"Raising in a middle-class family was indeed demanding" Commonwealth Scholarship Personal Statement

Hello people! I am writing my personal statement for Commonwealth Shared Scholarship UK. Please help me to identify the areas in the essay which I need improve. Feel free to point out any mistakes and given suggestions. Thank you :).

to make an impact in your home country

Prompt: Summarize the ways in which your personal background has encouraged you to want to make an impact in your home country. You should indicate areas in which you have already contributed, such as having overcome any personal or community barriers to higher education. (500 words max)

"Raising in a middle-class family background was indeed demanding. Though, the self-reliant environment eventually helped me in cultivating a responsible individual identity. I was in 3rd grade when the factory my father worked in had been shut down due to bankruptcy, leaving my father unemployed. Being the only child, I was the primary concern of my parents' attention. Although both of them had not received a formal education, they were cognizant of its gravity. Despite facing financial instability, my parents made every persistent effort to support my education. Observing these events embedded an unusual stimulus in my personality to conquer the apex of my career and make my parents proud.

I received my early education in the town's school where the classrooms barely had any partitions between the different grades. Due to the unconducive learning atmosphere, I urged my father to transfer me to St: Bonaventure's high school for 8th grade. Living in a combined family setting, I could hardly attain privacy for my studies at home. However, I never joined any coaching academy as I found self-tutoring more comfortable and rejoicing.

After school, I engaged myself in assisting my father in fixing household appliances. Out of curiosity, I would unscrew defective machines to check their working mechanism. Through time, this interest grew manifold as I began understanding the big picture of machines in the industry during college factory visits. I found Mechanical Engineering to be the center of all my interests and decided to pursue my passion-turned-profession. Eventually, I successfully achieved admission with distinction in Mechanical Engineering at MUET Jamshoro, becoming the first family member to attend a university.

Seeking to build a concrete technical understanding, I applied for an internship at JPCL Thermal Power Plant. Being able to execute the systematic energy analysis of the plant incredibly surged my interest in energy generation. The work required applying the profound thermodynamic concepts into exercise which also helped in nurturing my practical acumen. However, one thing that left me deeply unsettled was the widespread industrial pollution. In Pakistan, environmental pollution has exacerbated the air quality seven times higher than acceptable levels, causing 22,000 premature deaths and hospitalizing six-and-a-half million people annually. Therefore, the country's situation demands an immediate turn to sustainable energy generation. Particularly, it was the moment I decided to pursue Renewable Energy as a postgraduate specialization.

I strongly believe that obtaining my postgraduate degree Renewable Energy degree in the UK will prove to be an important milestone in my professional development and attaining my long-term goal. Obtaining diverse technical expertise in the UK will enable me to construct radical solutions to the intricate problems in my domain. My enhanced qualifications will eventually place me in a unique professional position using which I can propose/implement my research initiatives. On returning to Pakistan, I will exercise my acquired expertise as a Mechanical Engineer in the Alternative Energy Development Board and hopefully contribute to amplifying the renewables segment in Pakistan's energy mix and attain its 2030 renewable energy goals."

The essay is on point until you get to the last paragraph. Since it appears that you are going to have some sort of career change from Mechanical Engineering to Renewable Energy, there needs to be a bridge in the discussion of this interest. What I am looking for in this essay, which the reviewer will also be looking for, is an explanation of how your Mechanical Engineering degree will be relevant to your Renewable Energy masters course. You mention that briefly in the portion about:


So there is a halfway point that will connect the two courses, which you should be showing in the essay. It would help if, as a Mechanical Engineer, you have already done some work in the field of renewable energy as this will show that you have the foundation for studies in the Renewable Energy field. This will also help you better respond to the part of the prompt that requires you to show ways that your personal background has encouraged you to want to make an impact in your home country.

Right now, the discussion highlights more of your education rather than a balanced presentation of the prompt requirements. Shorten your personal background. Focus more on how your exposure to your father's work helped build the foundation for your interest in mechanical engineering and renewable energy. Truth be told, your barrier to higher education is not as compelling as it sounds. Your problem only relates to a mixed family setting. Which means there were several households in one house. That is not exactly the kind of dramatic and compelling situation that the scholarship would consider to be note worthy.

The fact that your father lost his job when you were in 3rd grade? Not relevant. The prompt is asking you to discuss higher education. So that means college level. Third grade is elementary, high school is secondary education, and college, is tertiary or higher education as that is the focused and specialized field of education that is relevant to your scholarship application.