IPTN sponsors student on path to excellence

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.