Becoming an Awardee

The Announcement

The day before the supposed announcement was quite tense for me because I was filled with anxiety over what the result might be. I remember doing a group project at that day with my friends in which I talked repeatedly about my exhilarating but potentially disappointing feeling about the upcoming result. This overall state of mind of mine was still going on, multiple times more intense even, on the day of the announcement. One of the reason why I was so anxious is the fact that in the statistics of IISMA application for this year, University of Toronto was listed as one of the top 10 university with the most applicants (for both first and second choice), which means competition is going to be pretty fierce.

But there was nothing that I can do other than waiting. Even until the eve of the 20th of March, when IISMA has been hyping up the announcement to the max, the result was still not out. The announcement time coincided with the time of Tarawih prayer (it was the month of Ramadhan), and so I decided to stay until 18.30 to check the result non-stop before going to the mosque. Once that time has passed by with no announcement yet in sight, I decided to just go to the mosque without taking my phone with me, because I know for a fact that I would lack the focus to carry out the prayer properly if I were to carry my phone because I'll be checking for the result in between my prayer too.

After the Tarawih prayer has concluded, I almost sprinted my way back to my dorm to check the result (which I had assume should've been out by then). And once I saw the result which said that I got accepted to the program with University of Toronto as my host university, I immediately jumped and screamed "LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOO" off of the top of my lungs.

One of my favorite pastime is pacing around the rooftop of my dorm listening to music while pondering about stuff. That's what I immediately did. I was filled to the brim with so much satisfaction and excitement. I declared right then and there that whatever happens (good or bad) between then and my departure to UofT somewhere in August/September, I can't really be unhappy considering it'll be counteracted by the fact that I will be going to one of the best university in the world for the next semester.

What Comes Next

Who's the Other Awardees?

One of the first thing that an awardee is supposed to do after being accepted is to find other awardees who are going to the same host university, and that was exactly what I did after pacing my dorm's rooftop for an hour or two. After some digging in Instagram, I found Michelle, a psych student from UI with the same batch as me. Further digging didn't yield any other awardees who are also going to UofT. I believe that someone said in IISMAfess around this time that UofT and Cornell awardees was elusive since they're really hard to find. I definitely felt this too back then.

The next day I was messaged by an acquaintance from UGM that one of her friends is also a UofT awardee. After she shared her friend's contact, I got to know Azza, a psych student from UGM. Azza then told me and Michelle that one of her friends, a fellow psych student from UGM, is also an awardee to UofT. The friend turned out to be Vanya.

So at this point, there are four awardees to UofT including me, but of course I didn't think that there were only the four of us. UofT is one of the few host universities in the IISMA program with more than one campus (Mississauga and Scarborough) that awardees can choose to enrol in. Considering that, from the registration process up until then, I thought there would be maybe 10-20 awardees. And so I kept searching. Through some more digging on Twitter, I found a Whatsapp group filled with IISMA applicants who wanted to go to UofT. I believe there were around 50 people in that group. I sent a message to the group, telling them to please contact me if any of them got accepted to UofT. But I got nothing.

Early on when me, Michelle, Azza, and Vanya just joined the UofT awardees group that I made, we joked that it'd be really scary if we were the only awardees to UofT. Later that afternoon, we found out that that is the reality of the situation when we received an email from IISMA that (among other things) confirmed our status as awardees to UofT, because the email only had the four of us in its recipient list. On one hand, that was obviously very flattering, the fact that we are among the four best applicants out of the hundreds that applied for UofT. On the other hand, going to the other side of the globe with only three other people is crazy.

Being the First

University of Toronto had only been part of the IISMA program this year, which means that the four of us is the first batch of IISMA awardees that is going to go there. This comes with a few neat perks. For example, we will have the ability to make an Instagram account and the logo for IISMA to UofT for ourselves instead of inheriting an existing one. Which means we have near complete freedom to brand ourselves as we see fit, which is pretty cool.

More importantly, we don't have any past awardees to ask around about the campus and how it was like to go there. Coupled with the fact that there are only the four of us made our preparation to go to UofT both harder and scarier. This also has other implications down the line which should be visible in the later entries of this journal.

Organogram of Four

Usually if you look at the awardees reveal posts of any IISMA to blank IG accounts, you'll see that each awardee has a specific title. There are two roles that are mandated by IISMA to exist, such as SR (student representative) and co-SR, which are the leader and vice leader of the group. And then there's usually other roles that the IISMA to <insert university here> batch has decided to define within their batch, such as social media specialist, secretary, creatives, etc.. And so, one of the first thing that the four of us had to do collectively is to do that, to define the role that each of us has within our group.

Now, you might think that it'd be weird for us to define each of our roles and responsibilities, considering that in such a small group, there practically won't be that big of differentiation in roles and responsibilities. You are right and I completely agree with that. But I suppose we still had to do it just so that for any one of our affairs, there's one person that can reliably be asked and inquired about it.

After some consideration we ended up with the following division of labor:

• SR: Fatih

• Co-SR: Azza

• Event: Michelle

• Creative: Vanya

I probably would have thought twice about becoming an SR had there been more than four of us, but managing four people (including me) is probably hopefully not going to be too hard so I was pretty down to be an SR.