"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other" - Chevening essay

Chevening LEADERSHIP & INFLUENCE QUESTION

"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." John F. Kennedy. I do believe in this quote as I always believe that every situation you go through in your life, teach you something which will increase your ability while helping others who are going through the same situation.

In college, we had a field project about start-up small businesses, the team consisted of four students and we were running out of time as two of my colleagues were having a severe cold as it was winter season. The presentation required to make a field tour and interviews with the owners, with such circumstances my colleagues decided to save the situation by making an online research, however, what was really required from our research was to see these people in their natural environment and learn about the difficulties they faced. While hope was fading away, I made a decision and went to the small projects' exhibition in order to know what kind of business will I find there and I found a lot of creative start-up businesses. then I made a plan for us and gave each of my colleagues an assignment according to their abilities. We agreed that I and the non-sick colleague will go to the chosen business place for the interviews and take some pictures in order to share the experience with our classmates and my other homesick colleagues will prepare the presentation script for us.

After we made the interviews and got the required pictures, I had another idea of making a short video about the place as we put the pictures and chose an old classical Arabic music in order to reflect the great atmosphere we were in (this place was in one of old Cairo's locations).Our professor was amazed and we got an A+.

I have learned that following your heart and your dreams is the most important thing as if you do believe in something, it will come true. I have always wanted to work in the HR field but everyone around made me believe it won't come true. So, I decided to work as a customer service agent with high salary. But the problem was that I didn't feel that this is the right place for me or what I dreamt of, then I decided to quit, despite my family's disapproval, to pursue my dream. I worked in many recruitment agencies, although the salary was low I was beyond happy. Now, I am a vendor manager in a multinational company training all the newcomers and helping them to understand our policies and procedures and how the work is done.

One of my friends never believed that she can succeed in anything, she even was afraid to dream of doing anything. I started to help her to decide what she wanted in her life and what her hidden capabilities are. I told her it is okay if you failed once and twice as this considered a step forward to your goal. Now, she is working as a shadow teacher for disabled children and she discovered her artistic side and applied it as a part of her teaching methods.

Yomna, your presentation is too greenhorn. The one problem with presenting an academic leadership and influencing presentation in this essay is that it isn't based on a professional reality. Academic leadership does not require influencing abilities. It is not leadership that can be noted as experience because all college leadership presentations neglect to mention that all these activities have an academic mentor on the other end who helps in the decision making process and guides the whole project from afar. That is why Chevening is very specific about requiring work experience of no less than 2 years as one of its qualifying requirements. Therefore, this experience cannot be used for the essay. It is too old and does not really reflect an impressive leadership discussion. You need to present a leadership and influencing experience that is more recent in nature and more impressive in presentation.