Monday, April 26, 2021

Pandemic


Time flies so fast, it had been February 2020, so in this new semester, the thesis was my priority. After collecting all of my bravery, I ventured to the few regions in Java, looking for garlic samples with virus symptoms. The next step was extraction, PCR, and electrophoresis, yet I still didn’t familiar with using all the kinds of stuff in the laboratory so I asked my senior to help me to use those machines. March 2020, the government declared that Covid-19 arrived in Indonesia, and to curb the spreading of Covid-19, all public areas, including campus were closed. Consequently, I couldn’t continue my research in the laboratory.

Pandemic provided time for me to truly understand my research, through reading books, journals, and watching videos that relate to my research. Ultimately, my thesis proposal was done this semester. Besides focusing on my thesis, I started to learn English with my friend and practice every single day even just a half to one hour for "speaking". Just speaking practice was not enough, so I expanded my listening to western songs and watching English videos. Learning English was one of my efforts to escape from the habit of watching the drama because occasionally I still had the desire to watch drama.

Escape from addicted to watching drama was so heavy. In some conditions, such as when I was extremely tired or I was in bad mood, the drama was still relaxing for me. Even though the duration of watching drama was not too much, rarely but I hated it and I still stood to abandon drama. Ramadan this year, besides fasting from eating and drinking, I was also forced to fast from watching drama, to be free from drama. I already wasted my time watching drama and then a pandemic came, as a result, my thesis didn’t finish so I wanted an extra semester to finish my thesis. For the extra semester, I wanted to fix what I had broken.


New Chapter

           On April 22, 2021, I finally graduated and received a master's degree from UGM. It was a special day and a welcome to a “new...