Essay ini ditujukan untuk mendaftarkan diri ke program Accenture Experience. Topik essay ini adalah “Why do you consider yourself as a high performer”. Segala komentar silakan di-post langsung di halaman ini. Thankfully this essay brought me to the main event of Accenture Experience. So you may consider this essay as a working example for writing a good essay with quite bad grammar. 😛

I never imagined how I would spend my four-years of college life studying Computer Science back then. While I am a huge fan of computer since I was three years old and I started learning programming at the age of fourteen, I pictured my life to become an architect or a city planner. I realized up until today I’m writing this essay, I’ve been riding a very terrifying yet amusing roller-coaster ride of my life, the journey to become a high performer person in life.

It all began with my parents’ disapproval of pursuing my dream as an architect. Suddenly at the end of my high school year, 3 months before the big day of university entrance exam, I needed to change my course to something else other than architecture. A lot of thinking was done in a short amount of time. It would be a very big decision for me and I needed to make it right. In the end I knew that I should pursue my career in computer science, because it is actually where my true passion lies.

It is not easy to get my seat on a highly reputable university like Universitas Indonesia, especially the Computer Science major. Many hours, days, and weeks I spent just to prepare myself to face the entrance exam. I went to two different preparation courses everyday just to be ready for my lifetime chance. It was really paid off in the end and worth the fighting for.

As a student on Universitas Indonesia, I was forced to raise the pace. New school work was introduced almost daily. I took various courses in software engineering and development, which most mainstream students usually avoid of. I barely got a nice rest since I enrolled to this university. But I knew that a great future comes from a great sacrifice. That kept my strength to stay up and do the best.

In addition to studying in my campus, I took a job as a tutor and teaching assistant on my campus since my second year. It was the best option for me to build my experience in speaking and teaching without sacrificing my responsibility as a student. Additionally, I could strengthen the knowledge I’ve learned previously by teaching it. I taught programming classes and algorithm classes, in which I am profound at. I got various types of student, and it was quite challenging to teach them. Most of my students were pleased to be taught by me, as well as the lecturers who employed me. It was time consuming but it was all worth the time I spent.

I don’t come to campus only to learn and get a diploma. I am here to build my experience and network. I joined some campus activities such as Microsoft Innovation Center, where many passionate students over Microsoft’s technology gather. I was also chosen to become a Microsoft Student Partner for my university. I helped many friends who are willing to learn Microsoft technologies. While in campus most of the lecturers use Open Source solutions, I never let it as a burden to learn other solutions available in the IT world. I am neither an Open Source geek nor a Microsoft freak. All I do is learn as many things as I can, whether it is being taught on campus or learn it on my own.

Interestingly, some people define that being a high performer means completing job as many as you can. Obviously I am not that kind of person, which is reflected on my story. I don’t live to fill my CV with hundreds of pages of jobs I have done. I put a lot of attention to details, and I tend to give the best possible outcome I could give. I never let stressful moments ruin my responsibility and my relationship with people around me. That’s why I defined a true high performer as a person who is reliable to everyone and every job he/she responsible to, dares to make a hard and right decision fast, and gives full effort to everything he/she does. That is what I am, what I have been doing all the time, and what I will keep doing in the future. I might never live up my childhood dream as an architect or a city planner in my life. But certainly I can live up my life-long dream as an architect and planner for my own life, an architect who builds my life into a high performer person.