One day, my roommate told me: “Fik, you should take a rest. You have been working too long, take a break and don’t be too hard to yourself.”
I suddenly stop writing and calculating some math on GRE problem sets—at that time, I was preparing for my PhD application. Her thoughts about how hard I worked stopped me for seconds and gave me time to think and ask, “Have I been working too hard?”
I personally never think that I work ‘hard enough’, I always feel never enough in working. I always demand more to myself to improve my quality to be a better person. I take everything very seriously including something very small for others. To me, there is no unnecessary thing. Everything is important, and everything has its own value. And I will be taking every single work I have seriously, even it is only doing some dishes at my kitchen home.
My roommate’s perspective then made me really counted the duration I was studying, the number of problem sets I had solved, and how much I did not really get understand some hard questions on both GRE math and verbal. I just realized that I had stayed 12 hours in a row for studying. Crazy! I never counted how long and how much I studied before. The reality made me realized that I could say that I am hard-working ‘enough’.
I am taking this assignment very seriously as well. After doing some reflections and talking to my ‘inner-me’ about who I am, I then tried to collect how people around me perceive me. From my self-assessment, I had clustered my strengths, weaknesses, potentials, and some improvements need to be done. The results from my self-assessment helped me easier to develop a peer’s assessment to be sent out as a survey form. I named it, Fikriyah Winata’s Assessment Survey. I sent out to my family, friends, colleagues, and clients who have professionally worked with me during my career in at Esri Indonesia, and also my friends here in Champaign-Urbana.
I did not expect they would be very excited and willing to help me fill in my survey. I eventually received 46 respondents. Even though I expected the respondents are anonymous, but I also gave them the flexibility to write their names in the survey if they wanted me to know. I got about 10 of them write their names.
Interestingly, I found this self-branding assignment is not only an assignment, but something gave me a room to assess myself. Also, this assignment helped to really know what others’ perspectives about me professionally and personally. I found myself enjoyed reading one by one result and input from others. I was very excited when I was reading how positively and negatively my treats in their opinions. It's just so exciting! Let’s begin to drill down the overall results.
Strengths
I need to be honest that I was not that surprised with the results. The results from my self-assessment and survey revealed the same patterns. Back to the statement from my roommate about how hard I worked for my PhD applications reflected on both self-assessment and survey.
Hard-working and persistent are two of main strengths. First, hard-working, even though sometimes I demand myself work harder and harder, actually I have worked overly hard. Others also viewed me as a hard-working person in achieving both professional and personal (or academic) targets.
I remember, for instance, before I came back to graduate school, I was working at a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) company in Indonesia for 3.5 years. I worked as a GIS Specialist in Education Sectors. I delivered training and technical workshop for students and faculty members in universities across Indonesia.
In my first two years, I had an opportunity to initiate a program which never excited before. To work on this, I needed to negotiate with the decision maker in the headquarter in Esri U.S to influence them to give the granted license for 30 campuses across Indonesia. It was tough because Esri software license is extremely expensive. My CEO was the first person who talked to Esri CEO and President, and I needed to work with people in Esri for the implementation and get the license in hand. It was tough. But once we got the license for helping universities in Indonesia get access to the technologies, I was satisfied because hard-working paid off.
The second strength I found in both my self-assessment and survey is persistent. I am very persistent in achieving whatever I wanted as long as it makes sense and worthy of my future goals. I could not let myself give up in almost anything. I will be very careful if have decided to give up. I may give up if I have tried all the possibilities and works and I still did not get it. But, I found sometimes I got something better than I wanted. It was difficult to call it ‘giving up’ because I was still working to achieve it. I got countless failures both in my personal and professional life. But failures would not stop my efforts. I have been perceiving failures as friends to be closed with my success.
There were a lot of situation in my life that I did not give up and kept persistently. For instance, when I decided to come back to school as a graduate student. I found it was challenging to get into a university in the United States. In Fall 2014, I applied an Indonesia government scholarship to fund my degree. However, getting accepted to a university was not easy even though I have had a fully funded scholarship in hand. I applied three schools in 2014 to intake Fall 2015, and I did not get any. I tried again in Fall 2015 for school intake in Fall 2016 with a lot of improvement in my iBT Toefl and GRE. Also, I contacted more professors and applied to more schools.
There were a lot of people tried to kill my dream to study the United State by saying, “oh come on! You can get admitted easily if you apply to a school in the Netherlands, England, Australia, or other countries rather than the U.S. Come on! If you could not get accepted to a U.S school, it might not for you.” Honestly, I hated listening to those words. But, I kept working and being persistent to what I thought it will be my future. Eventually, I got admitted to Ohio State University, Ohio University, and U of I, and I decided to go to U of I. I believe there is something wrong of being persistent and I will always be persistent and not give up to something I believe it is worthy for myself.
