Senin, 14 Maret 2016

The SPIRIT !!! (the beginning)

Keep your SPIRIT up!! 
Yak..ini adalah nama salah satu grup chat yang sekarang sangat mendominasi di hape saya. Dibilang grup motivasi, memang sangat memotivasi khususnya untuk kelanjutan program beasiswa membernya. 

SPIRIT (Scholarship Program for Strengthening the Reforming) is a scholarship managed by Bappenas from World Bank loan, especially for civil servants who work in institutions that are judged supporting the birocracy reforms in Indonesia. They are Kemendagri, Kemenlu, Kemenpan, Bappenas, BPK, BPKP, BKPM, BKN, LAN and BPN. SPIRIT open for master degree and Phd degree. And now, I'm awardee of this SPIRIT for the master degree, together with other nine friends from my institutions. SPIRIT have started since 2013, and in 2017 all the awardee must finishthe study, which means 2016 is the last year for studying with SPIRIT, so I'm in the last term of SPIRIT.

I applied SPIRIT accidentally. At first, I tried to apply Pusbindiklatren scholarship only for domestic university, but I am late. So, I decided to apply SPIRIT without knowing I will be accepted. I can say that it is easy enough to get this scholarship compared with other scholarship. The requirement was very simple, only filled out the form, signed a letter of willingness join the selection and collected a CV, a copy of my bachelor certificate and transcript. The selection process was also simple and fast. The important specification was we should have worked for our institution for 2 years after becoming civil servants.

Submitting all the requirements in the end of January 2016, I had to take a TPA on 4 February 2016 and TOEFL test on 5 February 2016. There were approximately 500 civil servants taking the test. The TPA test was about our intelligence skill while Toefl Test was about our english skill. The tests took 3 hours to finish. For the TPA test, make sure you are not trapped only in certain questions.

The result came up very fast. On 15 February, i got my result and I had to come for interview related my plan on master degree on 17 February 2016. The interviewers were 3 persons from Bappenas dan my institution. They asked me about my motivation, what can I do after I got my master degree and why I choose the program. Because this year is the last year of SPIRIT, i had to choose a master program that can be finished on 2017. Discussing with my supervisor about my program, she asked me to choose a program related with my bachelor degree, Statistics. It was so hard to find a year statistics master program outside United Kingdom. Neither universities in America nor Australia could offer a year program in Statistics (or maybe I couldn't find it). Based on this reason, i chose university in UK. 

And finally, I got the SPIRIT....It was hard to accept...because I didn't really want this scholarship. Remembering there were so many people pursue this scholarship, I realized that I had to thank God for giving me this opportunity.