Personal Journey #2: My Three Years Reflection of College Life (Part 1)

An Epilogue

If I have to mention the quickest moment in my life so far, I will mention that it should be my college life. It is so quick as if it does not let me take a short break and breath to tick all my bucket list. Entering an Economics degree program at Universitas Indonesia, my head was full of plans and expectations. At the end, my last year is enough to fulfill my self-expectation.

Being a Country Representative of Indonesia to ASEFLYS2

Indonesian Delegates and Chairs in Asia Pacific Model UN 2017

Open Recruitment of EDS UI 2016

My First Business Competition in College Life!

My college life was the first moment stepping outside my country's horizon, meeting people from diverse countries, and befriended with uniquely different people, from the nice and friendly to hardworking and highly-achieving. College life transforms and challenges me to be a different figure; I learn about leadership and building network, I push myself to talk to strangers, even if I am still disatisfied with my extraversion skills. College life is also the time which teaches me about hardworking, combating desperation, loneliness, and disappointment, to enjoying joy in the middle of the rain. It is a truly diverse experience and I am excited to rush on my bucket list, hoping that I have enough time to build the empire of a dream to be a reality.

Surely, there is a lot of learning in the joy of success and the pain of failure. And if I can share some of my reflections in my college life, I would honestly share these experiences with all Indonesian varsity students taking an education in Indonesia. These experiences go beyond the academic landscape, traveling to an enormous journey of self-discovery and a better understanding of life. I would split the writing into three different parts in several postings that hopefully can be finished before I am graduated. At this post, it contains in what aspect I consider myself quite successful, in which part I consider myself not learning a lot/not performing/failing, and a thing that I suggest you to do in college life. The following part will share a lot about my non-academic experience, mainly from doing competitions and conferences. Last part, I wil talk a lot about my perspective in Indonesian education and what I hope from my juniors and freshman.

Academic: Sharing What I Consider Myself Quite Good 

1. Let clarify some misleading things about GPA

If you are a casual Indonesian person who often scrolls LINE timeline in the middle of lunch, you will realize that there is a relentless post debating about the importance of GPA. For a freshman, here is my point of view to help you understand why GPA is important and help you to prioritize activities in your college life.

1. It brings you to the interview table and helps you pass the screening stage. For me, GPA reflects that you take your academic life seriously. If it is combined with good non-academic activities, it also reflects that you have a good time management, prioritization, and 'balancing' skill. Put it in another word, GPA help companies to rate your commitment level that you are not 'lazy' enough to finish your work on deadlines, prepare your presentation, and study for your examinations, even you may not like it. It is a quite simplication on capturing a quality of person, yet, it is how it works, the conventional way. Similar to applying for a job, the same rule applies to master or Ph.D. degree.

2. However, GPA can't build a meaningful story to tell. Your education section in your resume consumes only one-to-sixth of a page and you can't tell your interviewer that you study eight hours a day, even if you do so. A resume needs a story to tell and interviewer looks for the personal and inspiring story from you, outside your class.

Takeaways:

1. If your GPA is below your peers' average, you need to be very outstanding in the non-academic field. This seems like a 'compensation'.

2. High GPA with good balance in non-academic life is a key differentiator among a myriad of applications/students.

2. How to academically excel in your university life [for FEB UI students]:

1. Don't assume it is a fixed-A class

The ingrained culture in FEB students is that we are trying to find a lecturer that will undoubtedly give us A score, no matter how lazy or uncommitted we are in the class, or to less extent, find a lecturer that will give an easy A. 

From my experience, there is no such a lecturer. The moments that I did not get an A score happened because: (i) I think that I can catch up on the materials at examination week, well it turned out, I was overburdened with the materials, (ii) not paying attention to the class simply because not having enough rest (e.g. I watch movies until night), (iii) late submission of paper and assignment, or (iv) poor examination execution (e.g. careless, too slow). It is never about the lecturer. I seriously mean this. Because every time I didn't get A, there was/were student(s) who received A score.

So the takeaway in getting a good GPA in FEB UI is very simple: (i) prepare for exams, do not skip class if unnecessary, pay attention to the lecturer, do your homework, take notes, and prepare presentations, (ii) do not do be a day-deadliner, (iii) sleep enough. I'll bet at least you will pass the class if you do these things and quite brave to say you can achieve more than 3.50 in terms of GPA. And last, never make an excuse, 'the lecturer does not teach this, I was not expecting this to be this difficult, I have a meeting to night, and so on'. The culture of excuses will not bring us far ahead, even if I understand that every student has their own personal circumstance.

I believe that even if there is a kind of lecturer failing in this spectrum, this is a good culture to believe that it is not a fixed A, it teaches us the value of being a fighter by pushing us to give an A culture. We are accustomed to have a good standard in our work. Look, how a culture would change the overall Indonesia, if we do so!

