Chevening Scholarships

This post is also available in: Spanish

And to kick off the new year, here’s our Lisa with a blog on one of our most important (and popular!) areas of work: Scholarships!

One of the highlights of working in the Embassy is involvement in the FCO’s Chevening Scholarships programme, and the opportunity to meet and support the future leaders of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who apply for these one-year Masters scholarships in the UK. In December, one of our colleagues from the FCO offices in the UK, Nicola Ware, visited El Salvador and Guatemala together with our Director for the Americas, and had the opportunity to meet some of our former Chevening scholars as well as some other Guatemalan alumni from a range of UK Universities. This is what she had to say about the meeting:

It was a pleasure and a privilege to meet former Chevening scholars and other ex-UK scholars. Our lunch turned out to be one of the highlights of my trip to Central America. I was fascinated to hear what the ex-scholars had been doing since their return to Guatemala. Without exception all were working in areas where their studies were proving essential. One was involved in environmental issues, one was helping a company to develop more responsible and sustainable business practices, another was an expert in corporate tax. I was hugely impressed with their enthusiasm about the UK and their evident wish to make the very most of the opportunities their studies there had given them. As a Brit, perhaps even more interesting for me were their impressions of the UK (“diverse, accepting, multi-cultural, clean, green, full of opportunity, great curries! Great fish and chips!!”) and of British academic life (“challenging, top-class, high quality, thought-provoking, tough”). I was, however, slightly disturbed that having studied in the UK they all now spoke better English than me!

If you’re interested in a Chevening Scholarship, the application process for the academic year 2012-13 is now open!  More details and the application forms can be found on our Chevening pages.  It was a pleasure for us to select 3 scholars from Guatemala and Honduras for the scholarship last year, and we look forward to some quality applications this year too.  We’ll be publicising more about the timings for the selections and interviews here in Guatemala City in January.

Watch this space too for information about a year’s local scholarship, offered in kind collaboration with the International Business Academy.  There are a number of part and full scholarships for English classes on offer, with individuals to be selected via essay competition.  We’ll be launching the competition details together with more of our British Week information in mid-January.”