Chevening Professional Relationships Essay Example: 气候数据桥梁搭建者

As a programme officer at a climate adaptation NGO in central Vietnam, I needed three groups who rarely sit together: 42 smallholder rice farmers in two communes, the district agricultural extension office, and a soil-and-climate lab at a regional university. Farmers distrusted forecasts that ignored field reality; the lab had rainfall models but no ground signal; the extension office worried about overpromising to growers already hit by erratic seasons. I started by listening, not pitching. Over six weeks I visited each farmer group twice, mapped what they already tracked (sowing dates, pest events, standing water), and asked the lab to translate one product first: a 10-day rainfall outlook in local terms. To respect the extension officers' caution, I drafted a one-page disclaimer they could sign off on, and ran the first three bulletins past them before farmers saw them. Reciprocity made it stick. Farmers contributed weekly field notes through a simple voice-message group; the lab used those notes to calibrate its model and co-authored a short Vietnamese-language brief; the extension office gained a feedback channel it had wanted for years. After eight months, 31 of 42 farmers were adjusting sowing windows using the bulletins, and the university invited two farmer representatives to its annual review, the first time growers had spoken there. I realised I am stronger at translation than at designing the evaluation that would prove which decisions actually reduced loss. At the LSE or Reading MSc in Climate Change, I want to study monitoring and evaluation methods for adaptation programmes, and join the Chevening Climate Change Network to compare feedback-loop designs with peers from Kenya and the Philippines. Back home, I will rebuild the bulletin with a proper outcome tracker the extension office can own.