Undergraduate Students in Indonesia Must Change

Humans are social.

What university wants from your cohort

I have been to meetings where top-level organization leaders meet to be given materials about the university.

I am an undergraduate student at Institute of Technology Sepuluh Nopember. I led UKM Cyber Security in its early years since 2024. I saw what students need and how their environmental understanding is still too narrow.

Top universities in Indonesia have Key Performance Indicator (KPI) indicating how effective is their curriculum.

One of the KPI is interesting, it asks how many graduates are employed within 6 months of their graduation.

University is not a scam, if you know how to navigate it

We have seen a lot of online influencers preaching to their viewers that universities are kind of like a scam.

I can see how they think like that, because a lot of people who graduate with their specific degree doesn't get the job they wanted. Or at least a job that fits their degree.

The thing is, the current job market is hard to get into. There are a lot of entry-level jobs that requires both a degree and years fo experience. Even getting a job has been a luxury.

I also seen a lot of scam job offers making applicants do the recruiter's work for free without pay and further notice.

So, is university a scam?

Fortunately, not. You see, in university there are two distinct entities: people and academic. A lot of people focus on academic without focusing on people. A lot of people are also surprisingly focusing too much on people that they neglect their academic responsibilities.

As a reader of this post, please do not lean to any of them. Instead, be balanced and be vast.

What I mean by 'vast' is to maximize you time as an undergraduate student to make connections to high value people. People like this will give you some sort of 'force' to do well in academics while also do well post-graduation.

Remember, you have to work after you graduate. Either as an entrepreneur or just a salaryman. Both are respectable.

If you connect with high value people and interact with them well, they will remember it. This rememberance will play a huge role, especially if you're in Indonesia. The bond you made during your undergraduate years will make things easier when you have to apply for a job to a company that has relation with that high value person.

Is this nepotism? I don't think so. I think the best word to describe it is 'marketing'.

You market yourself to high value people as high value person. Thus, making you a high valued person. And high valued person will get to work easily.

Remember, working is not just about technicalities, it's not just about your hard skills but also your soft skills.

Furthermore, recruiting these days requires you to be more proactive. If and only if, of course, if you don't want to clump with thousands of applicants on Linkedin. Reach out to people in power, reach out more to people in HR, connect yourself with influential people. Lastly, make your own portfolio.

Univerisity is a unique experience. People started to think consciously, well most of them did at least. University collects you with other like-minded people and people in your own discipline.

However, is being monotalented enough?

The age of interdisciplinary collaboration

It must be told explicitly that interdisciplinary collaboration is important nowadays.

Let me illustrate,

A circle can only be expanded by nudging its circumference one dot at a time. This circle is the overall human knowledge. When you focus on one discipline, you're essentially nudging the same angle for a long time. This can feel narrow and boring.

It feels boring because a lot of knowledge has been discovered. But as the circle grows, the more we found ourselves exposed to knowledge that hasn't been thought of before.

"The more you know, the more you know you don't actually know"

When acknowledged, this could benefit us in multiple ways.

1. Is that innovation is expansive and is getting easier
2. We will be discovering more discipline than ever before
3. We will know that in our own small lifetime, we will not be able to completely discover the circle

The last point is that I wanted to emphasize here. If you want to solve a certain problem, that problem might haven't been solved before. And if that's the case, then that problem is far out of the circle's center. Which means, that it takes more time to scaffold your way to nudge that point.

Unless if you bring friends to help get to that point.

This is the core of interdisciplinary collaboration.

You are a computer scientists with a GIS specialist friend trying to solve forest fire in Borneo using computation. You absolutely can do it alone. But the time it takes to do that would outweight the result you got.

If you can reach the same result with lesser time, why not to collaborate?

Reasons why this correlates with Indonesian students

In the organization where I lead, the failure rate to fully enroll is 97.96% (n=492). Where we had some rules to be an active and successfully passing member. If you met just one of these criteria, you have passed:

1. You have to attend 80% of the activities held such as Weekly Training and MaBar CTF
2. You have to win at least one cyber security related competition
3. You have to volunteer to any opportunity from the organization at least twice

The first criteria is hard, that's why we have to come up with two more. Unfortunately, it's not easy for them I think. Therefore, one of my friend proposes that we add one, or two, more to the list:

4. You have to obtain a certificate of some sort in your membership lifetime
5. You have to create your own project to your liking and collaborate with others at least once

Hopefully, this will make things easier without sacrificing quality.

However, looking back at it,

How come does a lof of these undergraduate students not accomplish any of these? What's currently happening inside their mind?

The reason being: academic pressure.

In Indonesia, there are two groups. One who think that GPA is the most important thing in the world, and one who think that GPA are just a compliance indicator tool. The latter cohort are actually a paraphrased quote from a businessman whom I have met.

If you're reading this, know that GPA are not even the top 5 things that employers seek in their applicant. It's only a compliance tool, a number for filtering candidates below 3.0 GPA. Because they think that anyone below that GPA is not fit for being an employee. Because they're not compliant, most of the time.

So, if Indonesian students kept prioritizing their GPA over portfolio-making activities, it's easier to be exceptional than ever before.

You can keep focusing on your academics while also doing portfolio-making activities. 3.5 GPA is enough, huge collection of achievements and certifications are worth more than that.

To sum it all up, being a great person in Indonesia is as easy as changing your objectives. Most Indonesian students are still not consciously thinking about their future, let alone collaborate out of their departments. If you're an Indonesian student, the key takeaway is to observe and analyze your surrounding environment and make disruptive decisions for yourself (first!) before you make other disruptive decisions for others.