So today,

I first started working using statistics when I wrote my bachelor's thesis, but looking back to the manuscript, I could see that I was lacking the basic foundation of statistics. It does not mean that the conclusion in my thesis was not acceptable, it's just that I did not provide the full arguments of the method I used in my thesis, which kind of bothering my today's self. The reason was not because I did not take a statistic class before. It was simply because when I took the class I did not yet have the first-hand and real experience of applied statistics. Looking back, now I know what I could improve from my bachelor project and what measures I should use, etc. etc. This realization does not just come because I am now an expert in statistics, rather it is mostly because I already have the experience of using statistics in a real life condition and I can make sense all the basic calculations in statistics. So I grow to be more accustomed in processing and analyzing dat...

The grassland on the top of Vosges Mountains, France. Personal documentation. The impacts of climate change have been quite dramatically discussed in the past few years, but in 2019, the matters were just being put in the middle of a table for everyone to take a little bit of it to be talked over in their evening coffee table meeting with their coworkers. They talk about how the impacts are already quite clear and how they’re already happening now. They saw it on the news or in their twitter timeline. It’s in everyone’s daily conversation. And forestry has been one of the things that people now believe should be put in priority to combat climate change. Not combatting climate change will lead to long-term changes in the natural and climate system. These changes have driven the changes of the organism living on Earth; forests are non-exception. Trees that make up the forests are important to combat climate change because they absorb carbon from the atmosphere. At the same ti...

Source One of many new things I’ve learned during my stay in Joensuu, Finland in terms of my expertise is bioeconomy. It comes as a new concept to address the problems that the climate change has brought to our civilization; resource scarcity, GHGs accumulation in the atmosphere, global warming, ozone depletion, to name a few. I didn’t experience the heatwave while in Finland. Maybe a bit, I guess. There were several days when the temperature went up to 32 degrees in the afternoon in Joensuu, while Central Europe was struck by an alarmingly hot temperature; Paris reached 42.6 degree at that time, an alarmingly record-breaking temperature. Articles on the heatwave have used words like “unprecedented rise in temperature in scale and intensity” or “record-breaking” or “extreme events” when addressing this matter, and to know why, there are many factors to explore. A famous theory provided by most articles is human-driven climate change. Researchers have conducted studies using cl...

Check my VSCO journal for my stay in Finland: https://vs.co/kHpmq96zYZ When I told my supervisor that I would go to Finland for studying, his response was “That place only has 2 seasons; cold and too cold”. Other people expressed their excitement by saying “you won’t have the night in summer!” or “that place is great for education” which are partially true. But Finland is beyond that. When I walked out of Helsinki Airport once I landed my feet on Europe, I knew for sure that this place is exceptional. First thing first, you don’t get to choose which department/faculty you want to apply in Erasmus programs. Erasmus has designed their program to be specific and with special rules. So, when you’re applying to EMJMD, you’re applying for a program which can be made up of many universities in one consortium. Some program requires you to stay in the coordinator university (the university that proposes the program to the European Commission) in the first year, then continue to ...

It was a busy daytime in Indonesia, and I was just starting with my work when an email popped up. It was neither a newsletter from some website which I stupidly put my email address on only to access their free Wi-Fi, nor an email from my supervisor asking for my last week’s works. I’d been exchanging emails with the coordinator from an Erasmus program I was applying to whom I always asked or confirmed my careless mistakes during the application process, and at that morning, the email that I described in the beginning of this post was from her. There were a bunch of documents in the email and the first thing I searched on the email was the letter of acceptance with the statement “You’ve been granted with Erasmus scholarship” and I was dying in tremor trying to find it in all those documents. Guess what. I did find it, and I couldn’t believe it. My journey in finding scholarship started early in my college years. I didn’t know what I would like to have for my job at that tim...

The Letter that Ends the Story and Starts the Encounter There are books that I bought but never read. The Postmistress was one of them. The book was neatly stacked on my shelves since many weeks ago and was one of the novel that I avoided just because it’s romance. I’m always weak to romance novel because the sad ending got my eyes damp and my nose runny – most of the times. Even though the novel is categorized as romance, the story turns out to be interesting enough. Sarah Blake presents the love story between Emma and Will Fitch during the years before World War II as resolutely, beautifully, ironically and deeply. Iris James is a postmaster who serves her duty in a small town of Cape Cod, Franklin, Massachusetts. Working as a postmaster gives her the control over a million of letters that come through her office, originating from other places and delivering various kinds of news. A string of sentences that makes out the whole story in a letter may change the life or en...

Surat yang Mengakhiri Cerita dan Mengawali Pertemuan Ada banyak buku yang aku beli tapi tidak pernah aku baca. Buku ini adalah salah satunya. The Postmistress sudah tersimpan di rak bukuku sejak beberapa minggu yang lalu dan merupakan buku yang selalu aku hindari hanya karena ceritanya roman. Aku selalu lemah dengan novel roman karena akhir ceritanya yang menyedihkan selalu membuat aku hampir menangis. Meskipun tergolong ke dalam genre roman, Sarah Blake menyajikan cerita percintaan antara Emma dan Will Fitch pada masa sebelum Perang Dunia II secara tegas, indah, ironis dan mendalam. Iris James merupakan seorang kepala kantor pos yang ditugaskan di Cape Cod, Franklin, Massachusetts. Sebagai seorang kepala kantor pos, Iris memiliki kontrol penuh terhadap surat-surat yang masuk ke kantornya yang pada saat itu merupakan sarana komunikasi yang penting dan sakral. Melalui Iris James, Sarah Blake menceritakan betapa surat merupakan sarana bagi orang-orang untuk menyampaikan be...