Shreya Joshi: How Failing Chevening Early Led to Cambridge

Imagine sitting down to fill in an application you already know you cannot win.

You are missing a requirement. Not a small one — the work experience criterion, two years, non-negotiable. You have the ambition, the intent, and the conviction. You don't have the one thing the form is asking for.

Most people in that position close the tab.

Shreya Joshi filled it in.

Not because she thought she'd get in. She knew she wouldn't. She applied because she wanted to feel where she got stuck. Which questions made her pause. What she didn't know about herself yet that the application was trying to surface. She wanted the experience of sitting with Chevening's demands before she had the credentials to meet them — because she understood, instinctively, that the application itself would teach her things no amount of reading could.

She was right. She didn't get in. And she walked away knowing exactly what she needed to build before she tried again.

In 2022, Shreya Joshi received the Chevening Scholarship to study LLM at the University of Cambridge.

———

Between her first and second applications, Shreya did something most applicants only do in the weeks before submission. She went deep.

She read every blog article she could find. She watched countless YouTube videos on the Chevening scholarship and how to think about it strategically. She sought out Chevening alumni — not just to collect tips, but to understand how they had approached their own narratives, what had worked, what had fallen flat, what the panel was actually looking for beneath the surface of the questions.

She incorporated what she learned. She revised her essays — more times than she could count — until they were no longer documents she had written but positions she could defend. Until the narrative wasn't constructed, but excavated.

"Time is your best friend," she says. "Time allows you to plan, prepare and do better than what other people with less time are doing."

The key insight from her two-attempt journey is this: most applicants treat the Chevening application as a test they have to pass. Shreya treated her first attempt as a diagnostic — a way of finding out what she didn't yet know about herself. That reframe is everything.

When you apply before you are ready, you learn what ready actually means. Not from someone else's blog. From your own encounter with the questions.

"Take time to understand what exactly is it that the scholarship demands from you — and how your past experience, your skills, your abilities can be fitted into those requirements," she advises. "Chevening looks for leaders. Not the most decorated, not the most credentialed, people who can demonstrate the capacity to move things, to influence, to build. Your application is the first room. Walk into it knowing who you are."

When she finally sat for the interview, it was more straightforward than she had expected. But one moment has stayed with her.

In one of her application essays, she had mentioned the name of a judge she had worked with. A specific detail — the kind you include when you are writing from genuine knowledge rather than performing it. The interviewer picked it up. A question followed, threading directly into that name, that reference, that corner of her essay.

She answered easily. Because it was true.

"You never know what particular fact or little detail you have mentioned in your essay might interest the interviewer," she says. "Because my answers were truthful, it was very easy to answer any question that followed. If you are 100% honest and genuine in your essays and know them inside out, the interview should be easy."

Her advice for anyone who has just been shortlisted is three words:

Prepare. Prepare. Prepare.

And then she adds something no other scholar in this series has offered.

"Call me and we can schedule a demo interview."

Not a generic encouragement. A specific offer. Because she knows — from two attempts, from practicing with friends and family, from the moment a judge's name turned into a live question — that the candidate who has survived a difficult mock interview walks into that room with something solo preparation cannot give you: the memory of having steadied themselves once before.

Know your essays until they stop feeling like documents and start feeling like convictions. Practice until being questioned on them feels familiar. And hold onto this — being shortlisted already means you have nearly made it. One more stage.

In 2022, Shreya Joshi walked into the University of Cambridge to study LLM.

She is candid about what she found there. Not reverential, honest. "I observed and experienced how the brightest, and often the most elitist, people live and pursue their lives," she says. "And that's one of the biggest ethnographic experiences for me."

That word “elitist” is deliberate. Cambridge concentrates privilege in visible ways. Seeing it clearly, naming it honestly, and choosing to compete within it anyway — that is a different kind of confidence than simply being dazzled by the institution.

What the year gave her, beyond the degree, was a permanent shift in how she sees herself, and what she believes she is capable of.

"The most impact is on your confidence, on your idea of the self, and on your belief that you are as equally capable as any other person in any part of the world."

That belief doesn't arrive in a lecture hall. It arrives in the ordinary moments — a networking event, a classroom discussion, someone from Nepal and someone from Botswana equally passionate about the same idea, shaping the same conversation. The synergy of those exchanges is what changes how you carry yourself, long after the year ends.

