My College Journey

9 August 2026 marks my last day as a bachelor student. I feel really incredible thinking what experience I got from those 3.5 years of learning process, experimenting, improving myself, getting feedbacks, making mistakes, and many more. Those journey reflected in my academic performance each semester (as seen in attached graph) where each semester my GPA consistently going up, from 3.53 to 3.90 (Yes, I missed Summa Cum Laude honor by 0.01 points).

Missing Summa Cum Laude honor by 0.01 left a pain in my heart, but from that experience, I learnt to always see the bigger picture, not just 1 tiny dot of pain. After recapping my GPA semester on semester in a graph, I realized how far have I grown as a student, as a learner, and as a person. 3.90 is the result, but I learnt to love the process which started at my first semester GPA (3.53). I remember when I first got that GPA, I was really grateful and excited but I also realized that I can achieve more than that. Driven by those thoughts, I kept pushing and adapting my study habits to achieve better results and also really understands what I learnt each semester. Each semester challenge presented itself differently, but each one taught me something valuable about consistency, feedback responding, perseverance, adaptability, and the importance of continuous learning.

One of the fun moments in my academic journey happened on my second semester. On that semester, I got really challenged on a subject called "Calculus", classic huh? Yes, everyone was struggling too, including me. When mid-exam score came out, I got really disappointed because the score were really below my standard and target (75). Responding to that disappointment, instead of giving up, I decided to adapt and adjust my learning to achieve far better score on final exam. Every week, I really put in effort to practice and focus even more in classes to make sure I really understand the materials and the fundamentals of the subject. The results were really great, I got 97 on the final exam. I really glad that I have my own "Academic Comeback" story.

Learnt from the calculus experience, I adapted a those mindset approach to my further learning. By understanding these fundamentals subjects such as calculus helped me to understand what I want in the future at that time. Around late 2023, I chose Artificial Intelligence track for my study, which considered hardest at that time. I chose this track because I see my future is in this track and I want to step out my comfort zone and fight more to achieve better grade which will result me as a better person. The journey was challenging, the math were different and tough compared to what I learnt in the past. Driven by my curiosity, I kept pushing myself to understand the materials. One of different approach this time is I chose to deep dive more on to the math of Artificial Intelligence on my summer holiday. At that time, I found a tutorial and courses that build AI things from scratch and not using regular library as a starter which forces me to deep dive on to the math behind AI. From building AI things from scratch, I learnt how AI learn using calculus, gradient descent, and many more. Those fundamentals really helped me on the next semester in Artificial Intelligence track which resulted me on all A grade in Deep Learning and Computer Vision course. Also, by understanding the fundamentals, I know what are the weakness of AI especially LLM, and how to maximize LLM performance based on their fundamentals which benefits me in my intern as an AI Engineer in egeroo.ai/PT Karyaputra Surya Gemilang.

My experience on academic performance is just one aspect of my college journey. The other aspect are outside of classroom, such as joining communities like HIMTI BINUS and also being a scholarship student mentor. Those experiences taught me leadership skills, time management, responsibility balancing between academic and non-academic activities, and effective communication with others. On HIMTI BINUS, I had the opportunity to be a vice-coordinator of a division in a welcoming party, I learnt to coordinate things, manage my teams, having bigger responsibility and accountability for myself and the event overall.

Being a scholarship student mentor has significantly changed me as a person. At first, I thought the main benefit as a mentor is the scholarship, but overtime, I realized that the experience itself was the greatest benefit. Before being a mentor, I was quiet, shy, and not really good at communicating my ideas to others. Being a mentor forced me to step out of my comfort zone and become more confident in expressing my thoughts and helping others. Other than that, being a mentor helped me to understand and communicate things better since it forced me to communicate complicated things in easy words to help my mentee understand complex materials. The results were visible when my mentee's academic performance improved significantly and awarded as best mentee.

At last, I am grateful of this experience even with the slight miss of Summa Cum Laude honor (gratefully, I still got Magna Cum Laude). Many fun things happened during my college journey, from making new friends, challenges presented from different subjects, joining communities, being a mentor, experiencing "Academic Comebacks", learning maths in fun ways, doing internship, explaining things in funny & understandable way and many more. I am really glad that I chose to step out of my comfort zone in each stage of my college journey and it really improved me as a person both academically and personally. I am looking forward to the next chapter of my life and I hope I can continue to grow and learn from every experience I have.

Oh yeah, feel free to reach out to me, explore my website, play around with it, and don't forget to say hi to Dio on your bottom right of screen!

Best Regards,

Dean Hans Felandio Setiadi Saputra, S.Kom.