Angela Tanudjaja, marketing and advertising senior, is taking initiative to gain experience in her field of study.

Tanudjaja recently completed internships at the Actor’s Theatre in Louisville and Ideology, an advertising firm in New Albany.

“It’s very humbling,” she said about gaining the experience.

During her internship at Actor’s Theatre, she worked in the marketing department.

Actor’s Theatre has one of the largest intern programs in the nation. While the internship was not paid, she was given free tickets to all the shows that performed there.

Tanudjaja said when beginning an internship interns are at the bottom of the company, and most interns are very arrogant because they think they know everything.

In her recent internship at Ideology, she was in charge of the copy writing and wrote the words in the advertisements the company produced.

She also helped out with some of the photography for the company, which she said is a hobby of hers.

Tanudjaja was born in Indonesia in 1989 and lived there until she was 9 years old.

She and her family moved to China in part because of the financial crisis the country was experiencing in 1998.

That same year, riots broke out in three different Indonesian cities, including her city and the capital, Jakarata.

“The riots were horrible,” she said.

She said they burned cars and buildings for three days.

When Tanudjaja went to China, she was enrolled in a very bad school.

She said she caught lice from it, and they were allowed to hit the students with sticks. However, she wasn’t there for long.

When Tanudjaja was 10 years old, she transferred to a private Chinese International School Manila, where she met missionary children from Arkansas.

CISM school is where Tanudjaja learned to speak English. She said it was not too difficult since she would hang out with a lot of American children at school.

She also learned through the Internet, by watching movies and being a member of the social networking websites MySpace and Friendster.

“I didn’t have Chinese friends because of that,” Tanudjaja said.

When she finished her schooling at CISM she attended Xaimen University in Xaimen, Fujian, for two years and then transferred to a community college in Singapore.

She came to the U.S. in 2009 and was initially going to attend IU Bloomington, but IU Southeast was cheaper, and she had friends in Louisville.

When she came to the U.S., Tanudjaja said she wasn’t used to having to drive so much.

When she first went to the Department of Motor Vehicles, she failed the written and driving tests.

One big culture shock for her was the amount of food Americans consume.

“I have to watch what I eat,” she said. “I wasn’t used to that.”

She said she was also surprised by the amount of obesity in the country.

Tanudjaja is the vice-president of the Young Americans for Liberty chapter at IU Southeast. YAL is a student-political organization.

“[Our job is to] inform students about what’s going on and make them care,” Tanudjaja said.

Tanudjaja went to Washington D.C. during the summer of 2010 for a week-long campaign training.

Tanudjaja said she plans to graduate in December 2012 and wants to pursue a career in political campaigning.

“I see it as [the] ultimate way to advertise,” she said.

By JOSH WILSON

Staff

wilsjosh@ius.edu