Weaknesses
It was three weeks ago when I could not move on from one work to the other just because I was not satisfied with a work. I checked it again and over again, and I just realized and told myself, “stop Fik! You cannot be this perfectionist!”
Based on my self-assessment and survey, perfectionist is one of my weaknesses. Sometimes being perfectionist is good in some ways, but the magnitude of perfection I demand is over. Being perfectionist is sometimes avoiding me to work faster even though I am always working faster. But, I could do more works if I can reduce my perfection demand.
Another thing I don’t like from being a perfectionist at this point, I could not just apply to myself. But sometimes I also expect people who work with me could be as perfectionist as I am. This perspective is challenging because everyone has their own standard of work. Some may even more perfectionist than I am, but not everyone is perfectionist. I am still struggling to reduce the level of my perfection expectation to me moreover to others.
Other people who assessed me and I agreed that my second weakness is “control freak”. I realized especially in a working environment both professionally and voluntary I always control all the works that I am responsible to make everything in the good direction. I think control freak is more or less related to perfectionist on some point. Because I am perfectionist then I want to control and ensure that everything in the right ways.
However, being control freak might be annoying when I have to work with others. Not everyone likes to be controlled. If I become control freak to myself, that should be totally fine. But, once it includes other people who work with me, it will become challenging. For instance, when I was in Indonesia, I was involved in social service program to educated poor people. I was the training manager and I had several interns and staffs working with me. When I organized a training and I have those interns and staffs helped me, I could not stop asking them how everything was going, how were their works? Anything I can help? Or sometimes, I just simply checked to them the tasks I gave them. I realized it was sometimes annoying and I really should reduce this habit.
Features Benefits
This is an interesting part because I have a graph from my survey telling how people perceived the way I work and how I always treat the works I have. It can be seen from Figure 3 that I am always hard-working and ambitious for all the works I have professionally and voluntarily. Hard-working as one of my strengths shows 37% of all the respondents I surveyed. Also, 28% people said that I am ambitious of doing works. I could not deny that I love working, and somehow it is silly because works can help me to escape from something I overly think. Back to my weakness of control freak, sometimes I just could not stop thinking about literally everything. And doing some works or studying makes me less overthinking.
My ability to work hard and ambitiously, as well as being always persistent of almost everything I wanted to achieve helped me to be at this stage of my life. For instance, I back to the very first condition when my roommate said I work too much last semester on my PhD application, it then paid off because last February I got admitted to a PhD in Geography here at the U of I. I admitted with funding to work with my advisor as her research assistant.
However, at the same time, people who have been working with me in the past found I was control freak and overly perfectionist and it was challenging for them to work with me. Even though, interestingly, I could mentor them especially my interns at my social services program in Indonesia. They learned how to work (work with my style may not the best method but at least they learned how to ‘work’), and now they still wanted me to mentor them and ask them to join any social service project again if I have one. That means even though I was control freak and perfectionist, they found the benefits of it.
To me, I just need to reduce my perfection demand, but I may not want to lose it because I want to serve and deliver a work as best as I can and being a perfectionist (but not over) always helped me to deliver work beyond and above my boss’ expectation. As such, in Summer 2017 I was working as an intern at State Farm Research and Development Center and I was nominated by my manager to a University of Illinois Research Park Award in category Outstanding Graduate Student Intern simply because my manager was satisfied with the works I have done. He said, with my GIS skill sets including the maps I created and spatial analyses I applied helped the company decision making process in Earthquake policy endorsement for homeowners' insurance. Eventually, I was a finalist for the award, and honestly, I never imagined I got it, even until now.
One more thing from the survey to close this assignment, I asked the respondents to describe me in a word freely, whatever they said about me in a word. I am surprised with the results below in Figure 6. And again, this assignment is not just an assignment, but it gives me an opportunity to improve the good things I have and to reduce something that unnecessary and made people uncomfortable and annoyed working with me. Hopefully, I can be a better person, that's what I always do.
I suddenly stop writing and calculating some math on GRE problem sets—at that time, I was preparing for my PhD application. Her thoughts about how hard I worked stopped me for seconds and gave me time to think and ask, “Have I been working too hard?”
I personally never think that I work ‘hard enough’, I always feel never enough in working. I always demand more to myself to improve my quality to be a better person. I take everything very seriously including something very small for others. To me, there is no unnecessary thing. Everything is important, and everything has its own value. And I will be taking every single work I have seriously, even it is only doing some dishes at my kitchen home.
