Outline why you have selected your chosen three university courses, and explain how this
relates to your previous academic or professional experience and your plans for the future.
my marketing career
On May 2017, the student job portal I am working for, Bukapintu, launched a city-level
campaign called Indonesia Magang (Internship for Indonesia). The campaign aimed to
connect companies who need interns with college students who were seeking for work
experiences during the school vacation period from June to August. As Marketing Manager,
my main responsibility was to attract as many students as possible to apply to the available
internship opportunities on our portal.
At that time, the team already had connections with over 40 student organizations who
would voluntarily spread the vacancies information to their members. Since they only do it
voluntarily, my team could not ask them to spread the information repeatedly. I did not have
the benefit of repeated exposure, so I only had one chance to attract all 40 student
organizations' members. Thus, it all came down to one problem: how to craft a highly
effective advertising message.
As a marketing management graduate, I then took a step back and tried to remember the
lessons I learned from my Consumer Behavior class in 2011, when I was still a college
freshman. There is one thing that I considered would be relevant to the context: consumers
have different types of motivation and one of them is the motivation to be socially
acceptable.
Based on this insight, I came up with a headline for the advertising message: Masih Belum
Dapat Magang? (Still Haven't Gotten an Internship Yet?). The idea behind the headline was
to tap into the students' inherent motivation to be socially acceptable among their peers by
making an internship look like a "cultural norm"--something college students commonly does
during their school vacation. With this message, the campaign succeeded to attract 691
internship applicants out of 3478 website visitors--thus resulting in 19% conversion rate from
visitors to applicants. The rate was significantly higher than our last year's internship
campaign, which only resulted in around 9% conversion rate.
This defining moment is one of the reasons why I selected my chosen three university
courses: MSc Marketing in the University of Manchester, MSc Marketing in the University of
Bath, and MSc Consumer Behavior in the University of Goldsmiths. I might have learned the
basic marketing concepts during my undergraduate study. Yet working in the tech industry,
that is consumer-centric and puts great emphasis on lean customer development, further
strengthens my belief that understanding consumer behavior and decision-making process
is the key to a business' success.
My works as a Marketing Manager and employee number #3 at Bukapintu have taught me a
lot of things. In less than two years, the portal has helped over 16,000 students in Indonesia
to find an internship, entry-level job, and career guidance. Our blog, that has over 200 career
education articles, is visited by more than 40,000 readers every month. However, I still
have a high curiosity to further my understanding of marketing, especially on consumer
behavior and how marketing intersects with psychology.
I have made comparisons between all marketing programs in the UK, and I narrowed down
my choices to the three courses above because of these reasons:
1. I chose MSc Marketing in the University of Manchester my first priority because the
program offers a specialization in Consumer Behavior and because the Manchester
Business School has a great reputation in my country.
2. I chose MSc Marketing in the University of Bath because consumer research is one of the
School of Management's research focus. I am particularly interested in Professor Avi
Shankar's research on identity and consumption.
3. I chose MSc Consumer Behavior in the University of Goldsmiths because it is an
interdisciplinary program under its Institute of Management Studies, supported by the
university's core strength in psychology.
Following the course, I would like to go back to Indonesia and continue my marketing career
at one of the country's high-impact technology companies. I believe either one of the chosen
three courses will equip me with the necessary understanding and skills to help achieve that
goal.Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,835 
4783 Raisa, you do not need such an extensive back story for your response essay. In fact, it is not required at all. You only had to focus on the 3 universities and the courses that you chose in relation to specific situations in your workplace. You did not have to throw in the whole house in the discussion. Just the requirements of the prompt. Due to the extensive back story, you lost your chance to qualify for the scholarship.
The Chevening reviewer does not have the time to sift through all of this information before he gets to your highly non-informative university and course choices. You would have killed your scholarship application with the end of the first irrelevant paragraph, if the reviewer even bothered to read that far. When he realizes after the first 2-3 sentences that you are narrating a novel instead of responding to the prompt, he is going to trash this application and it all ends there. If you want to have a prayer of at least having a competitive opportunity at this scholarship, you will revise this essay.
Focus the immediate discussion on the university name, the choice of course, and the reason why that is relevant to your line of work. Additionally, inform the reviewer as to how your current profession has prepared you to succeed in completing this course of study. Do that 2 more times for the remaining universities and your essay will be well within the prompt requirements and competitive opportunity that you are seeking as a scholarship applicant.
