Pengalaman Berburu LOA dari Kampus Newcastle University UK dan Technische Universitat Dresden Jerman

Selamat sore semuanya, rasanya sudah sejak sebulan lalu saya tidak menulis di blog ini. Nah tulisan saya kali ini adalah tentang pengalaman saya pada salah satu tahapan untuk mengejar studi pada jenjang master. Ya seperti yang telah tertulis pada judul, tulisan ini akan mengupas tentang pengalaman saya mendaftar di salah satu kampus di Jerman dan Inggris hingga sampai pada terbitnya surat penerimaan, yang merupakan sebuah surat sakti untuk mengajukan kontrak beasiswa LPDP.

Seperti yang kita telah ketahui pada masing-masing Universitas memiliki tata cara pendaftaran tersendiri yang terkadang sedikit dan mungkin jauh berbeda dari beberapa negara. Hal yang sangat perlu diperhatikan dalam mendaftar sebuah jurusan di kampus luar negeri, khususnya pada bidang sains murni dan kedokteran berbasis riset, maka pengalaman riset kita adalah menjadi poin utama untuk kita dapat diterima atau tidak. Pengalaman riset tersebut harus segaris dengan baik penelitian ketika S1 atau mungkin ketika bekerja sebagai asisten peneliti. Hal kedua yang perlu diingat adalah deadline pendaftaran dan kelengkapan administrasi yang diminta. Jangan sampai kita mengirimkan berkas tp nyatanya ada salah satu dokumen yang kurang (kecuali sertifikat bahasa untuk mendaftar kampus di Inggris bisa menyusul), atau bahkan sudah kelewat deadline pendaftaran, ya tentunya bakalan tidak direview aplikasi kita meskipun kita termasuk strong applicant. Oleh karena itu, sejak jauh jauh hari kita perlu mensurvei terkait periode applikasi, dan sejauh mungkin kita perlu menyiapkan syarat yang diperlukan. Oke lanjut saja saya kupas di tiap negara biar sedikit memberikan gambaran tentang pengalaman mendaftar di kedua negara tersebut.

1.      Pengalaman Mendaftar di Newcastle University, UK

Pengalaman saya ketika mendaftar ke NCL ini sebenarnya sudah sejak tahun 2015 lalu, tepatnya pada bulan Oktober 2015. Mayoritas untuk kampus di UK membuka periode aplikasi selama setahun, dimulai dari bulan September hingga mendekati Juli di tahun berikutnya. Jadi apabila teman-teman ingin kuliah di UK, bisa mendaftar kapan pun selama setahun. Persyaratan yang dibutuhkan ketika saya mendaftar di program Mres Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine adalah personal statement, ijazah original dan translate, transkrip original dan translate, surat pernyataan pendanaan beasiswa (jika sudah ada), sertifikat IELTS minimal 7.0 no less than 6.0, paspor, pas foto. surat rekomendasi 2, dan dokumen pelengkap seperti sertifikat-sertifikat prestasi. Kesemua berkas ini saya upload di akun aplikasi online Newcastle University. Setelah dua minggu kemudian saya mendapatkan email bahwa aplikasi saya telah lolos dan diterbitkan juga LoAnya.

2.      Meraih LOA dari Technische Universitat Dresden, Jerman

Mendaftar di Technische Universitat Dresden ini adalah kali terakhir saya setelah mencoba mendaftar di beberapa kampus di Inggris dan Belanda. Perlu diketahui bahwa untuk pendaftaran di kampus Jerman kita perlu mengirimkan berkas secara online dan berkas dokumen fisik melalui pos menuju alamat jurusan atau universitas yang dituju. DI TUDresden saya melamar dua program di sebuah lembaga riset milik TUDresden, yaitu MSc Molecular Bioengineering di BIOTEC Zentrum, dan MSc Regenerative Biology and Medicine di Center for Regenerative Therapy TU Dresden. Pada waktu itu saya mengirimkan satu berkas aplikasi yang kemudian diseleksi oleh panitia seleksi berbeda di BIOTEC dan CRTD. Berkas yang diminta oleh TUD lebih banyak dari pada yang diminta oleh Newcastle University.

