Whatever it Takes: The One Solid Plan (Essays 3&4)
Get ready to dive into the fun and challenging path to writing your Chevening's Study in the UK and Career Plan essays.
Hope the title looks catchy as I expect lol. No really, you should seriously do WHATEVER IT TAKES in these 2 essays.
DISCLAIMER: This year’s application has new guidelines for writing the essays. The word count has been deducted to 100-300 words, and the requirements are also a bit different in some context. This article represents my OWN point of view and recommended approach according to my experience; therefore, use it wisely.
To recall, Chevening is not your bank of luck! It is an extremely challenging battle field that you need to survive. They are not going to fund your degree just because your dream is to study in the UK, but rather, you should have a purpose that would leave no option for them but to pick you. What I mean by this is you should have a solid plan that is well connected and serve a purpose that you know and made an intensive research on.
Form answers in your head. What do you exactly want to study? Why do you want to study it? What does your country lack with regard to what you want to study? What are the issues you want to solve using the knowledge and experience you want to gain from the UK? Why do you want to study this specifically in the UK? What makes the UK so unique in this field? What universities are you aiming for? Why those universities? What are your short, mid, and long-term career goals that you want to achieve in order to solve the issues your country is experiencing within your field?
Newly added: you should align your essays with the UK’s priority areas for Chevening. There are 4 categories that you must align your course study with. This should be carefully described.
In a nutshell, there are some problems in your country, you want to study in the UK to get the knowledge, experience, and the connections that would help you solve those problems, period. The distinction between the 2 essays? You should answer all the questions in the previous paragraph in essay 3, along with your short-term or immediate plan upon returning from the UK, then focus on your mid and long-term goals along with the rest of requirements needed for essay 4.
Let us take an example on how this all works together. First, remember, it is okay if you do not study the same thing you did during your undergrad, but you do however need to know the W questions: what, why, where, and when you want to do it, and how. Chevening used to not care about that, universities do however. You must illustrate why you want to do that shift in career and what the transferrable skills you got are that will help you with your career goals.
I will create a hypothetical example for you to comprehend and get an idea on how you should think and structure your essay.
Assume you want to study a degree in technology and human behavior. You focus on the safe use of social media among people, with the aim to target those with poor education and little awareness on how to safely browse and use the Internet and social media. Your third essay should start by highlighting how vital technology and social media are in the current era, and then you begin listing the issues you identified in your country that are making it lacking in comparison to other countries. For instance, your research showed that:
People can easily get scammed through Facebook or WhatsApp
It is more common among people aged >40 to click on suspicious links, which lead to their credentials get stolen and cause more serious issues
This issue is significantly increasing due to poor tech education that is not being covered by schools or external awareness workshops
Many fraudsters are leveraging this to their own interest
There is a huge lack of the necessary workforce that would combat this problem
There is a huge rise of misinformation and disinformation, and people are unable to identify the authenticity of the news being shared
Government is not supporting or implementing proper controls, campaigns, policies, or strategies to tackle the issues
There is a reported percentage of 40% rise of scams in the country, with the majority targeting old individuals
A lot can be said, and they fall into the same purpose. You must state facts and statistics about the problem and identify real challenges that your country is facing. Following that, you should talk about why the UK and not other countries? What makes the UK special when it comes to studying technology and human behavior? You have to research and find out why you actually need to do this in the UK not somewhere else. Find real and actual reasons; something like: “according to the global cybersecurity index (GCI) by the ITU, the UK is one of the T1 Role Modelling countries and one of the top in the world, which comes from several factors that made the UK reach this stage including having the awareness about the threats emerging from technology utilization and the danger surrounding people”. This is just an example, not a neat one, but to show you the idea of how you should connect the dots and ideas and how to state facts and actual research not just ordinary and usual stuff.
After you are done with the UK, jump into universities. You have to choose 3 universities that offer that course and just talk about the first one. You order your choices based on what you need, but do noy worry, you can later on choose and study at whichever university you would like regardless of the order.
How you describe your university ain’t different from the way you did with the UK. You have to very well research your university and talk about actual, unfamiliar, and unusual information that made you choose it and not others. Again, this has to be something unique about the university, the course, its staff (like there is this professor that I have been following over LinkedIn and I would love to study under their supervision), the labs and how practical they are, he campus and its facilities, the city where this campus is based, etc. Talk about the uni and its course in a way that describes how this would contribute to solving the bigger problem your country is facing. Then connect this directly with your short-term plan (immediate and within 2-3 years after the degree) and how are you going to apply the skills you make after you return (use the SMART method here).
Important: I talked a lot here; I mixed the previous instructions for Chevening with the new ones. I purposefully did that so yo get a better understanding of the umbrella and what lies beneath. Grasp all this, then form the answers in your essay with the right flow that does NOT exceed 300 words.
Now, moving on to the Career Plan essay.
Recall when we talked about the issues your country is facing when it comes to tech and human behavior. You identified those issues, and you have the intention to solve them, but how?
Here comes the role of the career plan, which is the most critical piece of the puzzle. You must form a plan, categorized in 2 sections, that aims to solve the issues you identified in essays 3. Do you see the connection? Hehe.
Start the essays with a very short paragraph that re-emphasizes why studying such a degree is essential for your country (connecting your career plan with what you want to study in the UK). Then, the next paragraph should talk about the first section: your mid-term plan. This plan is what your goals are (the ones that solve the bigger problem) around 3-10 years after finishing your degree.
Once you are done with that, the next paragraph is the long-term one. Finally, conclude with a closure statement too on how Chevening will contribute to your achieving your plans or ambitions.
Throughout that, mention any challenges or obstacles you think you may face while you are working on applying your goals.
That was all about the structure; but, have you wondered about each paragraph is supposed to be written? How each goal is described?
Use THE SMART approach!
The SMART method should not only be the approach we follow when writing our goals, but it is a conceptual framework that should be embedded in our thinking. Each goal should not be random; it must be well designed and well expressed in your essay. You can not say something like: when I return from the UK, I plan to establish a company that fights cybercrimes (can be unrealistic and vague), or I want to change the human behavior and improve it by 70% (unrealistic, not attainable, and not time-bound). Do you have a bit of an idea now?
Each goal should cover and touch each of the 5 pillars of the framework. Let your essay and plan make sense together, connect the dots, connect the plans and goals together. Simply, just tell your story. You know your value, you know what you want, and you know the dream. All you need is just to have the right structure of putting it all together.