There are people you meet in life who don’t just walk beside you. They push you forward when you’ve already decided to stop.
Husni is that person for me.
We met at Information Systems, ITS Surabaya. He was the youngest among our circle, but his thinking was older than most people I’ve ever known. Grounded in faith. Calm under pressure. And occasionally, spectacularly stupid in the best way possible. You know the type. The ones you love precisely because of that contradiction.
Together, we built something we called Project 4-4. A college pact. Four years. Four commitments
The First Commitment: Graduate in Four Years, With a Good GPA
This one almost broke me.
In my third semester, I cheated on a final exam. The semester was voided. My record was marked. And suddenly, graduating in four years, which had always been the plan, started to feel like a fantasy other people were allowed to have. Not me.
Almost everyone around me said the same thing. Let it go. Take five years. Be realistic.
But Husni never said that. He just kept showing up, kept believing, kept reminding me that what I did in one semester didn’t have to define what I did with four years. Someone who holds your ambition for you when you can no longer hold it yourself.
The result? I graduated in exactly four years. GPA 3.47.
Without him, honestly, I’m not sure I get there.
The Second Commitment: Softskill
We believed, early on, that knowledge without character is just cleverness. And cleverness alone doesn’t build anything worth keeping.
So we got involved. We were active in our department’s student organization. We co-founded the Executive Faculty of Information Technology (BEM FTIf), an institution that didn’t exist before we decided it should. And Husni went further, serving as Chairman of KISI, the Islamic Studies organization for Information Systems students, in 2008/2009.
We learned how to lead before we had titles. That turned out to matter more than any class we took.
The Third Commitment: Hardskill
We also believed the opposite trap was just as dangerous. Softskill without hardskill produces people who speak beautifully and deliver NOTHING.
So while we were organizing, we were also building. We took on IT projects outside of class. We coded. We shipped. We earned money from work we actually understood. Theory became practice. Practice became confidence.
That combination, knowing how to work with people and knowing how to do the work, that’s the foundation we’ve been building on ever since.
The Fourth Commitment: Honors and Awards
We competed. And competition, it turns out, is one of the fastest ways to discover how much world exists outside our own campus walls.
We reached the finals of GEMASTIK 2009. Received entrepreneurship funding from DIKTI through PKM Kewirausahaan. And became a nominator at INAICTA 2010, Indonesia’s national ICT awards, where we stood in the same room as students from ITB, UI, UGM, and Binus.
That moment changed something in me. I realized we had been thinking small. Not because we lacked ambition, but because we had never truly seen the full size of the arena. Those students opened my eyes. The world is wide. And we started wanting more of it.
Husni now works at Pertamina. We’ve both come a long way from the hallways of ITS.
But we still have one target on the list. One we set when we were young and slightly unreasonable, which is the best time to set targets.
Before we turn 25, we said, we must live in Europe.