Shreya returned to Nepal and did three things simultaneously, each of them a different expression of what Cambridge had made possible.

The first was teaching. She took up a position teaching Intellectual Property Law — bringing the frameworks she had studied at one of the world's great law schools back into Nepali classrooms. Legal teaching, she will tell you, gets richer with the practical experience of a working lawyer. But her Cambridge training gave her something her students couldn't have gotten from a purely local education: the ability to contextualize Nepal's IP landscape within international standards, to show where the gaps are and why they matter.

The second was practice. She moved into international commercial arbitration — representing clients in cross-border disputes. This is a specialized, demanding field. The kind of work that requires not just a law degree, but the credibility and technical depth that comes from training at an institution that the international legal community takes seriously.

"These experiences of representing international clients would not have been open had it not been for my Chevening scholarship and the LLM degree," she says. The degree opened the door. The years that followed taught her how to walk through it.

The third, and the one she calls her most passionate project, is something she is building from scratch.

Nepal has no professional community specifically for young disputes lawyers. No network where early-career arbitration practitioners can find peers, share knowledge, access mentorship, or build the kind of professional relationships that shape careers. Shreya knows this gap firsthand, she had to navigate it herself.

So she is building the Young Arbitration Practitioners Group Nepal. A professional community designed to give young disputes lawyers the infrastructure she didn't have — the network, the exposure, the peer connections that would have made her own journey less solitary.

Teaching. Practice. Institution-building. All three running in parallel. All three traceable back to a year at Cambridge and a scholarship she almost didn't apply for — until she decided that applying before she was ready was better than waiting for a readiness that might never come.

There is a quiet assumption running through Nepal's legal community that Chevening prioritizes certain kinds of lawyers. Human rights. Public interest. Constitutional work. The implication — rarely stated openly, but widely felt — is that if you work in commercial law, corporate transactions, or arbitration, the scholarship is not really built for someone like you.

Shreya doesn't accept this.

"I wouldn't think so. My answers were not catered to human rights as such. They were more about broader constitutional law and policy. I think doing commercial law or corporate law can be your ambition. Considering that prosperity is Nepal's biggest demand, courses in commercial law or corporate law equip one to become ready to facilitate the economic shifts that Nepal is bound to experience."

That last line deserves to sit with the reader for a moment. Nepal's biggest demand is prosperity. The lawyers who understand how to structure investment, resolve cross-border disputes, and protect innovation are not peripheral to that story — they are central to it. Chevening is not blind to this.

Chevening selects for leadership potential and a clear sense of how your work will create change. That requirement doesn't belong exclusively to any field of law. A commercial lawyer who understands how contract frameworks shape foreign investment, how arbitration mechanisms affect cross-border trade, how IP protection enables innovation in a developing economy, can make a case for impact that is every bit as compelling as anyone else.

Shreya is the evidence. An LLM from Cambridge in a commercial law field. International arbitration. Teaching IP Law. Building professional infrastructure for the next generation of disputes lawyers in Nepal. None of it looks like what people assume Chevening funds.

All of it is exactly what Chevening was designed for.

———

There is a version of Shreya Joshi who waited.

Who waited until she had the two years. Until the criteria were met, the checklist complete, the confidence sufficient. Who treated the application as something to attempt only when everything was in place.

That version of her would have applied later, with less understanding of what the process demanded. She would have sat with the essays for the first time when the deadline was already close. She would not have known where she was going to get stuck, because she wouldn't have been stuck before.

The Shreya who actually exists applied early, failed cleanly, and used that failure as the most productive research she could have done. She walked into her second application knowing things about herself — and about Chevening — that the first attempt had taught her. She walked into Cambridge the same way.

Knowing she belonged there just as much as anyone else in the room.

If you are not ready, apply anyway.

Not because the outcome is guaranteed. But because the attempt will show you exactly what ready means — and that knowledge is worth more than any result.

Readiness isn't the condition for applying. Applying is how you build readiness.

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

Shreya Joshi is a Chevening Scholar (2022), LLM graduate of the University of Cambridge, practitioner in international commercial arbitration, and founder of the Young Arbitration Practitioners Group Nepal. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Story #005 — ScholarsNext | Chevening Nepal Series

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