Being a Leader Require Excellent Capability - Chevening Leadership Question

Hello Everyone. Please help me to review my essay for Chevening Scholarhip. Thank you in advance.

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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.

my energy and effort as a leader

I believe being a leader require capability to work well and perform excellent communication with others in order to reach specific goals. And I believe I have played leadership role since I was in high school. Being a chairman in several student organization had given me opportunity to involve with many teams, communicate with many people and organize several events.

During college, I had an assignment to make a group of fifteen students to do community services in rural village. Within a month, we had to implement our knowledge as university students to assist the village's development in various sectors such as education, health, environment, etc. As a team, we were planning to make several solutive projects. One of them was to build a library to increase reading interest and knowledge of the children in the village. As the group leader, with limited budget and time, I managed to delegate tasks to every member of the team, coordinated with local authority to arrange the location and permit to build the library and also coordinate with several bookstores who could assist us in the project. I could not deny that there are some different perspectives among my team member and challenges during the process. But, fortunately I was able to resolve the differences by facilitating all the ideas of the team. And fortunately, with the help of so many parties, our team's effort were paid as the library was established and the local authority have committed to maintain the library.

Since the community service assignment, I became interested in volunteering activities, especially in education sector. Since then, I always join volunteering group such as Inspiration Class Jakarta, 1000 Teachers South Tangerang, ARSA Banten. In Inspiration Class Jakarta, I got the chance to explain to elementary student about my profession as an engineer and what engineering really is. I am so glad that I got to be a part of this movement because I could meet people who cares about others, who want to share the energy for community and furthermore I got the chance to contribute to Indonesia.

Worked in various types of teams during high school, college internship, and professional job in several institutions have taught me that communication and teamwork are very important to achieve goals. Having work experiences in ministry, private, national and international corporation, I have learned both how to lead and follow. I have also been appointed as team leader in my job. In this position, more or less, I have been required to provide advice, feedback, and a good example for the team.

These experiences have taught me so many valuable lessons. Not only about leadership, but also about sharing ideas and energy, engaging with people, and facing challenges together. I'm glad that my energy and effort meet someone else need. I want to spend my time and attention solving my favorite problems. And I believe Chevening scholarship would give me a great opportunity to grow more as an individual and also as a leader in the future.

Guntomo, while I acknowledge that this is definitely a leadership and influencing skill, I am wondering if it will be enough to compete against the more career related, professional leadership and influencing examples coming from the other applicants. The fact that your leadership and influencing skill comes from the time when you were doing community service in college makes it less impressive for a number of reasons. The first, is that you had the assistance of the university in making the project happen. Sure you led the team and talked to various people in order to make the library a reality. That does not erase the fact that you were accompanied by a university representative during these times which made the negotiations and influencing situations more favorable towards your objectives.

In the review of the applications, there will be others who had to do certain things, similar to your community project, on a professional level. They did not have the opportunity to seek the assistance of their university adviser in the completion of their tasks. Things were not "rigged" towards their success as your community project was. That is why I feel that your leadership and influencing skill based on an academic achievement will not be enough to carry your application to the next level.

Have you started working yet? If so, in what capacity? Can you not consider any professional achievement one that can fall under the leadership and influencing criteria of the Chevening scholarship at the moment? I really wish that you could change the reference to one that will surely be more competitive when compared to the other applicants for the scholarship grant.