On Being Positive

As a new consultant, there are plenty of reasons to be insecure having most of your colleagues in your batch all gone on a big project and yourself left behind in central office hopping from one sharing session to another sharing session without any real work to do. Mind that for some reason, the big project was your dream project. The fact that you’ve lost your dream project is one, and the thought that maybe you’re not good enough for the project so maybe that’s why they don’t assign you is another. You’ve spent time contemplating and you’ve found 100 other reasons why you feel insecure and why you should feel insecure about this situation.

The thing is, somehow you refuse to accept the theory that you’re not capable in doing what your friends are about to be doing. And if you search hard enough, you’ll find better reasons why you should stop complaining and turn the situation into bigger opportunities for yourself, like:

Your friends are off busy doing lots of paperwork? Have no worries, you still have an abundant supply of additional online trainings that you think no one can ever finish in a year time waiting for you in just a click away. You know that knowledge requires not only theory, but experience, but hey, the order in which they appear won’t matter. Plus, you don’t work overtime which allows you to take care of things at home such as helping your dad making presentation and finishing a proposal of some important project of yours that has been abandoned for quite some time.

Your friends are now working in a beautiful office area located in the outskirt of Jakarta where the air is less polluted and the traffic is nicer (at least from your house)? Remember that your current office is at the heart of the city which makes it very easy to reunite with your other friends who work nearby at any time (except that you don’t often do that). Well, bottom line is, you commute to the office every morning, go straight to the 18^th floor, and when it is almost sunset, the sun goes down, it shines through the window right onto your face and it is still beautiful (maksudnya sinar mataharinya yang beautiful), just like you saw it almost three months ago when you first stepped into this office.

Your friends seem to have the chance to be assigned overseas, courtesy of their current project? You are happy for them if they really get the chance. Chances are in your future project you will also be visiting some places in Indonesia which hopefully allows you to learn about your country better or who knows, maybe next year you will be granted the scholarship you’ve always wanted. Anything can happen.

The male population in your friends’ project is better? Oh well, your friends are just lucky on that matter.

But that should NOT in any way make you feel unlucky. Cause you are not. What you see is what you get. You know your time will come.

I’m happy

for you, a friend who is about to start pursuing his dream. All those bumps in the road can mean nothing and everything to get to where you’re at right now. And where you are right now is far far better than what you could have set an eye for several months back. And I can tell you that you deserve this more than anyone I know and I really hope you could handle it better than anyone too. Speaking of which, I really think many people would kill for your job

I want my scholarship

Having a lot of free time as a new joiner: spending working hours in HQ with nothing to do except self-studying and on-line training allows me to frequent some scholarships websites. I mean, I REALLY like my new office and its people and still very much looking forward to experiencing the kind of works a consultant will deal with, but it still doesn’t beat my desire to go abroad and get a master degree from some noted University. And I guess it never will. The more I’m idle, the more I google over those scholarships, and the more my desire becomes.

By a lot of considerations, here are some of the scholarships which I’m very much interested in and fortunately are feasible to apply for. These are some of the well-known scholarships among scholars. Most of you may have already heard about them, but for you who have not, this is for your reference.

Australian Development Scholarships

Fulbright Master’s Degree Program

Erasmus Mundus International Master in Management of Information Technology

Erasmus Mundus European Master on Software Engineering

I’ve already applied for ADS last September. However, the first notification will be announced not earlier than Dec 21. As for the rest of them, I’m intending to apply in next year’s selection. Note that the most of the deadlines will be in sometime around the first months of 2008. Some prerequisites that require extra effort would be to collect letter of recommendations (one of above scholarships require TWO letter of recommendations, no less) and conduct costly tests such as GMAT/GRE and IELTS/TOEFL.

If you wish, please kindly add other scholarships to the list of mainstream scholarships above.

Fast Forward

Hi there! It’s me again. Yes, the same Mita you knew in college, high school, or maybe even middle school. Except that right now I’m no longer enrolled in any kind of formal school. At the moment, I’m done with everything that has anything to do with academic stuff, such as thesis, exams, thesis, assignments, thesis.. (read my old blog and you’ll get the idea) and finding myself doing the 9 to 5 thing (except that it’s not literally 9 to 5) to embark on a career that I had always wanted ever since I was still in college.

Anyway, I’d just like to welcome y’all to my new blog. It’s actually good to be online again (not that I haven’t been accessing the Internet for ages). It’s just that I haven’t been updating my old blog for ever. And the old blog is getting old if you know what I mean. So I decided to set up a new blog for a lot of reasons. The main reason would’ve been that I’m sort of bored and needing to write anything to overcome my boredom. So here it is! Feel free to read and share your comments.

Peace out.