The life and times of a Chevening Officer

Our latest Chevening Conversations blog takes a look at the other side of Chevening – the crucial role that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Chevening Officers’ play in ensuring that Chevening remains one of the world’s most prestigious scholarships programmes.

Ritika Kochhar is our Chevening Officer in India, one of the biggest Chevening posts in the world. India has second largest Chevening alumni network after China, and Ritika is responsible for managing a diverse range of alumni who studied across mamy subjects from sports to journalism to leadership.  The age group ranges from 21 (officially, India’s youngest scholar is 21) to above 60.

Confession time: I worry. I could be renamed the Great Worrier. If worrying was a sport, I could worry for India in the next Olympics. I worry about our scholars living in the UK, I worry about alumni not being engaged enough, I worry about Chevening funds being used constructively, I worry about our departments and regions (there are four right now and liable to increase) being constructively engaged with our alumni, I worry about what comes next. And I get to office worrying about what mails have hit my mailbox that might add to my worries for the foreseeable future…. So, most of any morning is devoted to responding to e-mails, emerging at regular intervals gasping for coffee. My job revolves around knowledge and I’m lucky enough to be in touch with really interesting alumni. I just wish I had the time to meet them a lot more than I currently do. Instead, I let the computer and my interactions with them online rule my life.

We have an ambitious Chevening programme in India. We’re starting three new programmes in 2011-12 in addition to the four we are currently running. And, in the past month alone, my work has included; receiving and comparing bids for the new Parliamentary programme we’re launching (it’ll be held at Oxford, for those who are interested), organising events in UK for our scholars currently there, launching a tender for the proposed Chevening South Asia Journalism Programme including giving presentations on it to interested parties. Then there is overlooking the contract for the Chevening Gurukul Leadership programme at LSE, thinking of bids and alumni activity for the next year and looking at the Chevening marketing for the Chevening Rolls-Royce Science & Innovation Leadership Programme 2012 – a new programme we launched this year and which is now in its second year.  It doesn’t help that I can’t pronounce the name and that the alumni and I keep shifting between SILP and CRISP for its acronym (a prize to anyone who comes up with a decent alternative, honest!!).

But this isn’t even the most interesting or busiest part of the year. That’ll start in a month’s time when sifting and interviews for our Chevening courses will happen back to back. Last year we received approximately 2000 applications for the Chevening Gurukul leadership programme, another 1000 for the HSBC Chevening open scholarships and 660 for SILP (or is CRISP?). That means we receive approximately 136 applications for each scholarship we offer. We do four rounds of sifting and interview approximately three people to every scholarship. In other words, soon the “Selection Games” will start. I call them games because they’re really hard work, lots of thought and effort goes into them and everyone on the panel ends up with candidates they are convinced Chevening couldn’t do without……..

No mention of Chevening in India would be complete without mentioning the team in the British Council, who are a crucial part of the Chevening team here. They often ask me if I have them on speed dial – and of course I do! However the one thing even they haven’t yet got an answer to is how do we keep the dreaded alumni database up to date when our alumni are scattered throughout the world?. Hercules had his 12 tasks that were smirkingly given to him in the certain knowledge that they’d never be completed, Damocles has a sword tantalizingly perched above his head and we have our alumni database. But it’s this database that enables us to keep in touch with our alumni. It’s got the names of – ok, maybe not everyone mentioned in it is rich and famous (yet!) but they are all doing really interesting work. And they are linked into excellent networks. So, no day is complete without sighing over the dreaded database.

Since this is meant to be a glimpse into the life of a Chevening Officer and it’s already reading like an autobiography, I’ll stop here today. And all I’ll say is, it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it…..