Student leader in the past, a compaany leader in the future. Chevening

Please help me prepare this Chevening Essay. I need additional inputs, comments, grammar corrections.

Chevening Essay Leadership and Influence

As the eldest child in the family, I have been trained to lead my siblings in any situation where a leader is needed. So young as I am, I always volunteered and sometimes elected as a student leader in our school and university organizations, in our local government and even in our church group. I attended a lot of leadership trainings like that one offered at the YMCA.

In my first job as a government owned corporation under agricultural sector, it has always been my desire to help farmers to improve their way of living. Technology has been there, but most of them are still hesitant to use the available materials. I was assigned to spearhead on introducing the internet to farmers in the area covered by our branch office.

I studied a a rural university in the Philippines that is why I want to study MBA abroad to increase my skills, new knowledge and confidence. My plan after graduation is to return home to my province and continue the business started by my family, which is engaged in small trading and real estate business. My parents are currently managing our small family business. They have employed local workers who never had an opportunity to study in a university.

Currently, while I am working here in the city as an employee of an IT Company. I have a part time business with Travel and Tours. I have direct contact with clients, suppliers and sub-contractors. I am also using the AIRBNB application to get clients from our real estate business. I am planning to full time manage my travel and tour business and my family business after getting an MBA. I felt that I am not equip enough to continue to lead our family business if I will not get an MBA abroad. But because studying abroad is expensive, I need Chevening scholarship to assist me in this.

Rani, this is a tremendously weak essay that will not pass the first round of considerations for such a prestigious and demanding scholarship program. There is nothing in your essay that indicates that you can be a future leader and influencer in your country upon your completion of the course. In order to prove that you have actual leadership and influencing skills, you must first, indicate a full time job that requires you practice leadership and influencing skills. From the description that you gave, your job at the travel and tours company will not accomplish that. Neither will your job at the IT company or real estate business since you did not even try to discuss your position at those companies in the essay. The mere fact that you cannot mention the names of the companies will make your claims suspect in the eyes of the reviewer. The validity of your claims will be in question because you are not giving any verifiable information regarding the company names and your work descriptions in relation to your employment there.

The overall essay is not impressive and does not offer the kind of leadership and influencing skills that will have the reviewer impressed by your capacity as a leading professional in your field. I strongly recommend that you read the sample Chevening leadership and influencing essays that are available here for your reference and try to develop an essay along the lines of those examples or base your revised essay on the advice given to those scholarship applicants at the time. Believe me when I tell you that this essay will not even be considered by the reviewer after the first paragraph. I have helped a majority of Chevening applicants from this forum reach their final round of interviews and most of them get the scholarship.