Creative Officer & Web Administrator
Yogyakarta, Indonesia – Feb 2020 to Jan 2021

Joining BEM KM UGM right before the pandemic

I joined BEM KM UGM, the university’s student executive body, right at the start of 2020. A few weeks later, the pandemic reshaped what “student organization work” even meant.

Almost overnight, everything that used to happen in a shared office moved online. As a result, a lot of my year ended up being about building the infrastructure to make that shift work, rather than the creative work the title suggests.

Building tools for BEM KM UGM during the pandemic

One project I am still glad exists is the document handling system for Advokasi Jejaring Masyarakat Digital. It is basically a way to keep track of advocacy documentation without it living in scattered chat threads and personal drives.

I also built the cabinet’s first proper website, www.ajarmasbemkmugm.com, from scratch. That sounds small until you remember that most student cabinets before this one had no real web presence at all.

Creative work during a pandemic

The creative side of the role brought its own kind of constraint-driven work. I produced ministerial branding materials that had to stay consistent with Kabinet Rumah Bersama’s master guidelines, while also managing YouTube and livestreams during a year when almost every in-person event moved to a screen instead.

There was no playbook for running a student cabinet’s public presence during a pandemic. Much of it was figuring out what worked by trying it, watching the engagement numbers, and adjusting the next livestream accordingly.

The most I did with the least

Looking back, this was probably the role where I did the most with the least: no dedicated design team, no existing systems to build on, just a small group of people trying to keep a very traditional student institution functioning through a year that broke most of its usual assumptions. That BEM KM UGM year shaped how I approach community work since: build the boring infrastructure first, then worry about the creative part.