Public Relations & Protocol Staff, Universitas Muhammadiyah Banjarmasin

In April 2018, a university-wide reorganization moved me from student recruitment and promotion into Public Relations & Protocol (Humas & Protokoler) at Universitas Muhammadiyah Banjarmasin . I was made permanent staff that June, and held the role until January 2025, when I left for my Master’s in Paris on the university’s study-leave arrangement; the underlying employment there is still ongoing.

The Core of the Job

Day to day, the role split into two halves: managing the university’s institutional social media platforms and content strategy for brand visibility and engagement, and developing and executing protocol for the leadership board, the Rector, Vice-Rectors, and deans, at official events and initiatives.

A Generalist by Committee

What the job actually looked like, in practice, shows up better in the range of committees I was appointed to over the years than in any single job description. A partial list:

• Crisis communications: the university’s Muhammadiyah COVID-19 Command Center in 2020, on its PR & Publications team, alongside coordinating remote work, distance-learning transitions, and livestream events to keep the university running through the pandemic.
• Ceremony and protocol: graduation ceremonies across Master’s, Bachelor’s, and Diploma cohorts, official installations of deans and department heads, and new-student orientation.
• Academic affairs: a curriculum item-review and socialization workshop for the nursing program, run with AIPNI (Indonesia’s national nursing education accreditation body), and the university’s community service program (KKN), including its online documentation stream during the pandemic.
• Student affairs: organizing the university’s internal selection for NUDC and KDMI, Indonesia’s national university debate championships, a full-circle detail given where I found my footing before any of this .
• Institutional growth: admissions and scholarship-pathway promotion committees, and public lectures and workshops across departments.

None of it was planned as a portfolio. It was closer to picking up whatever the university’s calendar needed that term: recruitment, then pandemic response, then curriculum or ceremony work. In hindsight, that range, campaigns and crisis response and ceremony logistics and institutional communication, all inside one job, is not a bad shape for someone who went on to study management and digital marketing formally afterward.

None of the software behind that content and livestream work, the Adobe suite, OBS Studio, and the rest, was something I studied for beforehand. I taught myself as the job demanded it, along with most of what’s on this list .