Institut Teknologi Bandung

The first presenter is the President Director of PT Telkom Indonesia which is also an alumnus of Electrical Engineering ITB class 1982, Ir. Ririek Ardiansyah. In this webinar, Ririek shared the story of his career journey after graduating from IT until now as a President Director. A few months after graduating from ITB, he began his career by working for Telkom Indonesia (was known as PERUMTEL). When working at Telkom, he had the opportunity to be trained in the field of satellite and worked in the United States for almost two years. His journey in the United States was a game-changer for him.

After returning from the United States in 1994, he was assigned to one of the child companies of Telkom Indonesia, Satelindo. According to him, if at that time he stayed at Telkom, maybe he can learn only one small part of a very large company. However, during his time at Satelindo, he had the opportunity to experience many things in various fields.

"We have to be willing to commit ourselves to deep learning and don't just stick to the things that you want and act indifferent because you are unsure whether that knowledge will be useful in the future," said Ririek.

After working for five years at Satelindo, he was transferred back to Telkom. However, his position and salary at Telkom are not as high as when he was at Satelindo. His salary at Telkom at that time was only ¼ of his salary at Satelindo. "At that time, it was like my five years of experience working at Satelindo was erased. But I'm grateful that there are many things that I learned during this process and those things are useful in my life," he said.

Through those experiences, he believes that when experiencing hardship, we will tend to think that that hardship is bad for us. In fact, it could be useful for our journey ahead. Ir. Ririek then became the Marketing & Sales Director at PT Telin in 2007 and finally settled as the President Director at PT Telkom Indonesia in 2019.

In this webinar, Ir. Ririek shared some of the lessons that he learned after he graduated. "First, this world is very dynamic, and we need to be adaptive, flexible, and ready to face changes. We are allowed to hope, but we also need to remember that we don't have full control over what happens around us," he said.

He also advised ITB students to socialize. "When we are entering the professional world, EQ and soft skills will be very useful," he emphasized. Moreover, other things that are important to have are empathy, social skill, personal motivation, positive and open mindset, commitment, adaptive, and lifetime learning to expand our knowledge.

The next speaker is the director of the LPDP Scholarship, Ir. Dwi Larson, M.SIE, Ph.D. who is also an alumnus of Industrial Engineering ITB year 1984. He began his session by showing the data of higher education levels that Indonesians had achieved.

"The competition to attain higher education in Indonesia is very strict," he said.

As a comparison, only 1:11 Indonesian has a bachelor degree, and 1:250 Indonesian has a master degree, and 1:2500 Indonesian has a doctoral degree. "As an intellectual, naturally we should be the person that can solve the problems in this nation, or in another word the problem solver," Dwi emphasized.

He stated that there are three main paths that were taken by a university graduate, those are continuing their study, working, and becoming an entrepreneur. Whatever choices that you make, as a human we need to be meaningful and useful to those around us. Moreover, whatever our profession, there are some entrepreneurial characters that can be useful to us, those are optimistic, tolerant, never giving up, and consistent.

According to him, as humans, especially newly graduated students, we need to live happily. Happiness in life can be achieved by searching for the things that we love, controlling our stress level, and not being afraid to do what we think is best, enjoying our journey, maximizing our time, and building synergy to give meaning to our short lives. "In the end, this life is all about sharing and giving meaning to everything around us," Mr. Dwi emphasized.

Finally, he explained some more things about the LPDP scholarship. Today the total LPDP endowment fund is around Rp. 90,11 Trillion. As of 31 August 2021, there have been 27997 LPDP scholarship recipients and the LPDP has scored 13666 alumni.

Reporter: Yoel Enrice Meiliano (Food Engineering, 2020)
Translator: Favian Aldilla R (Civil Engineering, 2019)