Suddenly something changed when I tried to do something new and said adieu to my comfort zone.

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Leadership and influence question.... Chevening

Being someone from middle class I always looked up to other people around me while growing up and went with what the majority said, but suddenly something changed when I tried to do something new and said adieu to my comfort zone to experiment something new.

It all started during my school days when I led a team of three people to participate in a quiz competition and being junior it was difficult to manage my senior fellows but the ability to deal with situations covered it all and we won the quiz competition. I didn't stop there and led a team of forty people to another district-wise competition and returned victorious when I was in twelfth standard.

In third semester I decided to organize a three-day Inter-University Olympiad named "Cloud'15 Olympiad" in 2015, in which more than a dozen universities participated and around 400 students. The tough part of this was to persuade students from other universities to participate in this very olympiad and it was difficult to contact every student of the participating universities, so I used social media and gave a student the ambassador role for his/her university and then it was the ambassador's responsibility to persuade other students to participate in different competitions. The event had several different competitions. I couldn't have managed all by myself, so I decided to make different teams and assigned a team leader, and those team leaders were responsible for their team members. After this plan, I only have to manage few people and supervise them and then they have to report to me. I had to manage all these things with the university's coordinator who was a staffer.

After acquiring some knowledge about software development I have developed an android application and convinced a foreign investor and a team of five people to work with me, they were hesitant at first being in different time zone and the potential risk whether people will like the app or not. All meetings were over video calls but they liked my idea and especially, the development model. Now they are working as part of the team and the idea is no more an idea, its a reality and the application crossed the milestone of one million downloads recently, receiving 7K hits per day.

Alpha Brains is my new venture, with two friends and a small voluntary team that writes for the Alpha Brains' website, a non-profit organization which is Pakistan's First Virtual Think Tank, keeping an eye on World, particularly Middle East, South Asia, Defense & Nuclear Strategies. I am the CTO and contributing editor

As a leader, I'm passionate about my team and the goal to accomplish. I had fantastic opportunity at school, college and university level to polish my skills and I'm now ready to take challenges head-on as I've good accomplishments being a young leader and influencing skills, but to top that Chevening Scholarship will help me move forward by acquiring new knowledge, meeting new people and exchanging culture which I will bring back to my country to develop quality IT systems in various sectors, that will help my community as the world is going towards digitisation.

Mukhtiar, you need to focus this essay on your leadership and influencing abilities on only 2 fronts. The first, is when you developed the android app and you had to convince a foreign investor to give you a start up capital, and then depict how you gathered the team of 5 people to work with you on the development of the project. You may not know it but, the foundation of your future leadership and influencing skills became evident during this time. More importantly, it focuses and shows a clear influencing style which is required by the essay. Second, discuss how you created Alpha Brains and what sort of leadership challenges you faced when you were starting the company. That will illustrate your leadership abilities. 2 different stories, but 2 strong stories that depict impressive leadership and influencing styles on 2 different occasions. That is exactly what Chevening is looking for.

@Holt
Thanks, and I would like you to gimme some feedback about the 3rd paragraph as well, if that's something I need to rethink about... also if you can send me links for other chevening example and good essays on this forum, which I can read, get guidelines and write my own.

and also if you want me to remove the 3rd paragraph, if that's not relevant