BRIN Said Yes While My PhD Struggle Continued

by Rahayu

Starting a PhD really humbled me in ways no academic warning ever could. One minute I thought, “Ayu, you got this,” and the next minute I was reading the same paragraph five times like it was written in ancient civilization code. Apparently, becoming a Year 1 PhD student at Faculty of Education, Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia means developing three personalities at once: a researcher, a professional overthinker, and a full-time deadline survivor.

There were days when my laptop witnessed more emotional breakdowns than my actual productivity. The readings kept multiplying, the theories kept getting more complicated, and somehow everyone in academia casually uses words like epistemology as if that alone does not increase my blood pressure. PhD life truly feels like intellectual suffering with a tuition fee (thanks God I am funded by LPDP Scholarship).

But somewhere between the chaos, sleep deprivation, and dramatic internal monologues of “why did I choose this path,” one of my works was accepted into the 2026 BRIN Local Knowledge Acquisition Program. Honestly, the timing felt almost disrespectful because I was literally in survival mode when the news came in. BRIN said yes while my brain was still in ‘PhD fatigue’ era.

And maybe that is the funny part about this education journey. Sometimes growth does not look inspirational and cinematic. Sometimes it looks like crying over assignments at 2 AM, surviving on caffeine, doubting your entire existence, and still submitting the work anyway. At one point, the exhaustion got so real that i feel the urge to disappear from academia entirely and open a tiny aesthetic coffee shop in some urban neighborhood where my biggest problem would be whether the espresso are single origin. Academia really teaches you that confidence is optional, but deadlines are not.

This experience reminded me that progress can happen even when life feels messy. Apparently, suffering academically does not automatically cancel the achievement. Sometimes you are still moving forward even while internally buffering.

So yes, my PhD survival mode continues. The stress is real, the readings are really challenging, and the imposter syndrome still visits uninvited (many times). But for today, at least, I celebrate the small slay: surviving Year 1 and making it to BRIN at the same time.