Hello, I received my endorsement email a couple of days ago. I decided to write about my application, maybe this can help people with similar profiles.
Recommendation letters:
- CEO of company organising startup accelerator in the UK. Our relationship goes beyond the accelerator and he has known me since 2020. He commented on my potential impact on the UK’s digital tech sector, my achievements as a founder in the UK, etc.
- My former MSc lecturer and supervisor. Talked about my exceptional performance during the MSc, technical prowess, achievements on a project we collaborated on and my work on a published research paper where I was lead author
- CEO of a company I worked for in my home country. Talked about my impact in transforming the company from consultancy to focusing on product-led stuff. Talked about my work contributing to the company’s fintech (billions of NGN processed) and edtech (used by top universities) products. This wasn’t featured in my evidence as I didn’t have evidence here that was as good as the others.
Mandatory Criteria:
- A project I worked on with the University (Cybersecurity in drone logistics networks) where I also developed simulation models. At the end of the project, the results were presented at a conference by me. I added screenshots of the drone architecture, code snippets, conference programme of events and evidence showing number of delegates.
- An open-source project I developed to help Nigerian developers with structured regional data (states, LGAs, wards and polling units). I explained how much of a pain it is to get this data in a useful format and how I created a scraping bot to gather the data. I attached screenshots of the GitHub, evidence of another developer joining the project and screenshots from Twitter showing a developer looking for this data and mentioning me when he found it.
- Dissolved event ticketing startup in Nigeria. I attached screenshots of high profile events hosted on the platform, snippets of the company mentioned in a lifestyle blog, app screenshots, evidence of company ownership and evidence of code contribution. Evidence of revenue (less than £5k when converted). Basically, I sold this as something I achieved at a very young age.
- Current startup in the UK. Attached evidence of pitching competition award won from my University, company ownership, startup accelerator and software MVP screenshots. Nothing spectacular here, just showing what I’m currently doing in the UK and what I’ve achieved in 6 months of running the company.
Optional Criteria 2
- Open source project (Flutter package). I explained the use-case, attached evidence showing my contribution, contributions from other devs and issues raised by others that I fixed. Also attached popularity score from Flutter’s official package repository. I explained how the popularity score is calculated and attached+linked to evidence.
- Another Flutter open source package. Similar situation to the above.
- StackOverflow contributions. I explained my impact on the field by showing a snippet of answers I provided and screenshot of my profile showing estimated impact (almost 30k people reached).
Optional Criteria 4
- Published research paper in an international journal. I talked about the research area and what my work contributed. Showed evidence of read+citation stats from ResearchGate (over 150 reads and 4 citations). I also explained that read statistics were not available for other sources such as the publisher. I attached stats from ResearchGate showing the rating of the paper compared to other papers published in the same year, category etc. I attached evidence of the journal’s acceptance criteria for quality and peer-review standards. As a bonus, I attached screenshots of the authors that cited my paper and those that recommended it on ResearchGate. I also attached a screenshot showing my paper being the first result on Google when searching the specific subject area.
- MSc Distinction: I explained my performance, modules completed and that I was hired by the university on a short-term funded project to work on commercialisation of academic research.
- Reference letter from my MSc programme leader. Talking about my exceptional achievements as a student, technical prowess, my work on the funded project and the published research. Both this lecturer and the one in my recommendation talked about future research work that we’re collaborating on.
My personal statement talked about how I got into tech, my impact in the technology sector of my home country and the UK, my plans to grow my startup in the UK, and touched on key points from the evidences I submitted.
I applied for Talent (I knew it was a long shot, but worth the try), but I was endorsed for Promise. No complaints here!
In general, I made sure I presented the evidence in a clear, simple format that can easily be digested. I also provided context and lots of explanations to the evidence. Hopefully, someone would find this helpful and relevant. Good luck!