God creates a lot of things. The examples of those things are living creatures such as human, animal and plant. In this case, human as one of living things who gets privilege to have complex brains rather than other living creatures. Those brains support us to think about something. In those thinking processes, we do some activities. We start looking or hearing about an issue, then think about it, after that we use our prior knowledge to create any assumptions, and finally we make some perceptions or point of views of it.
Studying in SSE contributed a lot of things to my life. One of those things is point of view changes. I was born here in Jakarta. I had finished my school experiences till senior high school. Now I am also studying to be an educator here, in Jakarta which is capital city of Indonesia. Perhaps, I ever met some students from other region in my elementary, junior or senior high school. On my previous life, I prejudged my school friends (especially in senior high school) from other region of Indonesia. I always think that they are old fashioned etc. Ironically, I also did stereotyping. However with being jakartanese makes me feel that I am better than them, they are bad etc. It still happened till my first month in SSE.
SSE Students are truly colorful. All of them have strong characters. At that time, I did stereotyping for some students like Medan student, Javanese students or Sundanese students. I thought that they have strange accent, that’s why their unique accent influence their English pronunciation (so that I thought their English is quite bad). My perspectives were changed step by step on my second month, when I asked some friends from Sundanese, what did they expect for living here? How about the people? They answered that at first time, it was hard to live here, and they assumed that people here are not welcomed. However finally they found that it was not true at all. Many Jakarta students are helpful and kind, they also could survive to live here.
Overall, from my personal experiences above, I concluded that every single human tends to do those kinds of things in their life (prejudice or stereotyping). Nobody is perfect. We may make a mistake, but let’s forget that mistake and take the life learning. For instance, when we see handphone, we can see from different angle, such as face, behind, left or right side. The most important thing is no matter our assumption about something, first try to know it deeply, and do not judge without observation or consideration (also facts).
