UNAIR NEWS – Three students in Reasoning Club Universitas Airlangga succeeded in winning the first place in National Maritime Scientific Writing Competition 2016 held by the Student Affairs Division and Alumni of Universitas Hasanuddin on Saturday, December 10. The topic of the competition was on marine, coastal and maritime studies.

The three students were Ditta Putri Kumalasari (Faculty of Science and Technology (FST) 2013), Maliya Izzatin (FST/2013) and Ahmad Farid Ary (Faculty of Fisheries and Marine (FPK)/2012).

In the competition, their article was titled “Semirefined Carrageenan as Effort of Coastal Community Empowerment in Tarakan, North Kalimantan”. The idea was inspired by one of their friends who has studied simple seaweed cultivation in coastal area.

“The information encouraged us to study about it deeper. Maritime current challenges in Indonesia are poverty and low quality of coastal human resources,” said Ditta.

“After we studied the references, we noticed that the price of carrageenan in the market was higher than the common seaweed. From the idea of this semirefined carrageenan at home industry scale can improve the coastal community economy to support Indonesia as the Axis of Global Maritime,” added Ditta.

The competition was followed by teams from Universitas Gadjah Mada, Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, Institut Pertanian Bogor, Universitas Sumatera Utara, and Universitas Jambi.

A lot of competitions did not make them feel discouraged to present their best performance. “We did not think to be the best, but we just did our best,” said Ditta when she was asked about her motivation for the competition.

In the coastal field competition, the second place was achieved by Unhas team, the third place was Universitas Sriwijaya team and the favorite team was Institut Pertanian Bogor. (*)

Author: Disih Sugianti
Editor: Defrina Sukma S