By Silma Suba
During her childhood, while most of her five-year-old classmates were learning to connect the dotted lines in their coloring books, Carisa Antariksa had already picked up her pencils to sketch.
Soon art became not only Antariksa’s favorite hobby, but also her identity. In fact, she was called “the class artist” for all her school years in Indonesia and later in Qatar. Now she’s pursuing a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar (VCUQ)—and will graduate in May.
“Art gives you a lot of freedom, you don’t work to please others, you do what you love and then people provide you with feedback,” said Antariksa. “But when I get my degree, I want to do something for the community with it. I want to create designs that will be useful to people.”
Antariksa laughs loudly as she recounts the first day she walked into VCU-Q for her orientation.
“I remember it perfectly actually, we were walking in a line and there were two people next to me, the first students that I met from my class – Sara and Barbara. We’ve been close friends ever since.”
In about three weeks, Antariksa will be graduating with her other VCUQ classmates and students of Education City. When asked about her future plans, she hides her face and laughs, shaking her head vigorously.
“I honestly don’t know what my plans are. I do want to apply to graduate school and hopefully get a scholarship, but for now I just want to buy some gaming consoles and have some ‘me’ time.”
According to Antariksa, looking back at the last four years of her education, the most impactful moment of her college life came in her junior year, when she had to collaborate and design an interactive project targeted for the community.
“We came up with this idea of ‘Kilma of the Day,’ which basically means ‘Word of the Day,” where we would design posters with a common Arabic word and put them up everywhere,” explained Antariksa. “Soon I heard many of my classmates using these words, and I realized then that design doesn’t just create pretty things but can be used as a tool to help the people around us.”
“I’m so grateful for everything I’ve experienced in Qatar Foundation, especially the people in my college who accepted me for all my weirdness,” she said, pulling a funny face. “We live in such a unique environment—it’s not something you will find out there in the real world–especially the strong bond that I have with my classmates who always look out for others before finishing their own work. I’m going to miss this life a lot.”