a.       Copy Ijazah original terlegalisir dan translate-annya terlegalisir

b.      Copy Transcript terlegalisir

c.       Copy original ijazah STTB SMA dan translate-annya terlegalisir

d.      Essay Motivation letter yang menerangkan motivasi saya belajar jurusan yang dipilih (max 350 kata)

e.       Essay Research Interest yang menerangkan tema riset yang saya minati dan background pengetahuan yang sudah saya miliki yang terkait bidang keilmuan S2 (max 350 kata)

f.       Essay Research Experience yang menerangkan pengalaman penelitian yang terkait jurusan yang diambil (Max 350)

g.      Sertifikat IELTS

h.      CV

i.        List tentang prestasi dan penghargaan

J. Surat rekomendasi (2 dari dosen)

K.        Mengisi form online

Setelah aplikasi tersebut saya submit online dan dokumen fisik sampai di BIOTEC/CRTD Dresden tanggl 31 Mei, barulah babak seleksi dimulai. Pada tahapan ini sangat menengangkan dan kita tidak tahu siapa saja pesaing kita, dan apa saja kualifikasi mereka. Satu aplikan yang saya tahu dari Indonesia adalah sesama awardee dari Aceh yang memiliki background S1 pendidikan dokter. Sampailah pada tanggal 1 Juli, tepat setelah berbuka puasa di Sidoarjo bersama si Manis (Ines Melita), waktu itu kami lagi beli Jus di daerah Sidokare, saya melihat ada notifikasi email masuk. Saya lihat dan saya baca bahwa saya lolos seleksi program MSc Regenerative Biology and Medicine. Alhamdulillah dengan rasa syukur, saya senang sekali dapat diterima di program tersebut, karena program tersebut berkolaborasi dengan Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell and Genetic Dresden, yang sudah sejak lama saya incar untuk bisa penelitian disana. Ketika saya ngobrol sesama Awardee tujuan Jerman, ada salah satu awardee yang pernah penelitian thesis di CRTD bilang kalau saya ini orang Indonesia pertama yang diterima di MSc Regbiomed.

Yah setelah menunggu hampir tiga minggu akhirnya Zulassungbescheid dari TUD telah issued. Insya Allah Oktober nanti saya akan melakukan penelitian dan belajar stem sel, tissue engineering, gene-editing CRISPR/Cas9 di sebuah lembaga di sisi selatan sungai Elbe, di sebuah kota terindah di Jerman, yang pernah luluh lantak akibat serangan udara sekutu pada PD II, Dresden

Itulah sedikit pengalaman yang bisa saya sharingkan di blog ini. Semoga sukses selalu bagi teman-teman yang sedang menjadi Pejuang atau Pemburu LOA dan Beasiswa. Kita tidak tahu pada percobaan ke berapa kita berhasil, intinya cobalah terus. Saya berhasil ini setelah 10 kali mencoba segala aplikasi beasiswa dan universitas hehehehehhe. 

VOCABULARY : WORDS COLLOCATION

Hello guys!!. Now in this page I am going to share you about English collocation or word collocation in English. So, have you ever heard about collocation before ?. I think some of you have already known about it. As we know in English, native people use words in combination or in a chunk which is composed of two words that stick together. Sometimes for us English learners, we try to make sentence by combining words which makes them unnatural in English. By learning collocation, you can improve both writing and speaking because your sentence will sound more natural. Learning collocation will also improve your IELTS band scores for writing and speaking, because it is also one of the scoring parameter for lexical resources, besides acedemic vocabularies. To figure out what is the collocation in practical term, let's see the following sentences

Sentence 1
John got a punishment because he did a mistake 

Sentence 2
John got a punishment because he made a mistake

My question is, which one of those two sentences sounds more natural ? The second sentence sounds more natural as it uses word "made" followed by mistake. This is the real example of collocation what I mean. Native speakers do not say do a mistake instead of make a mistake. Another example of word collocation

Sentence 3
It is a general rule of thumb that poverty breeds crime

Sentence 4
It is a general rule of thumb that poverty causes crime

Those two sentences have the same meaning, but if we can see from the sentences, the third sentence uses breeds instead of causes like in the fourth sentence. Native speakers use breeds for poverty and crime. So, in this case, the right answer is sentence 3, It is a general rule of thumb that poverty breeds crime.

The other examples of words collocations are portrayed in the following sentences

Sentence 5
This car has a powerful engine (correct collocation)

Sentence 6
This car has a strong engine (wrong collocation)

Sentence 7
Yesterday, there was a hard rain in Scotland which caused many trees felt in the ground (correct collocation)

Sentence 8
Yesterday, there was a big rain in Scotland which caused many trees felt in the ground (wrong collocation)

To find out more examples of words collocations, especially in every context likes law, environment, sciences, writing, and feeling, you can read excellent book of collocation in English Collocation in Use.

