In no more than 400 words tell us about your extra-curricular activities, positions of responsibility and an achievement of importance which you are most proud of.

My greatest achievement was in my role as the vice president of a student-led volunteer club called Girl Up Singhania. I was responsible for organising projects and campaigns to promote gender equality. While conducting a demographic survey for another project at a local orphanage in Maharashtra, I came across the poor living conditions of young orphaned children. I was dismayed that the orphanage had a shortage of sanitary supplies due to a lack of funding. To help tackle this issue, I decided to initiate a donation drive and set up collection stalls at 3 locations for 5 days. Through the collections, I provided 100 young children with yearlong sanitary supplies. To provide a permanent solution to the issue, I established a mandate in the club to conduct regular donation drives to support local orphanages. It gave me a great sense of achievement to see that the living conditions of underprivileged children in the area have been uplifted due to my efforts. I brought a real change in children’s lives, which was truly rewarding.

A position of responsibility that I undertook this year is the Head of Marketing for the Queen Mary Student Advancement Society. In this role, I conduct social media campaigns, help increase our memberships and grow our reach on campus. Beyond these responsibilities, I volunteered to design a ‘Careers Guide’ (outlining over 20 careers that law students can take up) and a ‘Law Firms Application Tracker’ (highlighting vacation scheme application processes and deadlines for over 50 law firms). My creative problem-solving skills and resourcefulness has helped the society achieve a 52% increase in memberships and a 41% increase in our follower count on Instagram. 

I also have a keen interest in negotiation. Recently, I won the Hogan Lovells Commercial Negotiation Competition. I vastly improved my commercial awareness, as the negotiations were based upon business news stories, and a strong understanding of these was necessary to succeed. I dealt with various topics, from ESG-related greenwashing concerns to human rights violations in the Qatar World Cup. I was commended by the judges for my problem-solving and commercial insights that aided me in getting the best deal for my client. Having never met my partner before the competition, we had to quickly form a working relationship, divide tasks and support each other in the negotiation, demonstrating strong teamwork and adaptability.

Our thoughts

Positives

• Very well written, with good spelling, punctuation and sentence structures.
• Covers the three distinct elements of the question - extra-curriculars, positions of responsibility and an achievement - at least to some extent, and the introductory sentence of each paragraphs makes this clear (although perhaps paragraph 3 could have referred back to the "extra-curricular activity" wording to make it even clearer).
• Gives solid context for most of the experiences mentioned, explaining what the organisations do and what their role involved.
• Focused on what they did (using "I"), rather than what was done/achieved more generally.
• The achievement example works well, as the applicant explains the challenges they faced, how they tackled them, and the outcome. It's a clear/specific example where they achieved something tangible. 
• The applicant also alludes to the "...which you are most proud of" wording in the question, by explaining why they personally felt a great sense of achievement.
• Good use of statistics in paragraph 2 to bring the example to life.

Potential points for improvement

• In general, if mentioning an organisation, I would briefly explain what that organisation does. It might not be clear to a recruiter what a "Student Advancement Society" is set up to do, and the answer doesn't explain this in paragraph 2.
• The question mentions "positions of responsibility" (plural) and "extra-curricular activities" (also plural). However, the applicant only gives one example for each. I would have tried to make room to at least list out a couple of more examples for each. The negotiation example in particular doesn't give a sense that the applicant is involved in a lot of extra-curricular activities, so I probably would have sacrificed some of the detail in favour of mentioning other activities.