NCP Application Advice: Pt 4
Strengthening Your New Colombo Plan Application (Part II)
In last month’s post, I focused on making your application for the New Colombo Plan (NCP) Scholarship Program as compelling as possible. This month’s post expands upon and completes last month’s content. Hopefully, it will help you to persuade the scholarship selection panel that your application merits an NCP scholarship.
Nail the ‘Why’
At the interview stage of the New Colombo Plan (NCP) Scholarship application process, you should be able to talk passionately about your goals because you believe they are worth striving for. This brings me to the importance of starting with the ‘why’. This is the reason you do anything; it is a powerful tool for inspiring people to empathise with you and your goals. The principle of starting with the ‘why’ is compellingly explained in Simon Sinek’s TED talk, ‘How Great Leaders Inspire Action’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4&t=5s. Really try to distil the ‘why’ of your NCP program. Make the reasons for your proposed journey clear at all stages of your application. To add some concreteness to these abstract concepts, I have provided a personal example taken from one of my previous Medium posts (https://medium.com/@julianvidalNCP/a-summary-of-my-new-colombo-plan-program-part-1-uber-1a1a817d2b5e):
Why: I want to help to pave a way for sustainable technologies that will change the world.
How: I envisage myself working for a private sector company to facilitate the acceptance of new technologies through creative public policy solutions.
What: I have already been accepted to participate in Uber’s Asia-Pacific Internship Program from January 8 — February 2 2018. This environment will enable me to explore the frontiers of public policy in the Indo-Pacific together with the experts. It will help to prepare me for my career in public policy.
If I had just written that my dream was to work in public policy, it would not have sounded half as worthwhile. If you go further by introducing the process that I will use to achieve my goal, your goal begins to sound more interesting. For example, ‘I want to facilitate the acceptance of new technologies through public policy solutions’. But my explanation still begs the question, ‘Why?’ To answer this question, I ought to give the fundamental reason that I am pursuing my goal in the first place. ‘I want to help to pave a way for sustainable technologies that will change the world.’ This shows that my goal is worth fighting for. If you nail the ‘why’, your goal will have the capacity to inspire others.
As Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman writes in ‘Thinking: Fast and Slow’, humans are far from being the rational decision makers we believe ourselves to be. We are proven to be quite irrational and make decisions based on our emotions rather than logic. The reason behind a goal (e.g. making way for sustainable solutions that will change the world) is an emotive trigger. It introduces the meaningful implications of your actions and not simply the mere process of carrying your actions out (e.g. working in public policy, working together with legislators to facilitate the acceptance of new technologies). The ‘why’ gives your goal the weight it deserves. I am not suggesting that you make things up or try to manipulate the emotions of your assessors. But if you want to inspire people with your genuine, clear-cut goals, make sure that you nail the ‘why’.
