Full Paid Travel Opportunity to Switzerland in Essay Competition to Win Cash Prizes

St. Gallen Symposium offers a Global Essay Competition, you will get the chance to win the St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award and qualify for participation as a Leader of Tomorrow in the world's premier opportunity for intergenerational debates: The St. Gallen Symposium.

The Essay Theme:

The essay theme for this year's competition will be "A Matter of Trust: How Can Trust be Repaired When It’s Lost?"

In recent years, we have seen many reports about “trust crises” in the realms of politics, health, business, technology, science, and media. Political and corporate scandals, mass protests, and deteriorating trust indicators in global perception surveys support this diagnosis. As a result, senior leaders in many of these sectors publicly aspire to « rebuild trust » in their decisions, products, or institutions. What would be your advice to them?

Choose an area in one of the above-mentioned sectors where you see evidence that citizens’, consumers’, regulators’, employees’, or other stakeholders’ trust has been lost. Describe your example of an apparent loss of trust; offer concrete and practical proposals on repairing damaged trust. Describe your idea’s impact on the future.

Participation Criteria:

• Enrolled in a graduate or postgraduate program (master level or higher) in any field of study at a regular university
• Born in 1990 or later
• English language essay (max. 2,100 words, excl. bibliography & footnotes)
• Your name must not be mentioned anywhere in the contribution file
• Individual work expected, no group work allowed. The essay must be written exclusively for this contest. The idea must be the author's own
• All sources must be cited and referred to as the respective part of the essay. All contributions will be tested for plagiarism

Required Documents:

• Copy of passport or other identification (in English for non-Roman languages)
• Confirmation of matriculation/enrolment from your university which proves your enrollment in a graduate/postgraduate level program as of 1 February 2020 (download sample document
  here)
• Your contribution file with no indication of your name in the file name, the file metadata or the file itself

Award:

 If the jury selects your essay in the top 100, you qualify as a Leader of Tomorrow for expenses-paid participation in the 50^th St. Gallen Symposium (7–8 May 2021). The results will be announced via e-mail by mid-March 2021. The jury selects the three awardees based on the quality of the idea on paper. The award is endowed with total prize money of CHF 20,000. In addition, there will be a chance for the very best competitors (including the awardees) to present their ideas on the big stage at the symposium. For this, the students will be asked to pitch their idea on video beforehand. 

See more available events and conferences on For9a

See more available opportunities in Germany on For9a