Corporate Affairs & Information Technology Manager
Yogyakarta, Indonesia – Feb 2020 to Jun 2022

Two roles at Balairung UGM, student press

Balairung UGM is UGM’s student press, a student publication running since 1985. By student-organization standards, that makes it practically an institution. I joined at the start of 2020 and stayed two and a half years across two roles at once.

The work kept overlapping. You cannot really separate who Balairung partners with from what its website and digital products look like when you are doing both jobs.

Corporate affairs at Balairung UGM

On the Corporate Affairs side, most of my time went into negotiating and maintaining agreements with other student journalism organizations across Indonesia, plus local SMEs around Yogyakarta.

That meant unglamorous relationship management: following up on partnership renewals, keeping branding consistent across different partner touchpoints, and making sure our social media strategy actually lined up with what the digital product side was building.

Building Balairungstore as IT Manager

The IT Manager side is where I got to build things. I maintained and patched the billing and technical infrastructure behind bppmbalairung.com. However, the project I am most proud of from this period is Balairungstore, a direct-to-consumer platform we launched so Balairung could sell its own publications and merchandise directly.

Wiring up Google Ads on top of that helped us reach 100,000+ monthly readers on the journal side. That is a meaningful number for a student publication competing with every other source of information a university student scrolls past in a day.

I also helped manage jurnal.ugm.ac.id/balairung and was part of the team behind five separate journal and magazine releases during my time there.

Why two and a half years mattered

Two and a half years is a long tenure for a student organization role. Looking back, that is exactly why it mattered at Balairung UGM. It was long enough to actually see whether a partnership strategy or a product decision held up over multiple release cycles, not just one. That same instinct for staying with a problem long enough to see it through carried into later work.