Hey there! I wanted to share my journey so far on being a Shell Scholar, so this particular post will centralise around two main themes, career and scholarship. I also hope to shed light on the questions I wish had known the answers to before applying to scholarships such as how to choose your career (because imagine needing to plan out your whole life at the ripe age of 17) and how to navigate through the entire scholarship process.
The continuum of careers rather than a point on a spectrum
I have a slight conflict with the notion of specialising in a certain field and dedicating your entire life to only one field of work. Growing up, an astrophysicist or forensic scientist was always the ultimate goal, even to the extent of having a whole journal for scribbling my own theories and Annie Jump Cannon’s work on stellar classification. However, I made the big jump to the other end of the spectrum to a more arts-and-business centralised field which is Economics. I think this is mainly motivated by curiosity of human behaviour and how money makes the world go round.
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Choose the course you’ve always secretly wanted,’ was a line I heard very briefly in a college advice video on Youtube and back then, it really didn’t strike me and mainly resided in my subconscious. As simple as it sounds, if you have the freedom to do so, choose the course you’re always thinking about.
“What do you plan on studying?” is a question we frequently get asked and the expected answers from parents and teachers are usually doctors, engineers and lawyers. Typically, I would answer a career I never actually wanted but was almost expected to say just because it was applaudable and reputable, but there was always another voice in my head to go into the world of Economics and Finance. Thus, with the leverage of Shell and my supportive parents, I made an almost too late decision to switch.
Despite that, I understand the complex situations of overbearing parents and restrictive conditions of certain scholarship bodies and not everyone can be supported in the course they actually want to do. In those cases, I really advice you to push through with what you’re ‘forced’ to do because in the end, education is a lifelong endeavour and you could always study what you’re really interested in on the sideline.
Something I like to keep in mind when I’m studying a topic that feels uninteresting to me is the 100 mental models which is basically a concept that talks about how the world is complex and interconnected, and we need to understand the big ideas from big disciplines, in order to have a whole map of our reality to be able to make better decisions.
In short, education and careers are a continuum (like the ranges of temperature in comparison to discrete variables) and there is honestly no limit to what you can and want to do in life! My journey starts with Economics but who knows what I want to branch out to in the future :D
Starring: A Shell Scholar
Which leads me to second part of the post which is the journey of a Shell Scholar!
One of the main reasons why I chose Shell was because they really treated us as holistic individuals rather than future employees. Along with that, I knew I was indecisive of my career choice and I felt like I needed the flexibility to grow and change, which is a leverage that Shell allowed.
Shell’s scholarship process is divided into 4 main components which is the online application, assessment, on-demand interview and the final interview with the Board of Trustees.
The online application is your usual application form where you put in your details, academic results and ECAs. Following the application, they will send you an email to the online assessment which is game/quiz based. If Shell still instills the same programme for the upcoming years, you’ll probably see a video-game like graphic assessment. However, this does not mean you should take it lightly because from previous blogs I’ve read, this stage is where they will filter most of the applicants. The online assessment is to test your cognitive capabilities (something like an IQ test) like memory and mental arithmetics.
When you pass those two stages, you’ll get to the interviews! The first interview is on demand so you’ll only know the questions during the interview. You’ll essentially just be talking to your computer and you’re given 30 seconds to prepare your answer which should be 2-3 minutes long. Last of all is the final interview with the Board of Trustees. These are the people you really have to impress and to me, it was honestly really nerve-wrecking to talk to these people of such high calibre in a field I’d like to work in the future.
However, all of the Shell scholars I know now, came out of the interview feeling rejuvenated because the questions they ask are really about you and yourself as a person, rather than your academic capabilities. They really want to see you holistically as a person, your team-work, work ethic, how you perform under pressure and your action-plan in certain scenarios. The Shell interviewers really listened to you and what you have to say. Strangely, that calmed my nerves and allowed me to really be myself during the interview!
All the best if you’re applying to scholarships and I really hope this helped in some way. To future scholars who would maybe want more specific information about the Shell scholarship or anything in particular, just sent me a DM! Ig: @audreymmq
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