2. Some technicals stuff:

Strategize:

Even if I said that never assume it is a fixed A class, I believe there is no value in taking unnecessary risk at lecturer without much value and not clear/too strict in terms of scoring. So plan and strategize carefully, whether you really need that subject or it is worth the value to get into that specific course considering how clear the scoring system is and how good the lecturing is. 

Here, it means also to plan out things to study, which lessons will be tested, and so on.

Prioritize:

If you are quite busy, sometimes, you can't handle the urge to study in the last weeks of the semester. The key is to prioritize, there is a varying degree of difficulty, and you can allocate time properly, it is quite safe to say that you should not have too much problem in handling the test. It means, if the course if a little bit difficult, let say Advanced Mathematical Economics, Macroeconomics 2, Panel Data Econometrics, Monetary Economics, you should spend more time and willing to sacrifice a bit of your favorite Netflix binge-watching moment to read the book.

Skim the materials and be active in the class!

Lecturer takes into account how active you are in the class. They would not hesitate to upgrade your score if you are active in a good way. This happens on me on various cases, from taking the 'Introduction to Accounting 1' course, to 'Public Policy Analysis' course.

Don't overlook the small percentage

Quiz, participation, attendance, and presentation usually comprises a small percentage of total scoring. However, based on my experience, these scorings have a strategic role for two reasons: (i) You may not perform at your best in the exam, (ii) the exams may go a little bit more difficult than usual. This works as a safety net to safeguard your score to plummet if the exams execution goes less than expectation. Because, we can not expect the lecturer to give the similar set of questions from previous year, again, and again.

Don't count the number of hours that you need to study

You can study 36 hours in total for the exam and get the same score with a person who studies 12 hours for the exam. Don't count how long you study, but measure, how depth and width your coverage. Be efficient, do not open your messy LINE timeline or open people's Instagram wondering how what they are doing currently. It means start early if you can and how long you study is not the key to get a good score.

2. What I was lacking for: Not interested enough in what others doing

Simply, I am just quite silent to person that out of my inner circle. Yet sometimes, it is important to know 'who does what', 'what this person is doing', and having a conversation to know this person's interest.

Here is the key: Everyone offers a unique thing to offer. So it helps you to learn beyond books and get some things that may not easy to be unraveled through internet.

So what I learned from my senior who shares a similar condition with me is: to do a selective networking! For example, I am super passionate about the issue of education, economic empowerment, development, human capital, and management consulting. So what I did is being surrounded by people with similar passion. Go find a club aligning with your passion and talk about your concerned issues to some people, if they click, continue, if not find others topic. I am still progressing on this, so please contact me, if you have some tips, projects, or interested to have discussion on aforementioned subjects.

3. The must thing to do: EXCHANGE!

I know that it may be a little difficult for FEB UI students, especially Accounting, to go abroad due to the academic barrier (we have so many subjects to do). This is the reason why I really want to involve a lot in education industry. Because, I will surely cut unneccessary subjects to allow students to have a more enriching experience through an exchange journey. Yet, some of those who are not academically constrained, two reasons for me why I decide to have an exchange:

(i) It helps to break inward-looking perspective (my first reason for exchange is to get a more global perspective)

One month living in Singapore so far teaches me that there are lots of things to catch up. It feels like we are much slower compared to Singapore. Here, in my home country, I feel that people are too complacent - thinking that the current condition is good enough and we are good enough. We are not fighters, yet we fight because of races and religions, we make too many excuses for our failure and incompetencies. We do not spend our time meaningfully, spending hours in gossiping, scrolling social media, and spreading hatred about minorities group. In others words, it seems that we are not looking outward, not able to realize that the world is moving fast and we are lagging behind. That we are focusing so much on unnecessary issue, I am sorry to say this, but I think there is a value of being honest in what I feel about my home country. There are lots of good things about Indonesia, but we need to realize that we have some issues to be fixed.

Besides, exchange offers a personal value for me. It reaffirms the life purpose that I want to build my home country: make it more progressive through education and economic empowerment. I aim to make Indonesian people can equally progress and limit its gap, like the other people here. 

However, I also meet amazing full-time students here, it tells me that 'oh, we will have super power people to build our future'. More than that, we can build a great nation by having people who are genuinely concerned about Indonesia's development. So, I hope that more and more people are concerned with Indonesia's development issue.

(ii) You are exposed to a different culture - which helps you to tolerate differences

Besides that, I am just always curious about experiencing studying outside my home country and wondering what life looks like outside this archipelago country, called Indonesia. What people are eating, what conversations that they have, and so on. 

End for now, in the next post, I will talk more about my competition stories!