When I chose Urban & Regional Planning major for my bachelor, it was a pragmatical decision.
I understand that my decision to choose an Urban & Regional Planning (URP) major for a bachelor degree was having no subjective preference. It was pragmatic. To be bold, URP is within the Engineering faculty always has a prestigious place amongst faculties. However, in my comparison imagination, other students likely own their life calls — for example, attending Law School to fight justice, Medical School to save humanity or International Relations for being a part of UN’s missions. Frankly, I didn’t have sort of so-called life-calling. The only reason I had just: I needed to go to one of the high-level universities, precisely state-university with affordable tuition, graduated well, and hope for the best searching a fit job to survive.
In my previous post, I told you that I attended Earth Science Olympiad during senior high school. Honestly, I always love Earth Science topics in my Twitter timelines, Youtube feeds, and leisure teatime with Geology, Astronomy, Oceanography, and Meteorology subjects. Though, it is far divergent when you do it for the sake of science competition. I was opposed to other finalists who were super passionate about what they were doing in that competition. But my motive? I got a large sum of scholarship for my international-boarding school, so I just longed for some responsibility in return by giving the institution a good name with a gold medal symbol. So, after I achieved it, I had no further ambition to continue it by entering Geology or Earth Science major for my bachelor.
It was short research to fill university applications. I didn’t conduct enough surveys as well, only took a Grandfather advice, that he said, “Indonesia is currently focusing on infrastructure development across the country. Urban Planning is such as a good major there will be many projects within the sectors,” I who was green enough and met the application deadline could not think more. With brief research, I thought URP was sophisticated enough. Though digging Earth History by studying rocks & minerals, studying ocean basins, calculating how the galaxy expansion affects humanity, or measuring weather & climate change were also superb. However, I didn’t think my brain was compatible to do so. At that time, URP also had minimal Maths skill requirements I loved the most.
Fast-forward, some other days, I read a crush-crash book by Tina Seelig titled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. It forged reflection to me when she discussed what so-called Failures Curriculum Vitae. Many of us only measure our number of hands-on achievements but forget to see the quintessential failures towards self-progression.
I marked my bachelor degree journey as not successful enough. I was not giving 100% effort in my study due to my regret towards decision-taking URP major. So, to compensate for the regret feeling I jumped from failures to failures by the paradigm of “maybe other sectors could even match better with me…”
Although going to Rome has many different roads, but you can cut it off with a shortcut, if only I always gave my 100% effort to everything that I did, I didn’t need to get unnecessary karma. Shortly, after switching many different experiences, I am back again in the URP sector as my primary work. The burst of thinking, “…if I had optimized time to master URP since college, I would…..” But as Tina mentioned, however, those failures are also self-progression.
The older I am, the better I learn to optimize wherever and whenever advantages are there. When I don’t give 100% of my attention, I will get nothing. A bit tardy though, but for the first time in 25 years in my life, I restart studying URP one more time with great attention to master it and to compensate for the decision I made in 5 years before.
Currently, I am working for a national governing body in Agraria and Spatial Planning. One of my roles is supervising Spatial Planning documents preparation & legalisation for local governments. By the terms of supervising, I must refill my idle brain by reviewing the whole understanding of complex existing spatial conditions regarding ecological, economic, social, architectural, and cultural as well as technical matters to assess it into development potential. Finally, I get back something that makes my soul spark with thrill and ambition to master how to design cosy and less harmful human habitat. Someday I will make something from this to likely-this:
