Bhinneka Tunggal Ika –– Unity in Diversity. Indonesia’s national device earned UI’s delegation to the Asian Universities Alliance Youth Forum (AUAYF) 2022 a Third Place in Cultural Sharing Presentation. Members of the team also earned, individually, First Place and Second Place in the Student Forum (Kenzie Ryvantya and Raihan Ronny), and an award in the Cultural Bingo Game (Kenzie Ryvantya).
AUAYF is an annual university student conference held to discuss issues in development in Asian countries, encourage. The theme of this year’s AUA Youth Forum is “Synergizing Regional Identity and The Future of Asian Civilization”. The forum is held online by Universiti Malaya from the 21st to the 25th of March, 2022.
Participants competed in Cultural Sharing alongside fellow delegates of their respective universities. UI’s team consists of Azzadina Nurulain Ikhwan (Humanities 2020), Farrell Dzaudan Muhammad (Engineering 2019), Hafizd Akbar Priambodo (Psychology 2021), Kenzie Sultan Ryvantya (Sociopolitics 2020), Prita Ditahapsari Priambodo (Law 2020), dan Raihan Ronny Wazier (Humanities 2019). In this category, participants presented elements within their country’s culture that are representative of the latter as a whole.
Ronny, a member of the team, shared his experience of the competition. He said that many other universities from other countries presented their cuisine, costumes, dances, and musical instruments to the forum’s audience. He said that many other universities from other countries presented their cuisine, costumes, dances, and musical instruments to the forum’s audience, but that his team had the “not mainstream” idea of presenting Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, Indonesia’s national device and guiding philosophy. “We presented our material with a fervent and passionate voice in order to attract attention,” Ronny explained.
During the evaluation, Ronny narrated, UI’s team garnered lots of praise and hardly any criticism. A member of the jury — a professor — judged that the topic put forth by UI’s team, which places emphasis on Unity in Diversity, was very relevant to the theme explored by AUAYF 2022.
Yet another member of UI’s delegation to the forum earned an award for his victory. Kenzie, who earned First Place in the Student Forum, shared us his experience. “During the Student Forum, we were divided into groups together with participants from other universities, then were given a topic to be discussed, researched, and presented in front of the panelists, who also included recommendations from our team in order to maximalise the preservation of culture through education in Asian countries.” Kenzie was grouped into a team that contained one student each from Hong Kong, Japan, Kazakhstan, and China.
Ronny, who obtain Second Place in the same category, was included in a team that contained students from Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, and Myanmar. “Due to differences in time, we from group 1 faced a slight difficulty in finding the right time.”
Kenzie also secured victory in another category: the Cultural Bingo Game: a series of puzzles competed by teams composed of students from different countries. “There are tens of trivia questions on the cultures of countries in Asia, and each group was to gather as much points as possible by answering as many questions as fast as possible while discussing with each other. Alhamdulillah, my group possesses a sufficiently wide array of general knowledge on the topic, so that it managed to complete [the questions] quickly and precisely.”
