He Thought Chevening Wasn't for Him. In 7 Years, He Proved Himself Wrong.

It started in 2014, in India, where Vivek Sharma Dhakal was finishing his undergraduate degree with a pile of scholarship forms he had been quietly collecting for months.

TUBITAK. Erasmus Mundus. GREAT. He was applying to anything he could find, not out of restlessness, but out of a frustration he couldn't quite name yet. Every day he worked in Nepal's development sector, he could feel the distance between the work he was doing and the work he wanted to do. Between good intentions and real impact.

Then the GREAT Scholarship came through. He had won it.

He had to turn it down. It didn't cover full expenses. He simply didn't have the funds to bridge the gap.

"That rejection I had to give myself stung in a particular way," he says. "It wasn't a failure. It was being close enough to touch something and having to let it go anyway."

But it made something clear. The distance had a name: it was skills, frameworks, a deeper understanding of how civil society actually functions. He stopped applying broadly and started applying deliberately. Chevening wasn't just another scholarship on a list. MSc in NGO and Development Management wasn't just a convenient programme title.

It was the specific answer to a specific gap he had been living inside for years.

———

He applied for Chevening three times.

The first attempt got him to the interview stage. Close, but not close enough. The second felt different. He worked harder, prepared more carefully, made it further. And then received the answer that is somehow worse than rejection: reserve list.

"I knew what the reserve list meant," he says. "It meant waiting for someone else to say no so that I could say yes. It meant my future depends on a stranger's decision about their own. I told myself the odds were reasonable. But I didn't believe it when I said it."

Weeks passed. He started quietly pulling out application materials for the next cohort — not dramatically, not as a gesture of defeat, just practically. The way you do when you've been doing this since 2014 and you've learned not to stop moving. Fill the form. Write the essay. Keep going. There was something almost mechanical about it.

Then, on a Friday evening, an email arrived from the Chevening Secretariat.

"Not triumph. Not even joy at first. Just relief so physical it felt like something leaving my body."

Three attempts. Seven years of applications stretching back to a scholarship he once won and had to hand back. What kept him going, he says, wasn't confidence.

It was "the quiet refusal to let the distance between where I was and where I needed to be become permanent."

Vivek had been writing scholarship essays since 2014. By the time he sat down for Chevening, he wasn't starting from a blank page. He was, as he puts it, renovating a building he had been constructing for years. The challenge was knowing which walls to knock down.

He revised the Chevening essays more times than he could count. He sought feedback specifically from Cheveners studying the same or similar programmes, people who understood both the scholarship and the field. "Their feedback was sharp enough to be uncomfortable," he says, "which meant it was useful."

The essay that stopped him completely was the future plans essay.

"The other essays had something to anchor them — my past, my organisation, my record. The future plans essay asked me to be honest about something I hadn't fully articulated even to myself: where did I actually want to be, and why?"

He could write the version that sounded impressive. What took much longer was writing the version that was true. He had to sit with questions he had been moving too fast to ask. What did ten more years in the development sector look like if he didn't change course? What specifically was he going back to Nepal to do?

"That shift — from performing a future to actually claiming one — was when I knew the essay was done."

His advice for future applicants is precise. Make a list of everything you have achieved, then be ruthless about choosing the two or three things that tell a coherent story. "Led a team" is forgettable. "Led a team that reached 400 adolescent girls across five districts" is a sentence that stays with a reader. Quantify where you can. Contextualize where numbers aren't available.

And don't be modest to the point of invisibility. Chevening wants people who can walk into a room and lead. Your application is the first room. Walk into it.

His first Chevening interview was in person at the British Embassy in Kathmandu. He was nervous walking in — but within the first few minutes, the warmth of the space and the interviewers replaced tension with something closer to conversation. He walked away confident, but quietly unsatisfied. Replaying answers he wished he had shaped better.

His second interview was held remotely during COVID. It had a moment that has stayed with him. He mentioned having read a recent journal article by Professor David Hulme of the University of Manchester. One of the interviewers leaned in — he had read the same piece.

Just like that, what might have been a formal assessment became a genuine exchange between people who cared about the same questions. He walked out knowing — for the first time — that he had given everything he had.

The difference between his two interviews was not luck. It was preparation — and a specific kind of it.

In the days before the second interview, he read his essays repeatedly — not to memorise them word for word, but until he could feel the shape of his own arguments. At night, he used a text-to-speech app to listen to his essays as he fell asleep, letting the logic and language settle into something more instinctive than conscious recall. He also did mock interviews with a fellow shortlisted candidate — someone who asked questions uncomfortable enough to be honest preparation.

His advice for anyone who has just been shortlisted is worth reading slowly:

"Read your essays until they stop feeling like documents you wrote and start feeling like positions you hold — because in that room, every question is an invitation to go deeper into something you have already said on paper, and the worst place to be is surprised by your own words."

"Then find someone who will ask you hard questions and not let you off with a vague answer. Sit across from them. Practise being uncomfortable. Because the candidate who walks in having already survived a difficult mock interview walks in with something no amount of solo preparation can give you: the memory of having steadied yourself once before."

Read deeply in your field too. Not to impress — but because when the conversation meets your preparation halfway, the nerves simply disappear.

He flew into Heathrow via Istanbul on Turkish Airlines. Clearing immigration, he was struck by something he hadn't expected: the officers looked familiar, spoke Hindi with ease. The bus driver who took him to the hotel was Punjabi. A friendly young Indian man checked him in.

"I had pictured tall buildings and wide open spaces. What I found was narrow London roads, two-storied homes that looked almost modest from the outside, and footpaths wider than the streets themselves."

