Realising Quality Graduates

Quoting a discussion by Najwa Shihab, a journalist and politician whose name is already familiar on Indonesian television screens. Najwa said that being a university student is a privilege, a distinction that not all young people are blessed with the opportunity for; we are part of the 35% of young people our age who get to experience university. Going to university is an opportunity to enjoy and at the same time a responsibility for us, because the Indonesian word for university student, mahasiswa, comes from maha (great) plus siswa (student).

Being a university student means no longer being merely a school student; this title is an honour that we must truly guard. Because being a university student is not just about personal hopes and aspirations but also about the hopes of the whole community that must be fought for. So many people out there want to experience university, but not everyone is destined to be able to.

GPA as an achievement index in university is indeed important, but university is not merely about chasing periodic grades. Because university is different: when we graduate as bachelor's degree holders, what we bring is not only a sheet of grade transcript and a diploma, but it must be balanced with the skills we gained during our studies. Strong soft skills, upheld moral character, and social sensitivity are what matter.

But why, amid the highly respected title of university student, is there a saying that attending university and holding a bachelor's degree does not guarantee success? Because the facts seen in the field are that nowadays there are very many bachelor's graduates who have not yet found work, in other words are unemployed. Of course this is not due to a lack of job openings; looking around, there are very many out there offering jobs of various kinds. Rather, many graduates finishing without meeting skill standards is one cause of the high unemployment. Meanwhile, what is most important and needed in the world of work is softskill.

Looking around, there are many ways to improve a person's skills. The university years could actually be used to catch up on this gap, but many students instead pass up the opportunity, so that when they graduate, the skills they possess are open to question.

Several opportunities usually taken lightly by students include, first, that at university there are many training programmes that can be joined, such as certification programmes, which can accelerate our knowledge from university to be on a par with, or even beyond, the industrial world. Second, skill exploration training, such as internship programmes that can support our abilities in the field. Third, conducting research and studies is also one way to develop our skills.

The many facilities and opportunities we can obtain while at university, if not made use of, will instead make our bachelor's degree questioned. Besides making use of the opportunities available, mindset also plays an important role in changing our lives in the future. Because what determines success is not intelligence, status, privilege or level of education but mindset.

According to Carol Dweekanda, as written in her book titled Mindset, human thinking is divided into two types. The first, the fixed mindset, is a way of thinking that tends to regard intelligence, talent and so on as innate or a condition from birth. They tend to have a closed mindset, tend to blame circumstances, regard criticism as a threat, avoid challenges and give up easily; as a result, people with a fixed mindset make little progress in their lives even though their potential and talent may be great.

Second, the growth mindset, has an orientation towards growing. They believe that talent and intelligence can be trained rather than being innate. This makes them enthusiastic about learning new things, fond of challenges as opportunities to grow, and accepting of criticism as a way to evaluate themselves.

From this it can be concluded that those who do not have the opportunity to pursue education, if they have a good mindset, are not ruled out from being able to succeed, let alone someone who is educated, who has the opportunity at university, which should be the place where they improve the quality of themselves, and which is certainly their path to proving themselves to the outside world.

Truly, success is a process; success takes a thousand steps. Those thousand steps cannot be taken instantly; nothing happens suddenly out of the blue, but through learning by doing because we often fail and are willing to learn to turn a failure into a strength to rise again. B.J. Habibie once said there is no guarantee for success, but choosing not to try is a guarantee of failure. Believe and be confident that we are the golden generation, the nation's best seeds for life in the future.

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