okkyirmanita Postgrad Life

Graduation at Strathclyde 


I was attending a graduation ceremony today at The University of Strathclyde. This occassion taken place at Barony Hall, near from Glasgow Cathedral. Continue reading “Graduation at Strathclyde “ →

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okkyirmanita Postgrad Life

Tasty Strawberry

Back in my home country, strawberry is pretty rare. You could find it in street market but it is generally tiny and sour. But here in Scotland, I found the real strawberry. Since the first time I arrived in Glasgow, the size, taste, and prize of strawberry was impressive. I bought a box of strawberry at the stall on the side of the road for £1.5 pound. And then, when it turns to fall and winter, the price became expensive so did its availability on the fruit shelf. 

Now, everyone is begin to welcoming spring. Students are starting to change their winter coat to more fancy coat. There are also some flowers that begin to blossom again. It will not be taken to see plentiful strawberry at the fruit stalls.  Yeay

 photo by Putri Eva. 

okkyirmanita Postgrad Life, University of Glasgow

Remote Desktop 

  I’ve heard about this technology since the end of 2015 but I was not interested. But then, earlier today, I have a chat with PhD students from Nigeria who told me a story about her PhD life.
“One of my office mate rarely showed up because she’s using remote desktop”, she said.

So, this afternoon, I opened the uni website to find out. I installed the app to my mac and followed the instruction. 

First impression: this is cool. The display of my mac suddenly replicated the appeareance of any PC at the library. I can also access all my files that is saved on library PC’s. 

Second impression: okay, I still could access my files (especially journal articles) because most of the time, I will upload each journal to my Google Drive. Thus, I still can access the journal from any gadget. 

How about printing?

Well, since the beginning of my course, I’ve installed Pull Printing app on my mac, so I can print any document from my mac simply by pressing Ctrl+P and jump up to the nearest printer at the library to catch my printed files. 

However, this tech is still sophisticated. It could be easily forgotten that this was huge improvement for students without actually realising how big is the impact for our daily academic activites. 

okkyirmanita Postgrad Life

Lunch and Share

Glasgow weather today was looooovely. Plus, We have a cool schedule at noon. Today, Me, Eva and Maya cooked some Indonesian dishes and invited our friend at the university. Most of them are our classmate at Media Management course. And the rest, Jakub and John are Stella’s friend. We’ve met them at Stella’s friend on a Chinese new year dinner couple weeks ago.

The -super fun- lunch was taken place at Maya’s flat so me and Eva approached there at the morning and started cooking at 10.30 am.

Me and Eva and our cute and colourful fruit skewers.

Firstly, we cooked  fried rice with catfish (nasi goreng teri). We cooked this dish twice to make sure the portion is plenty enough for our guests. Secondly, we prepared Capcay with extra chili because we’ve notified our guests that our lunch will be spicy. Thirdly, we cooked Indomie Goreng with green peas and fried shallot for its finishing touch. We also made Capcay, which is our daily dishes in Indonesia, consisted of various vegetables. Fourthly, Maya fried her Ayam Kalasan (Chicken with Kalasan seasonings), which she has marinated the night before. Lastly, we sliced apples, oranges, and kiwis and put them into bamboo skewer or in Indonesia known as tusuk sate. We also melted some chocolate spread as a sauce for the fruits (photo above).

Our lunch: Fried rice, Indomie goreng, Sliced omelettes, capcay (mixed saute vegetables), and fruit skewers with chocolate dip.

Our guests were really enjoyed the meals. They voted for Indomie goreng for their most favorite dish. Thankfully, they were survived with the level of our spicy-ness. LOL

After lunch: Drinking Sariwangi tea and playing Domino

For a dessert, Maya has prepared chocolate pudding from our national brand Nutrijel. It was great, not too sweet, and the fla sauce was fantastic (credit to Maya, hope she read this).

It’s time to play. Maya brought out her Domino box and we played it. Although some of us did not know how to play, it was still fun. Those who didn’t know learnt so fast and made the game turn into serious run. We even put a notes of our score. We played as a team. The team who lost has to wash all of our dishes. And it happened. At the end, the boys washed the dishes. Hahaha

This is my second experience on ‘hanging out’ and eat together with foreigner. I spent most of my ‘eat together’ moment  with my fellow Indonesian. Either in Glasgow and in other cities that I’ve ever visited.

We shared our culture, daily experience, and even talked about our country history. For the non-native speaker like us, the moment like this might be perfect to improve our speaking skill. Especially for me, where I rarely have opportunity to delivering speech throughout my course. Almost all my assessment are based on writings.

Beside for speaking practice, We’ve got a chance to fulfill our desire as a human being: interaction. Many research proved that interaction not only delivers social support for person but also affect his/her immune system. For me personally, I’ve been consider interaction as my personal need at daily basis. So, obviously that is the answer why I still allocate my leisure time to join various social activities. 😉 🙂

 

 

 

okkyirmanita okky-irmanita.com, Postgrad Life, start up, University of Glasgow

Building a Startup

Sounds cool isn’t it? Well, but I am (currently) not the one who intended to do this. However, I went to Start Tech Meet Up this evening at Sir Alwynn Williams Building, UoG. This event was held by School of Computing Science SIE (don’t know what this abbreviation belongs to).

I was late for the event because I had another class which is Essay writing class. Surprisingly, it was refreshment time when I arrived at the event. So I was grabbed a can of orange soda and just stayed at my sit rather than approaching boxes of pizzas. About 5 minutes later, 2 guys were step forward and started to introduce themselves.

They are Tomasz Sadowski and Daniel Tsvetkocv. Tomasz is a student in UoG majoring Computing Science and Daniel is an alumni in the same degree. They both created a startup called Opinew.

Opinew is an application, which maintaining reviews in a company website. Sounds interesting. Indeed, I was, for several times, holding my intention to read my whatsapp messages during Tomasz and Daniel’s presentation.

They were formulating the idea and execute it for the duration of 9 months. Wasn’t simply to build a startup I suppose. After they found their product, they then arranged several meeting with real customer!. They’ve use this opportunity to hear the feedback and developed their app.

Surprisingly, their first customer was not from Glasgow but from Australia!. They admitted that they thought the internet or perhaps the information about Opinew was just spread throughout Scotland. Thanks to the globalisation then.

Overall, I found this event is pretty good. Even though, I assume, I am the only student  that not from Tech but I obtained some useful knowledge about this issue.

Firstly Everyone could have creativity. But those who execute and know how to execute tend to succeed on building startup.

Secondly friends from other major are useful. Tomasz says that Opinew needs resources from other background, preferably from marketing. He mentioned that this business (e-commerce) worth millions pounds in the UK alone.

Thirdly is not all about the money. I may say that Tomasz and Daniel excitement’s is mainly driven by their tech skill. It took a lot of determination and time to shaped their product. Daniel says it took £100 for operating this startup and -£100 as their revenue. Despite this losses drop them down, in fact, they keep on moving.

Lastly the event hosted from other school was not ‘scary’ at all. So I’d better put more attention at my inbox :D.