Explain your first choice of course and university. Please relate your answers to one of the UK priority areas for Chevening as referenced on the Chevening website. What is the specific priority area you wish to address? How will your chosen course equip you to contribute to addressing this theme? Why have you selected your particular university in the UK? How do you plan to immediately apply the knowledge or skill you’ll gain after your studies?
This prompt is asking you to demonstrate exactly how your first-choice master's course will equip you to tackle a pressing challenge in your home country while directly aligning with the overarching UK government global priorities. The committee is expecting you to categorically state your course of study and university as well, what inspired your interest in the course, how your chosen university will help you achieve those goals and how you plan to implement everything you have learnt in your studies in the UK.
Paragraph 1
The Problem You Have Personally Witnessed
Open with the challenge before the programme. Ground the essay in a real problem you have encountered directly through your work or lived experience. The strongest essays do not begin by praising the university; they begin with the urgency that pushed the applicant toward the course in the first place.
What to include in your essay:
Paragraph 2
Why This Course and University Specifically
This paragraph explains why your chosen programme is the right academic response to the challenge introduced earlier. The connection between the problem and the course should feel direct and intentional.
What to include in your essay:
Paragraph 3
What You Intend To Do With The Degree
Close with forward movement and clarity. The committee wants to see that the degree is part of a larger trajectory, not an isolated academic ambition. Your plans should feel realistic, specific, and connected to impact.
What to include in your essay:
PARAGRAPH 1
I am applying to study MSc Public Health Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and my focus aligns directly with Chevening's priority area of global health security. Nigeria loses thousands of preventable lives every year, not because we lack competent health workers, but because we lack systems that work. I have spent some months on the ground coordinating maternal and child health programmes in rural Borno State. I have watched women die from complications that a functioning referral system would have caught. I have submitted reports that disappeared into bureaucratic hierarchies. The problem was never the people; it was always the policy. This saddens my heart greatly.
Technique:
This paragraph begins with lived reality before academic ambition. The essay becomes emotionally convincing because the applicant speaks from direct experience rather than abstract concern. The line “The problem was never the people, it was always the policy” functions as the intellectual turning point of the paragraph.
Breakdown: