Are you applying for the Chevening scholarship this year?

Are you applying for the Chevening scholarship this year? If so, stay with me. In this series, I will show you how to answer every essay question to its full potential. Hi, I'm Daria. I've been working in higher education for the last 10 years. I specialise in international funding and I have read thousands of scholarship applications. So today, let's talk about question one, which is demonstrate leadership. So let's do a quick recap. Chevening scholarship is currently open until October 6th. It's for master students in the UK and you can get full scholarship, the full lot. They pay for everything, for your flights, for tuition fees, for your accommodation, everything. So it's a brilliant opportunity. The application form is quite lengthy. There's lots of different sections and steps, but one of the section is the essay section, and in that section there are four questions that you need to answer. And today we're going to tackle question no. 1, which is to relate to demonstrate your leadership skills. So what I'm going to do, I'm gonna read the question now and I'm gonna give you example how to answer this question. The example I'm going to use is going to be a little bit ridiculous, so don't copy it word for word, but I will demonstrate clearly what you need to put in this question to be able to score the most points. Right, so the question reads the following. Describe a time when you demonstrated leadership. What was the context or challenge you faced? What specific actions did you take as a leader? What was the outcome and what did you learn? So we've got context, actions, outcome. And we've got maximum of 300 words to answer this question. So I would strongly suggest to use one example of leadership, not two, not three, not five. Use one and maximise the word count there. Use a lot of examples. And as always, for all essay questions, I always recommend using STAR rule. So, situation, task, action and result. And my example for this will be office fridge crisis. So situation first, imagine a situation where there is a communal fridge in the office and food is going off because all the containers are unlabelled. No one knows what belongs to who and everyone is getting annoyed. Now, two, task. I put myself in a leadership position. I took charge. I spoke to everyone in the team to address the issue. I didn't complain. I went around the table, I gave everyone a chance to speak and I suggested a solution. Perhaps we could use a labelling system. Maybe we could use a rotor and for everyone, so everyone has a chance to check what's in the fridge. If anything is going off, then remove it. Let's trial this for a month and see if that works. So that is task. Number three, action. I created labels, I created the rotor. I spoke to everyone. I communicated with everyone. I sent all the emails. I put the plan together and give everyone a deadline, give everyone specific tasks to perform and give them a month to to trial the system. That was the action. And final number four, result. Within a month, complaints have stopped, the food stopped going off and everyone was happy and everyone decided that they wanted to keep the system permanently. This example shows very clearly how I demonstrated leadership. I provided context, I provided actions and I provided the outcome. And what's the learning from it? The fact that leadership doesn't always mean formal authority and telling people what to do. It means recognising a shared problem and finding a solution that fits everyone. The example of a weak answer would be I was responsible for improving the office fridge. A lot of people would say something similar to this. I was responsible for this and that, but that's not enough. What we're going to say instead is I identified the problem, I involved people, I found a solution and then I provided a measurable outcome. If you can turn the office fridge into a leadership example, you can definitely find one example from your own experience. Hope you found this helpful. For more scholarship tips and guidance, give me a follow.