Greetings from Bali, Indonesia!

Hi all, I am Kadek Hendra Darmawan, some of my colleagues simply call me Kadek. I was appointed as the president of the Sakura Alumni Association in Indonesia in July 2021. During my 1.5 years of being the main coordinator/president for this alumni association, I have had so much fun despite learning a lot in advancing my leadership and communication with Japan in this case JST/JISTEC.

I reminisced about my true reason for being the president in 2021, I was convinced by my short but truly engaging memories when I participated in Sakura Science Highschool Program (SSHP) back in 2015. I thank the program because it was my first time going abroad. Through the Sakura Science Program, I can achieve my dream to visit another country. In addition to my personal reason, I saw this platform could help me gain professional skills mainly in managing a large-scale group of people and more importantly, maintaining relationship with Japan’s institutions that support this alumni organization.

My top memories on my leadership as the president is the onsite alumni meeting last December (2022) in Jakarta. I would say it was a journey to convince the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) to support the fully physical event programs, due to the pandemic consideration. But evidenced by the statistical data that show the excitement of alumni in Indonesia to gather physically, drove us coordinators to discuss further with JST. And in the end, we successfully held the onsite alumni meeting after the paucity of a pandemic. Since I heard that following alumni events in other countries are turning onsite from online, I am personally so happy that our alumni meeting could serve as a baseline for other onsite Sakura Science events.

Toward my journey as the main coordinator, I realized it is not easy to maintain a connection with all SAAI coordinators. I needed to admit that this coordinatorship is voluntary work. Hence, it depends on each person on how they counted this organization as their priority. Coupled with fully remote coordination, since I was away from the country for pursuing my master’s degree, made this is challenging for me. But I tried my best to use a more personal approach to connect with all coordinators using an online platform to keep the bonding in place for running alumni activities. In the end, we are quite a success in maintaining our relationship as peers of Batch 2 SAAI coordinators.

In summary, I am super grateful for my time as the president of SAAI. Definitely, I owe many lessons I got from the past 1.5 years. They allowed me to grow professionally, to be a good leader on my own.

Thank you for reading my story, and I hope we stay connected under the Sakura Science Club!