Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Opening Access to Global Education to Indonesian Students



The article that I read for this week was about expanding the global education opportunity out to Indonesian students. At Stanford University there are two students by the name of Martin Tjioe and Veni Johanna. These two students are from Indonesia and they are currently studying at Stanford University. Since they have been there, they noticed that there were very few other Indonesian students. They became concerned and their concern was true for many other universities and top universities worldwide. In order to do something about the issue, the students created what was called Indonesia Mengglobal. It is a web based network that tries to provide firsthand information to Indonesian students and to top global universities to those who are aspiring or wanting to study abroad.
                One question that comes up now is, why go overseas for education? Or, why not stay in Indonesia?  Some of the responses to that question were “Overseas education offers students unique learning experiences. Studying abroad gives students opportunities to broaden their perspectives, be more independent and develop their confidence. It leads students to think and solve problems differently, while opening a whole new door of future opportunities”. That was just a little of what student Veni Johanna said in regards to studying overseas. The students also looked at reasons as to why students may not study abroad. Some of the reasons were, people often lack the confidence to make that big step in life, lack of accurate information, there is a fee at times when it comes to services that support the idea of studying abroad and sometimes there is just a lack of support when it comes to someone that the students can talk to or get information and advice from.
                The web based network Indonesia Mengglobal is meant to try and address some of the issues or problems that are hindering these students from studying abroad.  The students that created this network are hoping that it will help these students make the decision. Their hopes are to inspire, inform and educate. After a year of creating and implementing this network, it now has an eight person team. There are more than 100 articles that are provided as well as more than 60 contributors to the network. Some of the universities are Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge and LSE. They also hold events every now and then and the last event that was held had about 1,000 people who attended. The team also wanted it to be known that the network has now been made public. This article was very informative when it came to the created network and what their hopes are for it. It was interesting to see that the network has been up and running now for a year and it seems that it is growing for the best. It seems that the students and their team are working hard to make sure that global education is an opportunity for many students in their home country of Indonesia. It would be great to see if something like this could expand to students all over the world and not just in Indonesia. 

Jennifer Aiken
2/27/2013 3:03pm 

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