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My junior year has come to an end. I have to admit that it has been a very long journey as well. This blog post will serve to highlight one thing that I wish I could done better as well as another thing that I am proud of. This is not meant to be a super interesting read, but merely a checkpoint which I plan to do every semester.

I wish I could involve myself to the Indonesian Student Association more. While I understood that I have handed over responsibilities, I wasn’t even able to come to the general meetings this semester. My excuse is that I have research to do or I have projects to do. This organization was something that I put most if not all of my effort to last year. I did not feel uncomfortable to not give it more effort in attending the meetings or even help out the executive board when they need some advice.

I am proud I can still execute most of my plans despite the sheer amount of work I have to pull through. I completed courses that I need (with last Fall semester, that’s 43 credits for your information), my draft for a publication I’m writing is at its final phase, and I won an award for my new research project.  My ad-hoc honors advisor, who’s handling my chemical engineering honors thesis, gave me his concerns about my odd choice of academic curriculum; my dual major, my two honors theses plan, as well as academic pursuits which he thinks are outside of my field of studies.  He said that it might not even be worth it. But other people have supported this far for my decision and most important of all, I feel that I made the right decision. Therefore, I shall continue what I’m doing and hopefully get there.

My next goals would be planning for graduate school in materials science/chemical engineering/engineering science/relevant fields. I will need to include GREs, contacting professors, aiming for scholarships and assistantships among other things. Academically, I’m still pursuing more mathematics and have planned a rigorous schedule to study (sorry for the technical words here) stochastic processes, differential geometry, and applied analytical methods. My professor and I also planned for some serious training in microscopy. Why would I want to do that? Because, I’m just following what I love to do and make sure I become insanely, yes I really meant that, good at it! And one last thing, I will give it a try to help out on establishing some planned programs that my org wants to do. That will also be pretty exciting 😉

I’ll be around in State College in the summer. I hope to see some of you here!