Collocations of Success and Failure

1. Impressive accomplishment
2. Phenomenal success
3. Highly effective
4. Dramatic improvement
5. Unprecedented success
6. Crowning achievement
7. Modest success
8. Room for improvement
9. Make a good progress
10. Fail miserably
11. Completely failed
12. Mediocre performance
13. Remarkable achievements
14. Spectacular failure
15. A recipe for disaster
16. Doomed to failure
17. As a last resort

Resource
Mc Carthy, M., O'Dell, F., English Collocation in Use. Cambridge University Press.

IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 : Diagram Process

Hello guys, It's been a long time I have not posted anything in this blog. But now, I am going to share you IELTS writing task 1 diagram process. In brief, IELTS writing task 1 asks you to make a report based on provided data by summarizing it and picking some important information, so that it is really like describing data to make people understand about what the data is about. In this task, you need to be able to write it within 20 minutes, it feels a bit short time during the test. I got this task from my friend, Ms Oktifani.



Sample Answer :

The diagram portrays manufacturing process of wood pellets, which are usually used for generating heat at home. The process generally consists of three main steps involving conversion of sawdust, processing with steam, and removing unbind sawdust from the pellets.  

The first step of wood pellets production is the conversion of sawdust, which are taken from sawmill factory, into fibers with homogeneous size. This process is undertaken by hammering sawdust. Subsequently, the fibers are steamed to make them wet by using hot steam. Following the steaming process, hot wet fibers are forced to pass through a hole in the pellet machine to generate pellet. The pellets are then subjected to a cooling step for removing heat. Cooled pellets contain several unbind sawdust that are removed by vacuuming method. Finally, pellets are packaged into 18 kg size into a forty pound bags, which are ready to be sold to customer for burning in furnace and stoves.   

IELTS Writing Task 2

Hi guys, I am going to share my writing task 2 practice for IELTS. As we can see, IELTS is consisted of four sections including listening, reading, writing, and speaking. In the writing section, it is divided to writing task 1 and task 2. In this time. I would like to write my practice on the writing task 2, an argument or opinion analysis task. It is my group's homework at IALF. Any correction or feed-back is valuable for my improvement, therefore, should you have any question or correction, do not hesitate to let me know.

Giving lectures in auditoriums to large numbers of students is an old way of teaching. With the technology available today there is no justification for it, and everything should be done online. To what extent do you agree or disagree? give your own opinion.

In this digital era, the advance of information technology has numerous impacts on the way of people communicate. More people become easily connected each other and there is no barrier in space and time. It has great influence on the course arrangement in universities nowadays, some universities accommodate online class beside original lecture class in the classroom. A group of people think, attending lecture class in the big-sized class is an ancient method, and it should be replaced by its online counterpart. Although online courses are more efficient in time and offer more flexibility than lecture classes, in my point of view lecture classes provide more invaluable benefits for students and lecturers which cannot be overtaken by online distance learning.

Firstly, Old-fashion lecture class facilitates more connections between professors and students as a result from their interaction in discussion during tutorials. The relationship between academic tutor and student, especially personal connection, is a substantial benefit for student in approaching professor to participate in their research. An important fact to note is, many professors tend to recruit students with well-known working performance and good motivation for conducting laboratory research. Additionally, students also get benefit from the professor for getting convincing letter of recommendation for graduate school application.

On the other hand, online lecture classes are prone to several internet troubles. As we know that majority in developing countries do not have stable internet connection compared to developed country. An example in Indonesia, there is huge number of difficulties establishing video conference using internet due to band width limitation. Therefore, in such cases will give detrimental effect as delayed connections making knowledge transfer become partially. 

On the society perspective, University is a vibrant place to educate people by transferring knowledge and exchanging ideas. There are opulence opportunities for students exchanging ideas and gathering abundance international cultures from their classmates and lecturers. Students acquire critical thinking with different perspective, and it is beneficial for their career development after graduating. Not only deeply in critical thinking, scholar gain valuable experience such as making project together. 

In conclusion, attending lecture classes in the auditorium is more beneficial than via online counterpart. It allows disciples gaining many personal and professional connection as it is a good modal for the career development. Hence, i strongly disagree with the opinion and support old-way teaching. 

Method in Molecular Biology : DNA isolation

In this page I am going to show  DNA isolation  technique which indispensable step in molecular biology. Molecular biologist routinely perform DNA extraction to remove its contaminants such as protein, lipid, and cell wall component, prior to subsequent experiments. They are in need of pure DNA for several applications, such as polymerase chain reaction, restriction digest, molecular cloning, etc. The critical points of those applications is the purity of DNA samples. Contaminants 

There are three types of DNA, each of them need several modification steps to isolate. Genomic DNA (gDNA) is a kind of DNA that compose the entire genome of the cells or organisms. gDNA reside in the nucleus in the form of chromosome in eucaryote, or in the cytoplasm in the bacteria or procaryote. The second type is a plasmid DNA, and the third is mitochondria or chloroplast DNA.

