Red dwarfs outlive brighter stars by trillions of years. A reminder that endurance matters more than burning brightest.
I entered the International Program in Mechanical Engineering at Universitas Indonesia in 2014.
I was one of eleven Mechanical Engineering students, among around seventy International Engineering students that year.
Mechanical Engineering comes in many form, measurement, thermodynamics, fluida, control system, statistic, and more
Something that i didn't know and didn't think it matters before, but it reshape the way i think completely.
I spent my internship at PT Astra Agro Lestari, living in the middle of a palm oil plantation. The nearest KFC was around 60 km away, and even the nearest asphalt road was about 25 km away.
I learned a lot there about how a palm oil mill works—from processing fresh fruit bunches into crude palm oil and using the remaining fiber as fuel to generate electricity for the mill.
This is a simplified view of the palm oil milling process observed during my internship at PT Astra Agro Lestari.
Harvested palm fruit bunches arrive from plantation estates and are weighed, inspected, and unloaded onto ramps to feed the processing line.
Freshness is critical. Processing fruit promptly after harvesting prevents the oil from degrading and becoming acidic.
Fruit bunches enter large autoclave vessels and are cooked with high-pressure steam.
Heat stops natural enzymes from spoiling the oil, softens the fruit tissue for pressing, and loosens fruitlets from the stalks.
The softened bunches tumble inside a rotating drum, separating loose fruitlets from empty bunch stalks.
Isolates the oil-bearing fruit from bulky bunch waste. The empty stalks are collected and reused as biomass boiler fuel or organic mulch.
The fruit is mashed and squeezed through continuous screw presses, separating crude oil liquor from solid press cake.
Extracts the crude oil mechanically without crushing the hard palm kernels. The remaining fiber and shell by-products are reused as boiler fuel to generate steam and electricity for the mill.
The pressed oil mixture enters settling tanks where gravity naturally separates the pure, lighter oil from heavier water, sand, and sludge.
Purifies the crude palm oil cleanly through natural density differences without chemical additives.
The clarified oil is dried and pumped into bulk storage tanks, maintained at controlled temperature until dispatched for transport.
Keeping moisture low prevents oil spoilage during holding, ensuring commodity Crude Palm Oil meets quality standards for refinery dispatch.
I went to Tokyo Institute of Technology for six months as part of my International Program.
I spent a lot of my time riding my bicycle, commuting to campus, and experiencing everyday life in Tokyo.
I also got to see how students were taught in Japan and experience both the academic and social side of studying abroad.
It was another eye-opening experience for me, both inside and outside the classroom.
My undergraduate thesis was about seawater distillation using throttling and flash evaporation.
I built and tested a physical rig in the Mechanical Engineering laboratory at Universitas Indonesia, then compared the experiment with the thermodynamic model behind it.
A lot of the work was not glamorous—setting up the rig, adjusting valves, waiting for temperature and pressure to stabilize, collecting the distillate, and repeating the test when something did not behave as expected.
It became the last big project of my university years before I graduated in 2019.
Some things are not built all at once—they gather, align, and take shape over time.
