideas and opinions in an understandable way

Hi! I am currently applying for Chevening graduate scholarship programme and would like to hear your feedback on this essay.

Essay 1: Leadership and Influence

Chevening is looking for individuals that 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 counts: 500 words).

In this increasingly complex world, an influential leader must be flexible, adaptable, and able to communicate ideas and opinions in an understandable manner. I believe that I have the quality of being such leader based on my past experience in campus organisation and current professional career.

In my second year of university, I participated in a student-led international seminar and conference as a general secretary who was in-charge of formulizing the theme and the concept of the event. I observed that previous committees had had difficulties in translating the chosen themes to the public that resulted in low public engagement. My team and I were motivated to achieve our goal, which was promoting academic discussion that involved the general public. I did an extensive research about social-economic issues in Asia and discussed it with my colleagues. I was able to convince my team to pick a relevant topic of the growing of urban area in Asia by expressing my research-based opinions. It was a relief to find that the seminar and the conference that we had arranged succeeded in drawing public interest and non-academic participants.

Not long after graduation, I took up the challenge to work in Xxxx Xxx Xxx (XXX), which most of the work is done on the field and involves less familiar topics to me, so that I could enrich my knowledge and test out my adaptability skills. I consider this opportunity as a crucial turn since my previous research experience was dominated by desk-research. Driven by my desire to comprehend the issues, I listened to various kinds of people that I met during our visit, especially the local people. I evaluated the information that I received on a daily basis and tried to improve. I found that this method has not just escalated my understanding about the problems on the field, but also strengthened the relationships that I build with the locals beyond professional setting. As one of the consequences, the local people and the government appeared to value my opinions more than before.

Becoming a good leader to other people is a perpetual process since it requires an individual to constantly adapt to new people and environments. Learning from my experience, I perceive that the process is firstly determined by how I lead myself before extending my lead to others. Joining the Chevening program certainly allows me to explore diverse environments that induce me to enhance my leadership skills.

(word count: 404 words)

I think the idea in your second paragraph, of how you convinced your team to choose the topic of the seminar, could be fine-tuned to work well and meet the prompt criteria of "influencing". However, the "leadership" part does not shine through as strongly. Your third paragraph describes how you did field work and how you improved yourself and met people and built relationships. There are no leadership qualities showcased there, in fact, it leans towards networking. I would suggest you remove this paragraph and replace it with a good example of leadership. Try to think of a time where your team faced a challenge and you led them to a solution..?

Side note - without having read any of your other essays, I have no idea what field you are in. Something relating to socio-economics..? That means your examples were not specific enough. Use some good, real examples that explains you yo can be a leader in your chosen field.

Hello Rizky,

In my opinion, your leadership essay is weak. You are not showing your leadership skills. You'd better remove the paragraph about your university experience and focus on story about your professional career. For your third paragraph, you are only telling the reviewer about your job desk and your activity at work. What you should write is to pick one or two cases about your problem at work and how you could solve it with your leadership skill. Showing your leadership skill means you are in the position of being a leader not a subordinate.

I hope it helps. Good luck with your essay! I'm working on mine as well.

Adinda, this is not an essay that can compete with other Chevening applicants. Your essay portrays your ability to work with a team but not in a leadership capacity as a college student. Your influencing reference is weak and doesn't really prove an ability to influence. The overall essay does not indicate a local leadership and influencing scale on any degree because you never truly led a group.

Your later professional reference doesn't even touch on the required discussion topics. Therefore it does not help progress your application essay. You need to delete this version and think about a more relevant presentation of the required skills on your part. Show team management and inspirational leadership whenever you can. If you have a community based leadership experience then that is also an acceptable presentation for this essay.

@Xti02 @Ananta @Holt

Thank you for the constructive feedback. I am certainly going to rewrite the whole essay and dig deeper.