Information technology in Indonesia is keep on developing. The development of IT in Indonesia is marked by the social media trend that has been followed actively by Indonesian society. Thus, Indonesia as the biggest internet and mobile market in the world, attracted the interest of Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter. On thursday, March 26th 2015 the top leader of this popular social media visited UI and addressed some cooperation program that would be doing by Twitter in Indonesia.
In front of students of UI, Costolo stated the commitment of Twitter to give the data access of Twitter for development programs, give bigger chance to small medium enterprises, and empower more women to be involved on IT industries. In the discussion, Costolo also said that computer sciences enable human to explore the world.
According to Costolo, there are lots of entrepreneur in Europe and Asia with various idea who asked for technological support and support computer scientist. Costolo also supports young people who has interest on information and technology sciences to study on computer sciences subjects. He said that the graduates of computer sciences are now required. In the USA, the female graduates of computer sciences are hard to get.
The visit of Costello was also the first step of Twitter cooperation with UI. Together with UI, Twitter has fellowship program called #Twitter4WaniTek. This program supports the second year female students who come from poor family or has good marks or achievement in Faculty of Computer Sciences of UI. This program is the first scholarship program of Twitter in the world which is designed to encourage Indonesia’s women to IT world. This program is also intended to improve the quality of IT knowledge and capability for community.
On this opportunity, The Dean of Faculty of Computer Sciences of UI, Mirna Adriani, Ph.D., welcomed this initiative. According to Adriani, females are still the minority in her faculty, since it is only 30% of students. She hopes that this scholarship will increase the number of female students in Faculty of Computer Sciences of UI.
She added that people still has perception that the computer sciences subject is more suitable for male than females. “People think that computer sciences is hard and possibly not suitable for woman,” she said.
Moreover, Adriani hoped that her sides and Twitter could cooperate on opening the wider chance for students who willing to do internship at Head Office of Twitter at San Fransisco. One of the students of Faculty of Computer Science UI, Tri Ahmad Irfan, is now got a chance to intern at Head Office of Twitter at San Fransisco. Irfan got this chance after he had passed the series of selection test from Twitter.
