Bangkit Represents Hope: Story of Pandemic-Stricken Student from Magelang

 The Covid-19 pandemic is affecting many lives across countries, including Indonesia. Many families were left vulnerable due to job loss and other hardships. In fact, the number of unemployment has increased from 4.9 to 7 percent or about 9.7 million Indonesian people (BPS 2020).  As an impact, family members increasingly fall under poverty live or live at risk of poverty. For many of us, life has become more challenging.

Pandemic has also affected Abid Juliant Indraswara (21 yo) and his family. Abid is one of Bangkit students 2021 from Magelang. He lives next to agricultural area surrounded by Central Java’s mountains of Tidar and Sumbing. Last year his father lost his job as fertilizers merchant. He used to sell “pupuk” to small and medium farmers nearby but since pandemic their businesses also withered away. Thus, for sometimes, Abid and his family of four lived with no income and depended on their decent savings.  

Bangkit Represents Hope

“These are trying times for my family,” Abid confessed. However, despite the situation, his father always said to him

“Keep on trying and never lose hope.”

In fact, early this year he started a new warung soto at his house. The family business runs from 8 am in the morning until afternoon or whenever they run out of soto. 

Every day since 4 am Abid helps his father to clean the table, chair, bowls and utensils. When everything is ready, Abid leaves the warung to continue studying online in Bangkit. There are times when the stall is packed with people who dine in. But often times it’s also empty until late at night.

Through the ups and the downs, Abid and his brother help tending their small warung while at the same time, doing his best in Bangkit. 

“Because for me, in this tough times, Bangkit represents hope. Only in Bangkit..a person like me..can study with the best curriculum and best experts. Thanks to Bangkit, now I aspire to be a machine learning specialist!” (Abid)

As a machine learning student, Abid learn all the necessary skills needed to take Tensorflow Certifications from Google, both in Coursera platform as well as in class/instructor-led-training.

This is not the first time for Abid to learn Machine Learning because previously he also worked on 2 projects involving image-processing. However, only in Bangkit Abid started to learn best practices of data science in a much-structured way. Not to mention, all 3,000 Bangkit students including Abid also had the opportunity to learn directly from industry experts, such as Laurence Moroney, Google AI Lead.

In terms of courses difficulty, Abid gave 4 rating on a scale of 1 (very easy) to 5 (very difficult). So, he often worked late hours to finish his online self-paced learning at Coursera as well as his Capstone Project. Simply because of inspiration from his parents. Both of them always stay up late to prepare and cook ingredients for the following day.  Their work ethic motivates him to always move forward in Bangkit towards graduating from the Program.

Not only that, Bangkit also led his Capstone Team to work on machine learning solution for farmers. Based on season prediction, their tool helps farmers to decide what corps to plant. This idea stemmed from the fact that even though his hometown is fertile and surrounded by mountains, most of the farmers there do not earn enough living. Abid is always keen of using machine learning as way of to improve farmers’ lives. In his previous project before Bangkit, he tried once to identify diseases in chili and potato leaves using machine learning. So, Bangkit Capstone Project is really his avenue to improve his skills in machine learning even more.

More Confidence from Bangkit 2021

Abid is a student of Universitas Tidar, majoring in Electrical Engineering. Before, he was often shy that he comes from “unknown” university. But now, having obtained “graduate” status in Bangkit, he feels more confident to step up into professional world and ready to compete with graduates from big campuses.     

His father is so proud of him being accepted in Bangkit because he always wants Abid and his brother to succeed in education, much better than him. Abid also feels thankful and believes that his newly-acquired skills in Bangkit will be crucial for his next plan. What is it?

He plans to pass Tensorflow Certification from Bangkit and later, build his own IT consultancy services for farmers, using data science as benchmark.

In the end of the interview, Abid has a message to all students whose family are stricken by the pandemics, like him:  

“If our economic condition is difficult, it is normal to feel shy or minder. But don’t stop just right there. Find opportunities and prepare yourselves to grasp them. Keep going forward and never give up.”  

Bangkit Represents Hope: Story of Pandemic-Stricken Student from Magelang-end

Read story from other Bangkit students here:

1. The Spirit of Bangkit 2021: Never Give Up

2. 4 Tips to Excel in Bangkit

3. Inclusive Education for Persons with Disabilities: Bangkit Experience