My roommate’s perspective then made me really counted the duration I was studying, the number of problem sets I had solved, and how much I did not really get understand some hard questions on both GRE math and verbal. I just realized that I had stayed 12 hours in a row for studying. Crazy! I never counted how long and how much I studied before. The reality made me realized that I could say that I am hard-working ‘enough’.
I am taking this assignment very seriously as well. After doing some reflections and talking to my ‘inner-me’ about who I am, I then tried to collect how people around me perceive me. From my self-assessment, I had clustered my strengths, weaknesses, potentials, and some improvements need to be done. The results from my self-assessment helped me easier to develop a peer’s assessment to be sent out as a survey form. I named it, Fikriyah Winata’s Assessment Survey. I sent out to my family, friends, colleagues, and clients who have professionally worked with me during my career in at Esri Indonesia, and also my friends here in Champaign-Urbana.
I did not expect they would be very excited and willing to help me fill in my survey. I eventually received 46 respondents. Even though I expected the respondents are anonymous, but I also gave them the flexibility to write their names in the survey if they wanted me to know. I got about 10 of them write their names.
Interestingly, I found this self-branding assignment is not only an assignment, but something gave me a room to assess myself. Also, this assignment helped to really know what others’ perspectives about me professionally and personally. I found myself enjoyed reading one by one result and input from others. I was very excited when I was reading how positively and negatively my treats in their opinions. It's just so exciting! Let’s begin to drill down the overall results.
Strengths
I need to be honest that I was not that surprised with the results. The results from my self-assessment and survey revealed the same patterns. Back to the statement from my roommate about how hard I worked for my PhD applications reflected on both self-assessment and survey.
Hard-working and persistent are two of main strengths. First, hard-working, even though sometimes I demand myself work harder and harder, actually I have worked overly hard. Others also viewed me as a hard-working person in achieving both professional and personal (or academic) targets.
I remember, for instance, before I came back to graduate school, I was working at a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) company in Indonesia for 3.5 years. I worked as a GIS Specialist in Education Sectors. I delivered training and technical workshop for students and faculty members in universities across Indonesia.
 |
| Figure 1: I delivered a Guest Lecture for faculties and students at Hasannudin University, in Makassar - Indonesia (UNHAS Document, 2015) |
In my first two years, I had an opportunity to initiate a program which never excited before. To work on this, I needed to negotiate with the decision maker in the headquarter in Esri U.S to influence them to give the granted license for 30 campuses across Indonesia. It was tough because Esri software license is extremely expensive. My CEO was the first person who talked to Esri CEO and President, and I needed to work with people in Esri for the implementation and get the license in hand. It was tough. But once we got the license for helping universities in Indonesia get access to the technologies, I was satisfied because hard-working paid off.
 |
| Figure 2. I was sitting next to the Vice Rector of Mulawarman University (Dr. Bohari Yusuf, M.Si), East Kalimantan - Indonesia. I was in the university meeting talking about the granted license that Esri gave to the campus. (UNMUL Document, 2015) |
The second strength I found in both my self-assessment and survey is persistent. I am very persistent in achieving whatever I wanted as long as it makes sense and worthy of my future goals. I could not let myself give up in almost anything. I will be very careful if have decided to give up. I may give up if I have tried all the possibilities and works and I still did not get it. But, I found sometimes I got something better than I wanted. It was difficult to call it ‘giving up’ because I was still working to achieve it. I got countless failures both in my personal and professional life. But failures would not stop my efforts. I have been perceiving failures as friends to be closed with my success.
There were a lot of situation in my life that I did not give up and kept persistently. For instance, when I decided to come back to school as a graduate student. I found it was challenging to get into a university in the United States. In Fall 2014, I applied an Indonesia government scholarship to fund my degree. However, getting accepted to a university was not easy even though I have had a fully funded scholarship in hand. I applied three schools in 2014 to intake Fall 2015, and I did not get any. I tried again in Fall 2015 for school intake in Fall 2016 with a lot of improvement in my iBT Toefl and GRE. Also, I contacted more professors and applied to more schools.
There were a lot of people tried to kill my dream to study the United State by saying, “oh come on! You can get admitted easily if you apply to a school in the Netherlands, England, Australia, or other countries rather than the U.S. Come on! If you could not get accepted to a U.S school, it might not for you.” Honestly, I hated listening to those words. But, I kept working and being persistent to what I thought it will be my future. Eventually, I got admitted to Ohio State University, Ohio University, and U of I, and I decided to go to U of I. I believe there is something wrong of being persistent and I will always be persistent and not give up to something I believe it is worthy for myself.
