The story of my career

I started my career very early. Because I was one of students which got scholarship from Bina Nusantara University (BINUS) under career scholarship program, I had an obligation to work at BINUS from the first day of my undergraduate study until 2n+1 years after I graduated. Value of n here is the number of years that I need to complete my undergraduate study.

I started my career as an administration staff at EDP department, BINUS in September 2000. Now, EDP department is not exists anymore, it was merge with other IT departments. My duties more or less just arranged mails and documents, especially ISO documents, since BINUS already hold ISO 9001 certification. Sometime I helped my colleges to input data to computer and do simple query to extract the data. That’s it, just that simple. It was a boring job, but it gave me plenty of time to focus on my study and learn other things.

Realizing my potential, my boss, at the time, told me to learn Visual Basic 6, MS SQL server 1997 and Crystal Report. He even asked one of his programmers to give me training about it. So, I started to learn programming language and applied it in several simple forms. And not so long after, I forgot the exact date; I was promoted to be a programmer. It was a bit of improvement.

I worked my days as a programmer until Dec 2002. During those times, I involved in several projects using Visual Basic 6, MS SQL server 1997 and Crystal Report. My main responsibilities were to encode, test, debug, and install program systems or application that was being used in BINUS. I hardly remember the applications, but I think one of it is the early stage of admission application and library system.

At January 2003, I got promoted again. I was promoted to be a system analyst. The duties were pretty much the same from previous position, but in this position, there were additional tasks that I must do. As a system analyst, I had to analyze and design applications to fulfill user’s requirements. It was kind of challenging tasks, because in BINUS, users requirements changed rapidly. I can not really blame the users for changing the requirements because the requirements had to change to adapt to the real world situations and conditions. I learnt a lot of things during my time as system analyst not only in analyze and design application technique but also in business processes. I worked as system analyst for almost 4 years before I got another promotion. I finished both my undergraduate and graduate study during that time. I also managed to pass CISA exam with a very tight passing score.

At December 2007, I started my career as a Project Leader. I found that job was interesting and quite tricky to do. My main duties were to planning, monitoring, and controlling projects, while still helping to do analyze and design applications. I often had to negotiate the projects schedule with my users and control the quality of my projects. For me, the most interesting thing in working as Project Leader was how to communicate with users and the rest of the team. I think my patience and communication skill was improved during these times. Sadly, I become project leader just for a very short time. At July 2008, I resigned from BINUS and went to Singapore to continue my study.

Right now, I am just a PhD student. But I’m sure in the future, I will find other jobs that can be more challenging and exciting then I was have before. Still looking for the next best things to come.