I graduated!
It has been long time from the last time I wrote here on my blog. I remembered I wanted to tell you about my life as a student here in Taiwan. But now, I graduated already. Yes, It has been that long till I graduated. I even forgot that I wanted to write some things here in this blog.
Ok, let's talk about school. It was a long story. I took 9 classes which most of them were taught in Mandarin Chinese. I remember when I was applying the NCTU scholarship long time ago in Surabaya, I had no idea whether or not that my classes would be in Mandarin. I thought it would be in English since they asked to submit English language certificate instead of Chinese. At the beginning I feel I was trapped. However, after a careful consideration, maybe it’s just me who did not pay a good detail on my admission. I should've asked this question long time ago tho. So, for you who wants to study abroad in non-English speaking country, make sure about what language you are going to use later in the class.
Well, actually in reality it’s not that bad. The books, quizzes, homework and professor’s PPT are all in English, so I could do self-studying at home. On the other hand, I took some Chinese language classes to upgrade my language ability for my daily life. I enjoyed my classes and from there I met new people with different perspectives, backgrounds and nationalities.
I graduated on December 8, 2020. That was the peak moment of my study in NCTU. The feeling was mixed. I felt both happy and worried. Happy because finally I could finish my master’s degree. Worried because I guess this is just a new beginning. I think I’ll have to deal with real life and working life after that. And, THAT'S TRUE! (I'll talk about this later in different story). After graduate, there’ll be no more student prize for any facilities. No cheap gym and cheap (and good) food anymore.
If I look back to the time when I was doing research, I was very persistent (did I?), especially in my second year, my last year. I often stayed late for preparing my research progress report, doing hundreds of trial and error experiments as well as reading many scientific articles. However, I also got stuck many times actually. I often got myself difficult to find any references for a certain sub-study and that made me work extra miles to do some trial and error. That’s Ok. I know that all of my effort is going to be paid off.
Finally, I graduated with very satisfied score on my research presentation. By graduating in the first week of December 2020, it means I finished my study in 2 years and 3 months, counted since the first time I studied in NCTU, September 2018. I graduated together with some of my Taiwanese lab friends. We studied in the same lab and were supervised under the same professor.
