7/28/2019 SIT Essay - Final - Surya

1/3

Personal Statement

I am fortunate to be born in a family that knows the value of international

education. When my father saw the Singapore-government-funded ASEAN

Scholarship for secondary school students advertised at our local newspaper in

1997 when I was 14, he viewed it as a great opportunity for my social mobility. Atsuch a young age, I could not have appreciated the value of such education, and

accordingly went along with the scholarship procedures without any burden of

expectation. Now that I look back at it, my being awarded of the scholarship was

nothing short of a miracle, considering out of about 1800 people who applied, only

35 were admitted, a success ratio of 2 out of a 100. Out of the 35, only 7 were of

non-Chinese descent, including me. So began my ride into more than a decade

journey of international education.

Singapore was, and still is one of the few places in the world to get the experience

of such an education. A multicultural and multireligious city-state, until now it

claims to be able to survive and thrive only by attracting the most intelligent peopleto live there. Apparently the Singapore government considered me to be one of the

most intelligent, admitting me to their highest-ranked junior high school, Raffles

Institution (RI), where Singapores founding father and the then current prime

minister has gone to school to. At the school, I did not only meet Singapore and

expatriates elite children of various races, I also met Indonesian elite children of

various descent. Until now, only in RI have I ever interacted with the really elite

Indonesian of Chinese and Indian descent, a leveling experience since due to my

scholarship money I was often able to treat them ice creams or rent laser discs for

us to watch together.

My last one year at the most elite junior high school mentioned above was also thelast year I ever felt comfortable being in Singapore. Until the last 2 years of my

university education, I could not pinpoint the causes of my discomfort living in

Singapore. It certainly wasnt anything material in nature, since I got almost all the

material things that I want or need. An example of material excess was that in my

National University of Singapore years, I managed to get 4 iPods, one for every time

Apple released a new version. However, by that last 2 years, I have also managed

to travel to 3 continents, funding my trips to Europe, United States and Australia

through well-paying intern jobs, parents financial help, and award from a

corporation (HSBC). In each of these continents, I came to experience different

ways of being, acquiring different ways of tasting, and understanding different waysof living.

It was as much internal contradictions that I saw within Singapore as much as

external alternatives that I saw without it that led to my discovery of ideologies. I

became acquainted, through readings, conversations, and personal experience,

with capitalist, socialist, communist, and anarchist ideologies, to name a few, and

their authoritarian or libertarian, religious or non-religious, mode of expression. I

7/28/2019 SIT Essay - Final - Surya

2/3

began agreeing with the late Soek-Fang Sims dissection of Singapore society in

Rhizomes journal as one operating under neo-liberal governmentality, in which

citizens of a nation-state are really given the choice and capability to seek out their

means of opression or liberation (Sim, Social Engineering the Worlds Freest

Economy: Neo-liberal capitalism and Neo-liberal Governmentality in Singapore). My

conclusion for people in Singapore is they would rather be chained even after beinggiven the choice and capability to be free.

Not me. After I graduated, I chose to liberate myself, and worked to help others do

the same. I had been reading a lot on the troubles of modernity, in which modern

mans attachment to materialism comes out as the first and foremost source of

trouble. Both main ideologies of the recent millennium past, capitalism and

communism, in a sense were just expressions of this crude attachment to

materialism. Two sides of the same coin, their followers seek a kingdom of heaven

on earth, in which even human lives hold no sanctity. Soviet Unions dissolution,

continuous economic crises, and irreversible climate change are just three

symptoms manifesting the disease of both ideologies. Worse if they are

implemented and presented under the guise of development and religiosity. I

personally have ceased to see being in power in the dominant culture as a lasting

solution to modernitys problem, viewing the role of power-and-cultural-critic

instead as more vital for a healthy and truly wealthy society.

So how do I do it? How can I play the role of critic without being denounced as a

sourgrape? How can I contribute to society without being accused of merely being

deconstructive instead of constructive? How can I make a living not succumbing to

the mind-numbing and soul-sucking jobs tempting most youths of developing

countries? How could I avoid the charge of not wanting to give back to my family

and country when refusing to blindly follow the mainstream perception of modernity

as progress? How could I convince my fellow Indonesians that there are better ways

of living out there than the one we experience in currently unequal and unjust

Indonesia? How could I show them that it is not normal for streets to be full of pot-

holes, for public transport to be lacking or non-existent, for conflict to be started by

the mere exchange of a few words, for so many people to be discriminated out of

the benefits the state are supposed to offer them? Most importantly how could I get

them to act once they have shown their comprehension of whats going on how to

change it? How could I get them to understand their rights and responsibilities and

demand others do the same too?

Education is key. Educating others to achieve the list above is why I rejected secure

and stable jobs under the current prevailing system after I graduated from NUS. But

what kind of education? For me, a solution relevant to the millions of Indonesian

class-climber, socially-mobile youths is international education. Not enough

Indonesians experience international education, and a very strong case could be

made that this is because the symbolic violence that the states discriminative

education policies have inflicted among the aforementioned youths. The discussion

7/28/2019 SIT Essay - Final - Surya

3/3

for the evidence of the argument would be beyond the scope of this essay, but they

are enough for me a few years ago to begin offering free English language classes

to college students, at first using the venue of public squares (libraries and parks),

then later using the venues of college campuses proper. I became a consultant and

lecturer at a state higher education institution and managed to facilitate a number

of my students, which range from undergraduates and postgraduates to lecturersand professors, to experience international education in the forms of seminars,

conferences, and short courses in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Australia. However,

these students came back not as I expected. They were too enamored with the

sudden exotic foreign experience, most probably due to the very short duration of

their stay abroad, such as they did not show the critical acumen that I would expect

from an international education. International experience was for them merely a

means of acquiring prestige.

I have sacrificed so much to get my students overseas, mainly by putting my life onhold to teach them for free, so when they did not turn out as I expected, I got very

disappointed. I decided that I needed a break to evaluate and examine my

experiences with a graduate education. When I found out about SITs International

Education program, my jaw literally dropped. I could not believe that there is a

major to study what I have set as my life mission. I got even more excited when I

found out that they can be mixed and matched with SITs other majors in the

eclectic Intercultural Service, Leadership, and Management program. When I browse

SITs graduate studies book, I found the curriculum of Sustainable Development

major very appealing, given my lengthy environmental activism experience. So I

really wish to get into SIT and come back to Indonesia refreshed and energized for

the mammoth task of getting more Indonesians to experience a liberating and life-

changing international education, as I have been fortunate enough to experience in

my life.

An inspiration could be Bertil Hult, the founder of English First, an international

education company specializing in language training, educational travel, and

cultural exchange programs. Im planning to build small English 'University Towns',

taking advantage of luxurious apartments (by Indonesian standard) which are

springing up all over Indonesia main universities. A large scale version would be

converting a block of these apartments into English dormitories for university

students, or even building the apartments on my own from the ground up. I amstarting to implement the idea in two of the largest Indonesian universities near

Jakarta: the University of Indonesia and the State Islamic University.