Sudeep Kandel: Applied for Chevening, Got Rejected, Came Back to Win It

In 2017, Sudeep Kandel spent seventeen days trekking through three remote districts of Nepal: Rukum, Dolpa, Jumla.

He had trekked before. Nepal was not foreign to him. But what he encountered in those three weeks was something he hadn't been prepared for, a cultural shock in his own country. Poor hygiene. Almost no infrastructure to welcome tourists or offer a safe local experience. A gap between the extraordinary landscape and the ability of the communities living inside it to benefit from people who came to see it.

As a student of development finance, he came home with a question that wouldn't leave him. What are the structural disincentives for investment in private business and public goods in places like this? What would it take to create access to well-paid, meaningful work, or to the capital needed to build something, in communities that tourism reaches but barely touches?

That question led him to Chevening, and eventually to Dailo Impact Ventures, a blended finance firm investing in Nepal's MSMEs. His background in Development Finance and interest in creating equitable structures shaped the path of employee ownership at Himalayan Adventure Labs, where the guides who carry the rope on expeditions are now preferential shareholders in the company.

While the Himalayan Adventure Labs was in operation before Chevening, the learning from MSc Development Finance at Reading gave him a new lens to look at tourism development in Nepal.

Sudeep first applied for Chevening in 2018. He made it to the interview round, and no further.

"Looking back honestly, I don't think I articulated my story well enough in that room. I had relevant experiences but I didn’t do a good job of connecting them into a coherent case for why I, specifically, deserved this opportunity."

That stung. But the rejection did something useful, it made the problem specific. He didn't lack experience. He lacked a narrative that made the experience cohere. His path had been non-linear: economic consulting, the development sector, adventure tourism. Three quite different worlds, with no obvious thread connecting them.

The breakthrough came when he stopped trying to justify the variety and instead built his application around a single anchor: Himalayan Adventure Labs. He had invested significant time and genuine belief in it. He planned to return to it after Chevening. He had real aspirations for what it could become. Once he committed to that single thread, the non-linear path stopped being a problem and became evidence of range.

He came back in 2020 with a sharper answer to the question the panel had been asking. This time it worked.

His advice on the application is precise and worth slowing down for.

"For applications like Chevening, it is mostly about how you frame your own story; who you are, where you are in your journey, where you want to be, and how Chevening will help you get there. You cannot create an experience or an accomplishment overnight. But what you can do is weave your experiences, which are very much unique to you,  and create a narrative around them."

And the single most important thing he wishes he had known before he started:

"Believing that you have every right to be on the Chevening stage. The challenge then is to make the interviewers believe your story."

At the very start of his Chevening interview, before a single question had been asked, Sudeep turned to the panel and asked if he could remove his tie.

He was genuinely uncomfortable. Nauseated. Overheated. Not quite himself.

Someone from the panel agreed. He put the tie in his pocket.

"After the interview, I was glad I had asked, not only because the tie was making things worse physically, but because I think it sent a signal. If this person is uncomfortable, he doesn't stay quiet about it. He speaks up. Whether the panel read it that way I can't be certain, but I like to think it showed something useful about how I operate under pressure."

He prepared for the interview using a framework a friend shared with him: why me, why now, why Chevening. He wrote answers to each, then practised in front of a mirror, not once, but countless times.

His advice for anyone shortlisted: know the content of your four essays inside out. Then be able to articulate them in response to questions, not recite them, but inhabit them. The interview is not a test of what you wrote. It is a test of whether you mean it.

Sudeep was supposed to start at the University of Reading at the end of September. He couldn't, the visa application centre was closed due to Covid restrictions. He finally left in the second week of October, travelling with Bindu, a fellow Nepali from his cohort.

He still remembers wearing Covid masks at Kathmandu airport. And he remembers watching Bindu help an elderly couple navigate their boarding passes, quietly, without being asked.

"There I realised, if we were to get over Covid-19, we have to do it together. Looking after each other."

He arrived in Reading to a two-week quarantine in his apartment. And a silence he hadn't expected, quiet streets, empty cycling lanes, the particular hush of a UK neighbourhood in lockdown. He went to a local bike shop immediately after quarantine ended and bought a second-hand bicycle. One of the best decisions of his year.

His Chevening year was shaped by Covid in ways that were real and sometimes painful. Classes went hybrid, then online. Social life was largely absent until February. He spent his leisure time running and cycling, keeping his mental health in check through movement and fresh air.

One afternoon, he was cycling along the Thames with a group of friends when he fell into conversation with someone he was meeting for the first time. The man was a researcher at the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre at the University of Reading, the principal global hub for the transfer of cocoa vegetative material between countries and regions. He was studying germplasm brought from Trinidad.

