Leadership is my passion. Chevening Application

Chevening Application, the Leadership Question

My passion has always been to influence, inspire and lead those around me to achieve certain goals, objectives and aspirations that had been set out either collectively as a team or an improvement of individual performance for the benefit of the society. I have always desired to affect and change things around me in positive and very important ways having recognized that my Country and so many in Africa have suffered severely from poor leadership, because Leaders have failed to use their Leadership and influencing position for the good of those they lead and this has led me to pursue certain leadership and influential position in every place I find myself, Knowing fully well that one of the greatest ways to influence your environment and those around you is by taking up leadership responsibility while building up leadership skill and influential capacities.

One of my very key contributions to my environment was an academic one while serving as the Academic officer of my departmental association. Prior to this time, the students in the department had recorded very poor academic performance which was then a burden to me; I needed to change things for the better necessitating my election into the office. On assumption of office I foresighted and saw the need to pioneer and setup an academic team comprising of the best students in the department across all levels, I led the team to begin review of challenges faced by students in the department with a view to solving them without recourse to ethnic, tribal and religious sentiments as "a good leader should be able to work across all boundaries".

The members of the academic team were also mandated to begin tutorials for students across all levels and as head of the team "I definitely had to lead by example"

With the problems outlined I began discussions with my head of department and other lecturers in the department on the need to change some of the condition of learning in the department knowing fully well that a leader should be able to use the influential position to "communicate effectively" the problems of the people to appropriate authorities. Needful to say is that some of the conditions were reviewed and changed by the department and grades of students improved drastically in the coming years.

In addition, my other core leadership skills include strategic planning, ability to reason logically through problems and proffer solutions with ability to motivate and mobilize people around a compelling vision for the future, inspiring them to follow in my footsteps.

Conclusively, it has always been my desire to effect lasting changes in my country and knowing that this can be done using leadership and influence, I've sought to build up my leadership and influential capacities by reading good books on the concept, watching the experience of other leaders in related fields and environment and learning from them amongst others. I know that my country can be great and I'm willing to take the lead in achieving that.

Ahmadu, have you given any consideration to presenting a more solid idea of your leadership skills so that your abilities and character would be better portrayed in the essay and to the reader? I can see that you have a true potential to read based upon the overview of this essay. However, the scholarship reviewer does not need an overview of your skills. He needs to realize that you have at least one leadership skill, trait, or character that would set you apart from the rest of the applicants. I believe that it would be in the best interest of your essay if you could choose what you believe to be your most important leadership trait, skill, or character based upon the event of most importance that happened to you in the academic setting upon your assumption to office. If you concentrate on presenting your strongest skill and developing that image, you stand a better chance of creating a memorable paper for your application. You don't need to discuss so many events in the shortest manner possible. What you need to do, is discuss your best asset in the best way possible. Your paper will definitely be better for it.

thanks Holt.. I've reviewed the essay entirely and I'll post it again for your scrutiny... thanks again

second from last paragraph is a mere listing of qualities and does not add value to the essay without a description of how you demostrated these skills.