The principle of DNA extraction is based on the three steps. (1) cell lysis, (2) cell digestion, (3) DNA precipitation and purification. The first step is lysis of cell by disrupting membrane or cell wall to release all of the cell contents. There are so many strategies to perform cell lysis which depend on the cell type. Non ionic surfactant like sodium dodecyl sulphonate (SDS) and EDTA usually are used to perform this task. EDTA will bind with magnesium ions and makes cell more sensitive to disruption. EDTA also prevents DNAse to degrade DNA by chelating Mg2+ ion. SDS interacts with membrane phospholipid, so the cell membrane will break and lysis. Cell disruption is a first key step to accomplish DNA isolation. Several modifications are used according to sample type. If we isolate DNA from animal cell or tissue, we just need SDS, EDTA and proteinase K. But if we want to isolate DNA from bacteria, we use lysozyme (gram negative or E coli) or lysostaphin (for Staphylococcus spp) in order to break the cell wall. Several commercial kits using guanidin isothiocyanate to make cell lysis also.

The next step to perform DNA isolation is cell digestion, in this step we are digesting protein and RNA, and then extracting our DNA by using organic extraction or spin column. Proteinase K degrade protein and RNAse A will degrade all the remaining RNA. After cell digestion, we have to separate DNA from cell debriss. Organic extraction method by using phenol:chloroform:isoamyl alcohol is the most used in conventionally manner, but it more laborious and need several time to accomplish this. Most commercial kits use spin column method, in this method we use silica membrane to trap our DNA instead the other cell debriss are filtered through spin collumn during centrifugation steps. Washing DNA is needed to make purified DNA with the lowest impurities such as protein. DNA washing performed by using wash buffer containinng ethanol 70%. After that, DNA from spin collumn are eluated using elution buffer or steril nuclease free water.

Here I provide some DNA extraction protocols from several commercial kits and using organic extraction from Sambrok.

A. Genomic DNA isolation from blood, tissue, and cell culture using Purelink Genomic DNA Kit

B. Plasmid DNA isolation using GeneJet Miniprep Plasmid Kit Thermo Scientific.

Madakaripura "The Wonderful Indonesian Waterfall I've seen"

I didn't write my blog address correctly (with "t" ending) because  another blog  uses the same name, so i could not change it properly by adding "t" ending

Hey guys, it was a long time since my last post regarding my workplace. I want to tell you about our adventure (me with my life mate :D) in madakaripura waterfall. I and Ines were going to madakaripura waterfall which situated at Probolinggo, near Mt Bromo. We didn't plan to go there before, but we had planned visiting tea garden at lawang Malang. Suddenly, when we were still on the road, she wanted to go to madakaripura waterfall. It was 2,5 hours from Sidoarjo to Madakaripura. There was a beautiful mountain scenery around there. We continued our trip from parking area to water fall site by passing several rivers and walking on the barren road. Sometimes We walked on the big stone across the river. Yeahhh, It was very exciting for us !!!, we hadn't met like this kind of adventure before :D :D :D. Needless to say, we had walked around 30 minutes, it might be 1.5 km far. Here some pictures that we took in Madakaripura 

My workplace

I didn't write my blog address correctly (with "t" ending) because  another blog  uses the same name, so i could not change it properly by adding "t" ending

Examining  flourescence microscope specimen of mesenchymal stem cell in retina repair (dr Titik's research)

Yeeah :D,.. It was 6 month since i started working as a laboratory technician in Rumah Sakit Tropik Infeksi Universitas Airlangga (Research Hospital for Tropical Infectious Disease, Airlangga University). I have been enjoying my current adventure in research environment, giving assistance to student and doing some analytical tasks i.e. ELISA, PCR, and microscopy imaging. My Director, Prof. Boerhan Hidayat, always encourages us to develop research theme and submit research proposal for grant fundraising. Finnaly, I am very surprised that I have been granted 41.6 millions rupiah for studying the role of microRNA  from Indonesian Torray Science Foundation. This is my workplace, but it is not a workplace i think, It is my pleasure world, because i could develop my scientific potential to be the next stem cell biologist. It is my starting point to succes...:D :D :D :D:D