Nina N. Ramadhan: How Competition Helps in Your Career
This article is written for SICOMAS publication. SICOMAS stands for SISTEM Competition Material Supplies where you can find competition proposals and materials from those who already experienced in the corresponding fields. Rafif shared some of his business plan competition proposals, which you can find here: https://s.id/SICOMAS2020
Nina N. Ramadhan is a Fasilkom UI Alumni from batch 2016, majored in Information System. She graduated after spending 3.5 years in Fasilkom UI. Despite her short lifespan in Fasilkom UI, her days are filled with studies, organizational activity, and various competitions. Her strong dedication and effort helped her to land her position at 3rd place in Fasilkom UI’s Most Outstanding Student 2019. Currently, she is working as a Product Manager at Flip.id, a financial IT company. In this session, we’re going to talk about her experience in joining various competitions and how it helped her to pursue her career life.
Joining Various Competition
Her first competition experience was BCF(Business Case for Fasilkomers), a competition held by SISTEM when she was still a freshman. She divides her competing experience to 2 phase: her “stupid” phase(frankly said by herself) and “a-little-bit-brighten” phase.
During her first phase, she joined various competition like compfest and gemastik. Due to her lack of knowledge, she didn’t gain much from her first gemastik. From then on, Nina joined various kinds of competitions, like UI/UX competitions, business case, etc. From those competitions, Nina found her callings in products. Gemastik UI/UX taught her about product design and research. Hackathon helped her to deliver well and convincing to the judges. As a whole, these competitions eventually built her knowledge in products.
How Hackathon Affects Her Career
For Nina, Hackathons helped her a lot in terms of her career. She said that she has a little regret over the fact that she started joining Hackathons on 6th and 7th semester. In hackathon, participants are challenged to present to real judges. In instance, when her team joined Hackathon held by Grab, they were being judged by the head of product from Grab. Besides that, Hackathon participants are not limited only to college students, but also undergraduates. Therefore, by competing in Hackathon, she got the opportunity to see "how the real world works".
Hackathon helped her a lot on how to be a good PM; she learned how to communicate with engineer, how to lead her team, and how to do a good pitch. Her first Hackathon experience was BCA Finhacks 2019, where she got invited to team up with her friends from ITB and managed to reach the final stage.
What she learned during hackathon gave her a boost on what she wrote on CV. Competitions are one among list of questions that is most likely to be asked by the HR, like how the team got the solution, etc. One tip from her: if you want to write about your competitions in your CV, don’t forget to explain “how” you do those competitions (example: in business case competition, write about the frameworks that you used in solution-finding).
Closing Remarks
Don’t give up! It might sounds cliché, but that’s just how it is. Do NOT give up.
Ask yourself “why do I want to join?” before you actually join the competition.
She admits that one of her biggest mistake in the past is lacking reason about why she joined. Her other advice is to have goals.
It would be better if you could find goals that’s bigger than yourself.
What kind of goal is “bigger than oneself”? For example, she had joined some competitions with her juniors because she wants to help them to push themselves beyond their limits. She also hopes that Hackathon is getting more recognized in Fasilkom UI.
