The Association of Scholarship Awardees of the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP), or Mata Garuda, voiced its support to the stance that LPDP recipients must return to Indonesia after completing their studies.
“As LPDP awardees, we support the notion that the LPDP scholarship alumni are required to return to Indonesia in order to serve and contribute either at the executive, legislative, judiciary, private, organizational, university, or other levels,” Secretary General of Mata Garuda Satya Hangga Yudha Widya Putra remarked here on Thursday.
Putra expounded that the LPDP scholarship, managed by the Ministry of Finance, is provided for Indonesian youngsters with academic ability and willingness to continue their master’s or doctoral degree either in the country or abroad.
According to Putra, during the 2013-2021 period, over 30 thousand LPDP awardees from Indonesia’s 34 provinces were spread across 36 countries.
“Some 68.1 percent are domestic (studying in Indonesia) and 31.9 percent, abroad, with 61.94 percent of the alumni confirming they have had jobs in the public sector,” he stated.
Putra noted that LPDP scholarships in the General, Targeted, and Affirmations categories were open to all Indonesian citizens (WNI).
“Awardees and alumni came from various ethnic groups, ethnicities, races, religions, and very diverse backgrounds,” he pointed out.
An LPDP awardee from South Sulawesi, Syurawasti Muhiddin, stated that after clearing the scholarship selection in 2018, she continued her studies at the Gadjah Mada University’s Psychology Master Degree Program in August 2019 with the LPDP scholarship and graduated in May 2021.
“After graduating last year, I am now teaching at my undergraduate alma mater in the Psychology Study Program of the Medicine Faculty of Hasanuddin University,” she remarked.
Another awardee from Papua, Mayer Harsin, after graduating in 2019, now works at the Open University (UT).
“I am a member in many communities, especially in Papua, as a place of serving in addition to teaching as a tutor at UT,” Harsin remarked.
Meanwhile, Dwi Suratmini, an LPDP awardee from Yogyakarta, spoke of having decided to become a COVID-19 volunteer after graduating from the University of Indonesia Nursing Faculty with an LPDP scholarship in 2020.
“I decided to volunteer for COVID-19 (to become a health worker) because I wanted to contribute to a struggling country. At that time, there was acute shortage of health workers,” she noted.
Source: Antara News