Motivation To Participate In Chevening Scholarship

I am a strong believer in the notion that only through working partnerships can we achieve set goals. And Partnerships are non-existent without relationships. When I was the General Secretary of the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Students Association, I made it a priority to build the working relationships between my departmental colleagues. This was done through the creation of a Whatsapp group. On this group, critical information, tutorial questions and undergraduate opportunities were shared for all colleagues to benefit from. These groups would prove to be very critical in connecting my departmental colleagues and would eventually become the primary means of information dissemination for us.

After graduation, the Whatsapp group evolved to become a very useful and critical platform for us to share ideas, professional updates and opportunities despite the distance between us. As the person that started the group, I was very active on the platform and made it a duty to search for relevant opportunities and scholarships to post on the group so that my colleagues could take advantage of them. When I started my attachment with Unilever, I reached out to the community requesting help in surmounting some roadblocks I had encountered and received immensely helpful feedback and offers to help. These helped me ease into the position and made several roadblocks surmountable. While chatting with a friend afterwards, we broached the topic and he explained that it was because I usually researched and made available opportunities that were beneficial to the group. This made me understand that to build and maintain relationships over time, you need to be selfless and to be focused on how you can help others. This has helped me to build trust between colleagues and professional contacts which is a key factor in successful building of my professional relationships.

This trait has also helped to reveal my personal purpose, which is to help improve the standard of living of people living in poverty through capacity building and human development and this also shines through in my dealings with people. As a Chevening awardee, I will engage the Nigerian Chevening community to develop platforms where information about life changing professional and academic initiatives like the Chevening Scholarship program is made available to youths. I will particularly focus on the youths who live in areas without access to electricity and the internet. I also plan to combine the knowledge I have gained through my participation in Chevening events, to set-up mentoring and internship programs for undergraduates in their penultimate year, especially in areas of identified skill gap.