Sudeep had no idea the university even had that facility. The conversation stayed with him, not for what it taught him about cocoa, but for what it reminded him about proximity to people doing serious, specialised work. That was what Reading was offering, even through the pandemic.

The most consequential conversation of his year happened at home, not on campus. He lived with Mike, a housemate doing a PhD in climate science. One evening, talking about career plans, Mike said something that has stayed with Sudeep ever since:

"Rather than trying to plan your career, which can be daunting, focus on what skill sets you want to develop. And then see what opportunities that brings."

Mike wasn't a Chevening scholar. But living with people doing serious research at a serious university was itself part of what the year gave him.

He also made a call he now regrets. He dropped a quantitative financial elective early on, intimidated by the learning curve, convinced himself the time investment wasn't worth it. In hindsight, he says plainly: that was the wrong call. The technical fluency he would have built would have strengthened his work at Dailo. He should have sat with the discomfort rather than stepping around it.

Covid, for its devastation, gave him something unexpected: the kind of quiet, uninterrupted time to professionally assess his priorities that rarely exists in ordinary life. With the usual distractions removed, he worked through his coursework more carefully than he might have otherwise. And he came back with a clearer sense of what he actually wanted to build.

He stepped out of Tribhuvan International Airport and the noise hit him first. The horns, the chaos, the density of it after nearly a year in Reading. Familiar and disorienting at once.

He was excited, specifically, not generally. He had been working toward the structural problems in Nepal's tourism sector for years: guide training, SME capability, financial literacy among lodge owners, the gap between the value tourism creates and how little of it reaches the people delivering it on the ground. Chevening felt like the moment to accelerate what he already knew he wanted to build.

What he built is now specific and measurable.

At Himalayan Adventure Labs, he has introduced a Convertible Share Incentive Plan (“CSIP”), through which active and legacy participants are becoming Class A and Class B preferential shareholders in the company. Their entitlement is calculated through a points formula that recognises tenure, trips led, and hybrid contributions like training and mentoring. Active guides buy in at par value, and legacy participants at Fair Market Value, and receive priority dividends before ordinary shareholders.

Simultaneously, HAL is enrolling active guides in Nepal's Social Security Fund — the government-backed insurance and pension system. HAL covers the 20% employer contribution from booking margins. The guide's take-home pay is not meaningfully reduced. But they gain hospitalisation cover, accident and disability protection up to NPR 700,000, and a pension building year on year.

The people carrying the rope now hold a stake in the company. And a portion of every client booking directly funds the long-term security of the guide who led it.

Alongside HAL, he has built Dailo Impact Ventures, a founder-led blended finance firm investing in MSMEs in Nepal. The thesis he formed during that seventeen-day trek in 2017, refined through a Master's in Development Finance at Reading, and sharpened through Covid's forced clarity, is now an institution with capital behind it.

Chevening made Sudeep realise something that sounds simple and isn't.

"I have all the education and resources to work on anything, though success is not guaranteed. So I should stop waiting for other people to work on issues that matter to me. Most likely, other people are waiting for me."

He trekked seventeen days through Rukum, Dolpa, and Jumla and came home with a question he couldn't answer yet. A decade later, the answer is in the hands of the guides who carry the rope, who are now, through a small and serious mechanism, part-owners of the company that employs them.

To anyone reading this who has been putting off the Chevening application:

"You deserve a seat at the table. It might look intimidating at first, but once you get there, you will see people like you around the table."

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

Is Your Story Next?

Every story on ScholarsNext began with one honest answer to one honest question. We are not looking for polished narratives or highlight reels, we are looking for the real journey. The doubt before the application. The moment the email arrived. What the year actually did to you. What you came home to build.

If you are a Chevening Scholar and you believe your story could change how someone sees their own chances, we would love to hear from you. Download the ScholarsNext Chevening Scholar Questionnaire, fill it in at your own pace, and send it to [email protected]. We will draft your story, share it with you for review, and publish it only when you are happy with every word.

And if you are not a scholar yourself, do you know one whose story deserves to be told?

Forward this story to a Chevening Scholar you know. Share the questionnaire with them. Tell them ScholarsNext is looking for real stories, not the exceptional few, but the honest many. Every person who was rejected once and came back sharper, who asked to remove their tie before the first question, who came home and built something that hadn't existed before — their story matters to someone out there who is still deciding whether to try.

Your story belongs to you. We just help you tell it.

Sudeep Kandel is a Chevening Scholar (2020), Founder & Director of Himalayan Adventure Labs, and Founding Managing Partner of Dailo Impact Ventures. He studied MSc Development Finance at the University of Reading. He also supports Nepal Action Research for Tourism Solutions, an industry leading think and do tank. Connect with him on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sudeep-kandel

Story #009 — ScholarsNext | Chevening Nepal Series

Know a Chevening Scholar whose story deserves to be told? Send them the questionnaire or drop a line at [email protected]