1. LEADERSHIP & INFLUENCE QUESTION.
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: 50 words, maximum word count: 500 words)
I believe that for the leader sky isn't the limit when there are footprints on the moon. Leaders and influencers invest their academic capacity for the betterment and empowerment of others.
For my career, I always had a strong ambition to become a personality who can influence and lead. As a medical student I was always seeking an opportunity, to influence the staff of the faculty with my extraordinary academic capacity, lead students a team, and spread out my network outside the university. Therefore, I founded the student association for the first time in Kandahar Medical University.
After completing the faculty, with my excellent influencing background and strong recommendation of senior staff of my faculty, I was hired as a lecturer in one of the private medical university in Kandahar. I worked hard and influenced almost everyone there with my strong inventive capacity. Soon I promoted to the post of the dean of the same faculty.
While working as a dean of the faculty, I came to understand that, low financial status of the students, heavy expenses and low financial aid to the university, traditional barriers against women knowledge, and low quality academic affairs of the university are the catastrophic contributors to the discouraging condition of the university. In order to overcome these challenges, I had to make sure my colleagues first to have positive perception about the circumstances.
First of all I gathered senior staff of the faculty. I explained them my plan. We talked and discussed the challenges and opportunities and finally I convinced them to support me with their honest involvement in implementing my plan.
I established three main committees from the senior lecturers within the faculty, the committee of rapprochement with parents, the committee of rapprochement with governmental and nongovernmental organization (NGO), and the committee of quality assurance.
All three committees were committed to the evolvement of the university. Therefore, we arranged meetings with civilization communities, we debated on televisions, we offered bonuses to the female students, and finally the number of female students increased from 207 to 556. We convinced many NGOs such as ICRC, A.E.F, Promote, and Selaab Charity Foundation to sponsor more than 45 needy students to accomplish their higher education. The committee of quality assurance determined and implemented eleven standards to ensure the quality in academic affairs within each department. Finally after evaluation of ministry of higher education our university ranked first among all private universities in 2015.
Changing the perception of wide variety of people about women knowledge, saving an organization from heavy expenses, providing financial aid to tens of students who were obligated to quit their higher education of no financial aid, and establishment of high yield issues in quality assurance in the universities, demonstrated my leadership and influencing skills. In addition, these achievements also proved that I have the capability to lead people with working closely with them, investing them to be part of a vision that can be shared, and make them believing in benefits of collaboration.