By Hafiz Asnawi
“What if life gives you a second chance? All you have to do is to look for that second chance, grab it and push as hard as you can.”
This is an interesting quote from Siti Nur Atiqah Ismail from Kulliyyah of Human Sciences who has been elected to the recent Students’ Representative Councils (SRC) together with Muhd Thoriq Hasani Mahbub.
Siti Nur Atiqah Ismail participated in the 2015/2016 SRC election but unfortunately lost the chance to be elected leaving her in the state of shattered confidence, but with the help of her friends who always remain by her side she managed to bring back all the confidence. She stood for the recent SRC election for 2016/2017 and won.
In an interview with her recently, Atiqah shared with readers how she started to compose herself and regain confidence to win the election this time. Here are some of the steps on her path towards success that she had embarked.
- List all the weaknesses
- List all the solution to overcome the weakness
- Do not be afraid to voice out the opinion
- Know your responsibilities
List all weaknesses and possible solution.
As students, all of us had experienced the up and down of life and some of us may not yet found out how to overcome the challenges in our life. Atiqah Ismail said during the period of her defeat she had to list out the weaknesses within her to know where she had gone wrong and what need to be done to improve herself and not to repeat the same mistakes.
“It is hard for me to do it alone but with my friend help, I able to recognise my weakness and mistakes based on what I did in last SRC election that led me to my defeat,” she said.
“But, it’s okay to lose for the sake of becoming a better person and I have done a lot of self-reflecting to find a solution to overcome my weaknesses and it brings good result so long as I push myself to achieve my goal.”
She also mentioned that her manifestos are based on students’ problems and the problems are not faced only by Human Sciences students but the entire student population in IIUM. One of her manifestos is to reduce the subject withdrawal fees because some students were unable to acknowledge the subject withdrawal period and they had missed it.
“The fee for withdrawal is RM300 before mid-term and RM500 after mid-term. Not all the students can afford the large amount of money for dropping subjects.”
Do not be afraid to voice out your opinion.
“Sometimes we tend to conceal our views because of fear of rejection from other people, but if we do not voice out our opinion to certain situation or problem, the tendency is that the problems remain unsolved or at worst, the problem would cause great impact in our life that could lead us to remain in our comfort zone instead of discovering new perspectives or ideas in our life.”
Atiqah clarified, “One of the main reasons for me to be in SRC is to voice out students’ opinion and help those in need, and when the students’ needs are fulfilled, we can bring them to enhance their potential to become better persons that would not only bring benefit to the IIUM community but to the outside world as well.”
“In order to achieve your goals, you have to be brave to reveal yourselves for people to acknowledge your potential and make changes to society and the surroundings.”
One of her manifesto’s is to restructure IRKHS students’ society so that the activities and events would benefit the students in terms of soft skills to prepare them to enter job market upon graduation.
Know your responsibility.
Every student has his or her own idea on how to improve their life. They should be aware of their responsibilities. To achieve one’s goal, one must learn to work together that will eventually help to connect with each other.
Atiqah said,”Even though I was elected into the SRC, we in the Council have to review manifestos of all members to see if they can be implemented to bring benefit to students, for the good of everybody, not only for ourselves.”
She stressed on the importance of establishing a welfare fund to help students with financial problems, but sometimes, she said, “we have problems with some students who are afraid to tell out their problem.”
“As a responsible students’ representative body, we are obliged to help improve the welfare of students and we would do everything possible to reach out to every one,”Atiqah concluded.***