Indonesian Delegation at the International Student Week in Ilmenau 2019, Germany.

ITS Campus, ITS News – Muhammad Ridha Tantowi, student of the Department of Architecture of Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) who successfully became ITS representative at the International Student Week In Ilmenau (ISWI) 2019. For two weeks, he actively participated in a group focused on the issue of transportation and mobility that was managed directly by the Technische Universität (TU) Ilmenau, Germany.

Despite being the last year student, this does not impede Owi, his nickname, to actively participate in activities other than academic. Through ISWI 2019, he proved that even final year students can be active while completing the final assignments. “During the program, there was not much progress for my final project, but I still sure to catch up the lag later after returning from Germany,” he said steadily.

World Food Festival Agenda that provides opportunities to introduce Indonesian culture and culinary.

Briefly, ISWI 2019 is an international student conference agenda aimed at gathering students from different backgrounds from all over the world. This year, the ISWI committee invited approximately 300 international students from 75 different countries as the results from a rigorous selection of over 2000 applicants. Fortunately, Owi was successfully elected to be his only representative to participate in the small town of Ilmenau, Thuringen, Germany on 16-27 May 2019.

Explained by this bespectacled student, various ISWI 2019 agendas include guest lecture, panel discussion, World Food Festival, open share space, and group work. However, out of all the agenda, the group work became the core of ISWI 2019 activities. Students are welcome to choose one of 30 available themes. “The goal is to jointly discuss issues from various perspectives that are then done with the problem solving,” he said.

Owi with the participants of the transportation and mobility group from seven different countries.

As a student whose daily life deals with architecture and design, Owi admitted that he was interested in choosing and engaging in the transportation and mobility group. Because he saw the important role of the architects in helping to smooth the mass mobilization in various levels. “From the level of individuals, communities, to urban scale though,” he explained.

To ITS Online, Owi revealed, there was a lot of idea exchanges occurred among the conference attendees. For example, in the transport and mobility group work, each participating country certainly has their own policy of transportation. “There are good, bad, pros and cons that can be reviewed from various perspectives of participants,” said the student from Tanjung, South Kalimantan.

The part that is not less exciting, said Owi, when the participants discussed the transportation and mobilization system in Germany as the host. As a developed country, Germany has a transportation system that is certainly much better than developing countries. “Even so, Germany is still struggling with the problem of punctuality that continues to be sought better,” he said.

The atmosphere of the ISWI 2019 Closing Ceremony.

From ISWI 2019, Owi learned a lot about the differences. There are many things that may not match the culture of each participant, whether in worship, express opinions, socializing, and so forth. But according to him, this mismatch does not necessarily make a gap, but rather strengthen the relationship to mutual respect the culture of each other.

“We live where collaboration is key to global competition. There are no more partitions, “said Owi. Until hopefully, each individual can bring meaningful changes and continue to transform in a better direction. (*/gayatri)