Different from her peers who at around the age of 15 years start their high schools, Nida Aqidatus has instead gone to college after getting admitted at UGM for Medical Records at the Vocational School.
Nida - born on 16 July 2001 - is the youngest student of 8,745 new students of UGM for year 2016. “I didn’t know that I was the youngest student here, I’ve just been told,” she said alongsides the opening ceremony of new students induction (PPSMB) in the square of Grha Sabha Pramana UGM on Monday (1/8).
The first child of Suryatno and Yuliatin became the youngest new student after she went through acceleration programme in her previous schools.
“I did the acceleration programme at elementary school, so it took me only five years. At junior high school and senior high school, I did it for two years each,” she explained.
She recounted that the challenge for acceleration programme was to catch up with school subjects and have different school mates. She, however, did not find these a big problem and she still enjoyed throughout the duration of the study.
Despite her young age, she gets used to live independently. Her home which was far from the school prompted her to staying in a boarding house since fifth grade. She would only return home every weekends.
In her opinion, this experience helped her much in further studies, despite having older fellow students. She hopes she would be able to study well and mingle well with other students.
“I hope my study can run well and I can graduate quickly. I want to prove that young people can be great people, too,” she concluded.