What genuinely delighted him was how the city felt lived in and humane. Birds in the parks approached you without fear. Night walks felt safe. He opened a bank account online from his hotel room and his card arrived at his door — something that would have taken days of queues back in Nepal.

He also noticed the contradictions. A country that had mastered digital banking and seamless public transport still delivered almost everything by post. A nation that positioned itself as a global advocate for environmental sustainability, relying on Royal Mail for nearly all correspondence. "It taught me something important," he says. "No system, however advanced, is without its inconsistencies. Development is never a straight line — even in the places we assume have figured it out."

Then came the quarantine hotel. Standard procedure at the time. And a few days later, a positive COVID test.

He was alone. Genuinely unwell. In a country he had just arrived in. Unable to go out, unable to properly eat. For several days, his meals were packets of Wai Wai noodle soup he had carried from Nepal — not as a sentimental gesture, but because it was the only thing his body would accept.

"There is something quietly absurd and deeply human about surviving your first days in the United Kingdom on instant noodles from home."

He stayed in that hotel for ten days. The last few, he wasn't permitted to leave the room at all. The triumphant arrival he had imagined across years of applications never came. But what he also remembers is this: the Chevening Secretariat handled everything. Every arrangement, every check-in, every logistical problem a sick person alone in a foreign hotel room cannot solve for themselves.

He did not feel abandoned. And coming through those ten days entirely alone gave him something unexpected — a steadiness he doesn't think he would have found any other way.

Once he recovered, the year opened up. He travelled to France, Germany, and Switzerland. He sat in classrooms with scholars from across the world — and every day, Chevening was replacing what he had absorbed as facts with questions.

Two moments outside the classroom have stayed with him most.

The first was his British landlady, who one day pulled him aside with genuine concern. She had a relative who had once overstayed a visa and gone into hiding. She had drawn the same quiet conclusion about Vivek — who, as a full Chevening Scholar working remotely as a research assistant at the Sustainability Research Institute, was simply staying home.

When he explained, "the look on her face moved through relief, then laughter, then a kind of uncomplicated warmth that I still think about. It was the most purely human moment of my year — two people from entirely different worlds, briefly misreading each other, and then seeing each other clearly."

The second was a midwife appointment with his pregnant wife. The midwife asked questions that would be unthinkable in Nepal — how many partners do you have, whose child are you carrying, does he take care of you. Asked without judgment, as routine safeguarding, as a society's quiet way of ensuring no one falls through a gap.

"In Nepal those questions would carry shame. There they carried care. That difference, the same concern expressed through an entirely different cultural grammar, stayed with me longer than almost anything I learned in a lecture theatre."

He landed back in Kathmandu and noticed everything differently. The air first. Then the roads, the noise, the organised chaos of a city running on different rules. His brain kept running involuntary comparisons — not out of bitterness, but out of the disorientation that comes from having seen that things can work another way.

"The UK had not made me love Nepal less. It had made me impatient, in the best sense of that word, with the distance between what I had seen was possible and what I came home to find unchanged. That restlessness," he says, "was not a side effect of Chevening. It was the point."

The first thing he did was write. His dissertation findings on NGO financial transparency became an op-ed published in the Kathmandu Post under the title 'Governing NGOs Right', taking academic work and putting it where practitioners, policymakers, and the public could actually encounter it.

Then he rebuilt something more concrete.

At 3 Angels Nepal, he redesigned the Captivating Village Project from the ground up, toward the grassroots reality he had seen firsthand: girls dropping out of school, attendance falling below fifty percent, potential quietly disappearing into poverty. The redesigned project now operates across nine villages in Makwanpur district, serving over 500 girls from Chepang and other marginalised communities, providing not just a path back to school but vocational training and girl-led community advocacy that creates change from within.

"Before Chevening, I knew this work mattered. After Chevening, I had the frameworks, the confidence, and the clarity of purpose to redesign it in a way that made it matter more."

He calls his current role, Senior Executive Officer at 3 Angels Nepal, something more than a job title. He is, in his own words, becoming a social impact architect: someone who doesn't just do the work, but designs the systems that make the work last.

———

There is a library in London called the British Library.

One of the largest in the world. Over 170 million items. Vivek lived in London for a full year and never walked through its doors. He kept telling himself there was time. There was always next weekend. And then there wasn't.

"If I could go back and give myself one instruction, don't save the things that matter for the time that never comes."

He said it about a library. But it applies to something larger.

Vivek spent seven years believing, quietly, that Chevening was for someone other than him. Someone with better credentials, a cleaner story, more obvious promise. He applied anyway, three times, because he refused to let the distance become permanent.

He was wrong about himself. And it turned out to matter, to over 500 girls in nine villages in Makwanpur who now have a path back to school.

Chevening is not a reward for privilege. It is a bet on potential.

If you are hesitating because you think someone like you doesn't get this scholarship, apply anyway. Because Vivek thought the same thing for years. And he was wrong.

Don't save it for the time that never comes.

Applications for the 2026–27 Chevening Scholarship open in August 2026.

Vivek Sharma Dhakal is a Chevening Scholar (2021–22), Senior Executive Officer and Social Impact Architect at 3 Angels Nepal, and author of 'Governing NGOs Right' published in the Kathmandu Post. His work focuses on designing systems that create lasting change for marginalised communities in Nepal. Connect with him on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/vivek-dhakal | Organisation: 3angelsnepal.com

Story #004 — ScholarsNext | Chevening Nepal Series

Know someone whose scholarship story deserves to be told? Drop a line at [email protected]