A student for a year, a scholar for a life!
Hi, there! The deadline for Chevening scholarship 2020/2021 is approaching really sooon! As a Chevening scholar who just finished the master study, I’d like to share my thoughts for essay writing for Chevening scholarship.
I also did mentorship for some people for Chevening application 2019/2020 where I shared all the things that I write here, and two of them got accepted! So I hope there are some valuable tips for you for the essay 🙂
Disclaimer. This post does not reflect on the Chevening Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and its partner organisations. This story is just my experience and personal thoughts working on Chevening’s essay.
As we know, the Chevening scholarship is highly competitive. In my year, there were 4000ish applicants where only 150 of them were called for interview. In the end, there were 68 Indonesian and 4 Timor Leste scholars who studied in the UK on my cohort. So, if you want to get a chance for an interview, then you need to work on your essay. This is no doubt. This is the only chance for you to be astounding compared to other applicants.
A breakdown of each question is posted here. However, there are some important points I want to point out when you work for Chevening essay:
- Write your essay in Situation Task Action Result (STAR) structure.
Try to write your story in STAR structure which helps you to structure examples that you need to provide in each question.
Start with the Situation (S) first, explain your situation or task that you need to accomplish. Describe a specific event or situation which can be from your working or volunteering experience.
Task (T) state briefly what your task and goal was. What did you need to accomplish at that time?
Action (A) describe your actions you took to achieve the goal; to finish the task. What specific steps did you take and what particular contribution did you make?
Result (R), describe the outcome and emphasize your contribution that made the result difference. Besides result, state what did you accomplish and what did you learn? If you can quantify the result that would be much greater!
2. Write down the questions
Before you are 100% sure with your essay, work your draft in a doc file first instead of writing it directly in the application platform. You don’t want to get troubled by keep login and access your draft. Not to mention the possibility of technical glitch near to the deadlines. When you write your draft, sometimes it’s easy to get overly enjoyed your work and forget the focus of what is asked. Writing down the questions would actually help you to remind what is demanded from each question. For example, in the first question:
Chevening is looking for individuals who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer
There are multiple things required in the essay: how do you meet the requirement of future leaders/influencer, clear examples (use STAR), more than one example, leadership example, influence example. Make sure that you only write about these things in your essay and do not go beyond that. The background story is important, but do not give too much. Remember, there is a word limit where we need to oblige, which I know 500 words feels not enough! But yep, writing Chevening essay is actually a good practice to create a post-module assignment (essay) in the future! There are word counts and structure that needs to be followed through just like Chevening essay hehe :p
3. Make your story flow
In each question, make sure you have this: introduction —> body —> closing. For the proportion, I would follow this: 10% for introduction, 80% for body (where you put STAR) and 20% for the closing. The flow serves to invite readers deeper into the story and leave a greater impact.
For the introduction, you can put some background to connect to the next paragraph. This is just my thoughts, but you can start by what you believe about the topic or background information about your field.
For the main body, you can use the STAR structure. You can try to build the flow by providing your experiences from the early days until it grows up to the recent leadership/networking experiences that bring you greatest impact. In addition, for the leadership and networking questions, give them more than one examples and if you can, provide multiple situations and environment. In my opinion, the leadership experience doesn’t always need to be big and glory in regards to your title and how many subordinates that you have. Yet you always need to justify and emphasise your contribution and what makes it different.
For the conclusion, always elaborate your points mentioned in the main body to Chevening scholarship. You might mention that you already have abundant leadership/networking experiences, then, what role Chevening can play in your leadership/networking skills? What do you wish to accomplish more by being a Chevening scholar? How Chevening could accelerate your entrepreneurship journey (in my case)? You can try to give your hope and aspiration by being a Chevening scholar. By mentioning this in all 4 questions, I think you show your consistency and congruency in your essay.
4. Give sufficient time to proofread your essay
I mean sufficient time is 2-3 weeks, where you can have more free time to reach some people and help you proofread. I asked four of my friends to proofread, two of them are Chevening scholars in previous years, 1 is a friend who works as a consultant and another one was a current student of UK University. If you have no idea who to proofread your essay, do reach out to Chevening scholars via Linkedin or Instagram. But of course, ask politely and do not expect to give you their essay 🙂 They have been through the process that you do now and I’m sure they would help you. Some countries have a mentorship program for Chevening scholarship, the easiest is to check the alumni network in each country. For Indonesia, check here
Lastly, I would say that writing a great Chevening essay starts with the sincerity of the author’s heart. It needs honesty and passion for the essay that you write, at least that’s what I felt from my experience 🙂 Good luck and may you soon #chosenforchevening 🙂
laurensia.saraswati 
[…] I already mentioned in the previous post about general tips for writing Chevening essay, it is important to give an introduction. You can start with what you believe about […]