IPTN sponsors student on path to excellence
By Dewi Anggraeni
MELBOURNE (JP): Humanly speaking, a young woman should be brimming with pride to have completed a four-year undergraduate course with top marks, as well as secured a job in PT Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara (IPTN), one of Indonesia's most respected industries.
So what was the reaction from the 22-year-old who attained all of the above, received the Patricia Guthrie Memorial Award for the highest achieving female graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University in Victoria, Australia, and was permitted to skip a Master's degree program to embark on a Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne?
Ecstatic? Floating in the clouds? Jumping for joy?
Rini Akmeliawati offered a shy smile and said Alhamdulilah! (praise Allah). This despite the fact the young woman from Bandung has achieved in one fell swoop, and seemingly without putting herself through undue stress, what many young people her age can only dream about. Last year, Australia's National Center for Women even nominated her as the Most Outstanding Woman of the Year Studying in a Non-traditional Area in Higher Education.
Rini, the eldest of three children, first came to Australia at the age of 15 on a year-long student exchange program. She did not live in metropolitan Melbourne but instead attended a high school in a small Victorian country town. The cultural and personal adjustments from heavily populated Bandung to scenic Maffra in beautiful Gippsland in southeastern Victoria, with a population of just 4,000, could not have been easy.
"Four thousand and one with me," Rini said laughing. But she took all the changes in her stride and excelled.
The biggest hurdle was the language and trying to understand the unusual local accents. "It was a country town, and I had to learn to get used to the broad Australian accent." While the education system was more interactive than what she had been accustomed to at home, she took to it straight away.
"I had no problem, because my parents have always brought us up in that way -- to be curious, to ask questions, to probe and explore," Rini said. "In fact, the more I participated in class discussions, the faster I improved my English."
IPTN
The year in Maffra had equipped her well when she applied for and received a higher education scholarship from IPTN, Indonesia's state aircraft manufacturer located in her hometown.
Australia was her first choice and, not surprisingly, she was accepted at RMIT University in Melbourne. After Maffra, Melbourne was a comparative breeze. Most of her lecturers at RMIT University were male, and were very accepting of her, as were her fellow students. "Of the 70 students in my group, fewer than 10 were women. Yet we were never treated unfairly," she said.
RMIT University is indeed not a new player in the field of serving increasingly diverse needs of foreign students. It even has an off-shore campus in Malaysia. The university arranged a homestay accommodation for her.
Rini has fond memories of her host parents, a Hungarian- Australian couple. "My host father was a master chef, and he'd cook special halal food for me. If they had visitors who liked foods I couldn't eat, he'd cook separate dishes specially for me."
When she began wearing Moslem attire, her host mother was worried she'd be teased or treated like a curiosity. But Rini never experienced any harassment or taunting because of her race or her attire.
During her first two years studying electrical and electronic engineering at RMIT, she had to work during the summer breaks as part of the course. Rini recounted her experience working at the State Electricity Commission Victoria. "I was one of only two women working in my field. All my male colleagues treated us well. My religious adherence was taken seriously. They gave me a special room to pray. They asked me about my Moslem attire, my opinions on certain things from Islamic points of view. There were never any unpleasant attitudes against me."
Sitting in her office at the University of Melbourne, where she is doing her Ph.D. program on Control Systems Engineering, Rini looked at home surrounded by the mass of electronic equipment. How could she sail through life so troublefree, crossing national and cultural borders seamlessly?
Rini attributes her success to her upbringing. Her engineer father and school teacher mother encouraged their children to love learning, and to be unfazed by being different. She also grew up learning to accept that other people were entitled to have different opinions from her own.
Apart from her remarkable talents and achievement, Rini enjoys the same activities of any young woman. She makes sure that her Saturday is free of study or work. She plays badminton and tennis, goes to the cinema and shops with friends. She also enjoys traditional dancing.
With Rini, there is no hand-wringing over what career path to take. Once she has obtained her doctorate, she already has a job to walk into at IPTN, with whom she has signed a nine-year contract. It appears that her distinguished future is set in the same company whose act of good corporate citizenship set her on a path to achievement.