Growth and Global Partnerships

On behalf of UIII, I wish everybody a happy new year 2023. Together, we will overcome many more challenges, ones that we have experience in resolving, and those which are unprecedented. This year, UIII has finally open its admissions throughout the year for any student around the globe to apply and study at UIII under the UIII Scholarships or self-financed schemes. We will always be open to accepting the new applications of those who are interested in continuing their postgraduate education in our university, Master’s or Doctoral. We reconciled online and offline methods of teaching to ensure our operation through the Covid-19 pandemic, and currently returning to offline methods to focus on student-lecturer engagement. As I mentioned in my recent book, “Patchwork Learner: Negotiating with Destiny”, I believe that in any situation, there is always someone who is able to see things dialectically, clearly, and enlightening, like a lotus flower emerging from the mud and muddy waters. That is the true nature of humankind.

Growth has been a major part of the UIII upbringing. I am proud with the exponential growth our campus has endured, ever since the placement of the university’s first foundations by President Jokowi himself back in 2016, to this developing grand hub of education that we call Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia. From what you can call a historical site where the traces of Dutch colonial history can be seen, to a barren landscape filled with radio towers, is now molded and transformed into a futuristic campus with a graceful mission to nourish the upcoming young generations with knowledge. I wouldn’t even imagine that we could pull this off without the relentless support of the Indonesian Government and all our global partners.

Our global partnership with various countries has been effectively leveraged to set UIII into having international standards. Being the nation’s first National Strategic Project in the Educational field, slowly but steadily we have arranged many memorandums and agreements to implement, catapulting UIII to the international spotlight. With more projects planned for this year, we are excited to share them with you in the future.

Surely enough, we are shifting to a digitalized world, where we live in an era where interpersonal communication is easily enacted through a press of a button. No matter where we live, anyone can share information and stay connected through the power of the internet. In regard to the mass intercontinental connection between peers, an individual has the potential to build networks and maintaining it, finally creating a partnership if he or she is working is working in the same area of expertise with mutual values. Like it or not, partnerships are made based on trust, and trust needs time. If you are in a position where you have to choose to collaborate between two well-performing companies with the same high standards, but in one of the companies, the CEO is an acquaintance of yours, the obvious choice is to choose the one with someone you know because you had the time to build trust between you and that person.

Last but not least, let me thank all of the civitas academica of UIII who have made UIII perform well in 2022, and I will never stop praying that in 2023 UIII's growth will become more rapid, and will continue to partner up with various stakeholders from inside and abroad for the improvement and growth of our beloved campus.