Life-Transforming Experience from Bangkit Incubation Project

“Sometimes, you make the right decision; sometimes, you make the decision right.”

Phil McGraw

Rendy Mahaputra (23) is a Mechatronics student from Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta (UNY) waiting for his graduation ceremony. Coming from Bekasi, Rendy is the eldest of two siblings. He wants to dig his potential as much as possible now that he doesn't have to go after his father's career in a private sector company.

Failure is Not the End

Rendy once tried to register for Bangkit in 2021 but was unsuccessful. No wonder he is eager to try his luck on the next opportunity, as he firmly believes failure is simply a test of willpower. Learning from his failure, he practiced more in answering trigonometry, integral, and derivative questions before heading to his university. He did this almost every day from 03.00 until 04.00 AM for a few weeks. The result?

“I feel grateful to have passed Bangkit 2022 selection after many practices on numerical questions.”

Bangkit is a Brilliant Career Path

In Rendy's opinion, Bangkit is a brilliant career path since its founding partners are reputable companies in Indonesia and beyond. In addition, the experience obtained will be helpful to boost your CV amidst tough work competition. From this program, he also learned the two most essential elements to kick off a tech career: skills and supportive connections.

Even though Rendy was keen to join Bangkit, the fact that he's a final-year student has cast doubt if he can manage his time well between 900 hours in Bangkit and thesis research workloads. However, he believes that it is a risk he has to take to gain more opportunities outside the college. Rendy thought that it was worth the struggle even though he was a semester late in graduating from university because of Bangkit.

While running the product-based Capstone project, Rendy met other university fellows named Leo, Rafif, Adel, Gita, and Yasmin from Politeknik Negeri Jakarta (PNJ), Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta (UMS), and Universitas Sebelas Maret (UNS). As a team leader and product manager, he provided a meeting to discuss the urgent issue as the principal thing that should be carried out.

“We won an incubation fund from Google and Dikti to run the “Capstone” project, and my team made it into the top 15!”

Glucare, An Application to Detect Diabetics

Glucare is an application that can detect diabetes. You need to scan your eye through the camera to see the result. He said the previous object of reference was skin, but this was impossible.

Life is like connecting one dot to another. After his research, a plan B was accidentally mapped out. As an alternative to diabetes detection through the skin, the team decided to use the eyes instead. However, he found another problem; this body part is not accurate enough to identify whether someone has diabetes, let alone if the condition is considered acute.

Hence, Rendy tries to discover any kind of possibility from the obstacle he is faced with. The results he got were beyond expectations then. Diabetes detection through the eyes can be early functional prevention, considering that this disease is Indonesia's third cause of death. Moreover, it leads to complications among other organs.

Rendy's journey in developing Glucare was in line with his motivation, namely caring for his friend's parents who have diabetes. Until one day, he fainted.

“The extensive goal for Glucare is medical validation which is quite hard to discern. Therefore, prioritizing the user's trust is the other salient consideration to be noticed.”

Unique Glucare Features

Glucare has three focal features, namely GluCheck, GluControl, and GluAssistant. What are the functions?

GluCheck functions to indicate diabetes from eye recognition. Meanwhile, GluControl can connect users with nearby doctors to obtain more treatment. If you want to ask around through the application, employ GluAssistant. The answers from the chatbot, which has 500 thousand health complaints regarding diabetes, are available for you.

“We designed this application to help people with diabetes. We tried to make Glucare easy to use in terms of how-to and visuals.”

Bangkit Prepares Rendy to be Career-Ready

Rendy felt a significant impact after taking part in "Bangkit." He became more aware of his career plans as a data engineer. This training provides the machine learning material he needs and other supporting knowledge, such as communication, marketing, teamwork, people relations, negotiation, and management.

“The soft skills I obtained are priceless for my personal growth.”

If you are interested in the technology sector, Rendy recommends joining Bangkit. However, he also emphasized taking risks for a valuable career prep experience that will only be obtained here. Free your mind from doubts first and muster the courage to try something that seems impossible.

“Do your best in the capstone project. If you and your team take it seriously, the good results will eventually follow.”

More stories about Bangkit alumni & cohort:

1. Andi Abdul Salam Sabil - “Strike your weakest point to turn your dream into a reality”
2. Muhammad Rifqi Al Furqon - “Get yourself ready before contributing to industry”
3. Bagja 9102 Kurniawan - Overlearning to Go Beyond the Limits