Weaknesses
It was three weeks ago when I could not move on from one work to the other just because I was not satisfied with a work. I checked it again and over again, and I just realized and told myself, “stop Fik! You cannot be this perfectionist!”
Based on my self-assessment and survey, perfectionist is one of my weaknesses. Sometimes being perfectionist is good in some ways, but the magnitude of perfection I demand is over. Being perfectionist is sometimes avoiding me to work faster even though I am always working faster. But, I could do more works if I can reduce my perfection demand.
Another thing I don’t like from being a perfectionist at this point, I could not just apply to myself. But sometimes I also expect people who work with me could be as perfectionist as I am. This perspective is challenging because everyone has their own standard of work. Some may even more perfectionist than I am, but not everyone is perfectionist. I am still struggling to reduce the level of my perfection expectation to me moreover to others.
Other people who assessed me and I agreed that my second weakness is “control freak”. I realized especially in a working environment both professionally and voluntary I always control all the works that I am responsible to make everything in the good direction. I think control freak is more or less related to perfectionist on some point. Because I am perfectionist then I want to control and ensure that everything in the right ways.
However, being control freak might be annoying when I have to work with others. Not everyone likes to be controlled. If I become control freak to myself, that should be totally fine. But, once it includes other people who work with me, it will become challenging. For instance, when I was in Indonesia, I was involved in social service program to educated poor people. I was the training manager and I had several interns and staffs working with me. When I organized a training and I have those interns and staffs helped me, I could not stop asking them how everything was going, how were their works? Anything I can help? Or sometimes, I just simply checked to them the tasks I gave them. I realized it was sometimes annoying and I really should reduce this habit.
Features Benefits
This is an interesting part because I have a graph from my survey telling how people perceived the way I work and how I always treat the works I have. It can be seen from Figure 3 that I am always hard-working and ambitious for all the works I have professionally and voluntarily. Hard-working as one of my strengths shows 37% of all the respondents I surveyed. Also, 28% people said that I am ambitious of doing works. I could not deny that I love working, and somehow it is silly because works can help me to escape from something I overly think. Back to my weakness of control freak, sometimes I just could not stop thinking about literally everything. And doing some works or studying makes me less overthinking.
 |
| Figure 3. How the respondents perceived the way I work. (Fikriyah Winata's Assessment Survey, 2018) |
My ability to work hard and ambitiously, as well as being always persistent of almost everything I wanted to achieve helped me to be at this stage of my life. For instance, I back to the very first condition when my roommate said I work too much last semester on my PhD application, it then paid off because last February I got admitted to a PhD in Geography here at the U of I. I admitted with funding to work with my advisor as her research assistant.
 |
| Figure 4. An offer letter of my PhD program. I still could not believe it, but I am so excited for the opportunity. (Dept. of GGIS, 2018) |
However, at the same time, people who have been working with me in the past found I was control freak and overly perfectionist and it was challenging for them to work with me. Even though, interestingly, I could mentor them especially my interns at my social services program in Indonesia. They learned how to work (work with my style may not the best method but at least they learned how to ‘work’), and now they still wanted me to mentor them and ask them to join any social service project again if I have one. That means even though I was control freak and perfectionist, they found the benefits of it.
To me, I just need to reduce my perfection demand, but I may not want to lose it because I want to serve and deliver a work as best as I can and being a perfectionist (but not over) always helped me to deliver work beyond and above my boss’ expectation. As such, in Summer 2017 I was working as an intern at State Farm Research and Development Center and I was nominated by my manager to a University of Illinois Research Park Award in category Outstanding Graduate Student Intern simply because my manager was satisfied with the works I have done. He said, with my GIS skill sets including the maps I created and spatial analyses I applied helped the company decision making process in Earthquake policy endorsement for homeowners' insurance. Eventually, I was a finalist for the award, and honestly, I never imagined I got it, even until now.
 |
| Figure 5. Being one of the finalists of University of Illinois Research Park Award 2017 was not in my imagination. Still could not imagine, but I was grateful for being one of the finalists. (UI Research Park, 2017) |
One more thing from the survey to close this assignment, I asked the respondents to describe me in a word freely, whatever they said about me in a word. I am surprised with the results below in Figure 6. And again, this assignment is not just an assignment, but it gives me an opportunity to improve the good things I have and to reduce something that unnecessary and made people uncomfortable and annoyed working with me. Hopefully, I can be a better person, that's what I always do.
 |
| Figure 6. Word cloud I generated from 46 respondents with questions, "if you could describe Fikriyah Winata in a word, what word will it be?" (Fikriyah Winata's Assessment Survey, 2018) |
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