2011 Highlights (1)

Here I am sitting alone in my room on the first day of the new year. People have celebrations all over the world. What about me? I don't have one. I never feel I have an obligation to celebrate moment like this. Besides, my family is a quite religious one who doesn't really agree with such new year celebrations. What's important for me is the evaluation of what has happened and what would I do next.

I guess the very first thing that we have to do, like many people do in new year's eve, is to remember again what we have passed and how those experiences contribute to our life. In this post, I would like to share some of the 2011 highlights (highlights of my life, of course). My sole purpose to write this is to live life with no regrets, so I could be grateful to anything I've experienced.

My first months of 2011 are probably one of the most hectic phase in my life. I was a third grade senior high school student who had to study hard for exam while facing difficult choices for college. Well, I don't really have much things to tell about the final national exam (UAN). Yet, I do really have many things to tell about the "choosing college" stuffs.

Almost every high school students in Indonesia must dream to be able to enter prominent public universities in this country: UI, ITB, UGM, and other univ., mainly around Java. So did my friends and I. For the last 3 years, I was drawn into confusion determining what major I should take. But finally I decided to follow my father's suggestion which is to pursue economics/business study. It is quite a choice for me because I took Natural Science as my concentration in high school and if I want to study economics/business, I had to answer Social Science questions in the public universities' test. I felt like the Social Science students in my school laughed at me because I wasted 3 years learning things that has no relevance with my choice of future study. But that was my choice and I had no regret of it.

My choices for college were the well-known Economics major in University of Indonesia (UI) or the Bandung Institute of Technology Business and Management School (SBM ITB). They were tough choices, of course. At the beginning, I was very enthusiastic to pursue my goals: buying books, joining additional courses, etc. Moreover, I did it together with my best friend Yustina, an ambitious one. She dreams to be an architect or urban planner so she wanted to go to SAPPK ITB.

Like I said, that was the beginning. As the time flows, I felt like the hard works didn't worth the result. I don't know why but I'm getting more interested in private universities, especially Prasetiya Mulya Business School which is the place where I'm pursuing my Marketing degree right now. I read the curriculum, student forums, and I came to a conclusion that, for business major, each university offers different approaches. So the solution is to choose which one I do prefer or which one I am more suitable with, because none of them is the better.

My parents, especially my mother who is a graduate from ITB, of course disagreed when I told her I prefer going to private univ. I had completely losed my passion, so I didn't study as passionately as I used to be. During the time, I joined some of other universities' test, like President University where I got 400 million rupiahs full scholarship for Management major. My father told me to accept the scholarship but I rejected it, unfortunately. Some of my friends probably thought that I was really ungrateful. But honestly, I thought that, for Management major, there's a better choice of college.

My mother, beside wanting me to go to ITB, also wanted me to go abroad for study. She registered me to Singapore Insitute of Management for Diploma of Economics. I was really happy knowing that I had a chance to study abroad in Singapore. I collected my transcript, had a via-Skype interview for the admission, and I was accepted. But strangely, I never felt that it was the right choice for me. I tried to find logical reasons why studying in Singapore was right, but I can't. My father also didn't really agree with my mother's choice. So once again, I turned it down.

Now, as you, reader of this post, may have already predicted, I didn't make it to neither UI nor ITB. I tried SNMPTN Undangan and SNMPTN Tertulis, but luck wasn't on my side. When I told my parents that I didn't pass the SNMPTN, my mother said with quite disappointed voice,

"Finally you get what you want."

I knew that I've disappointed my parents, that I have thrown away the dreams that I've built together with my best friends, but I also knew and believe until now that God has another way for me. So now I am pursuing my Marketing degree in Prasetiya Mulya Business School which I believe is the best business school, at least for me. I also get a scholarship here, although not as much as the ones from President Univ. I joined series of test: math, english, psychology, group discussion, interview, and finally I made it here.

My story about getting into colleges is probably not as interesting as the story of others. I am not a big achiever who succeed in getting into public university with such determination and hard work. My parents are not that proud when being asked, "Anaknya kuliah dimana?". But I just knew I've made the right choice and every disappointments that my parents feel right now are the price for my success later.