Written by Novia Lestari
On an early fall morning 2021, Nizar Septian woke up in his apartment in Tallahassee. He looked at the clock showing 6 a.m. and went straight to the living room finding his roommate, an international student from Egypt, panicking. A bullet just went through the wall behind his bed. It created a hole, right above his head. Nizar had no clue what was happening, and how it happened. He was in a deep sleep, not hearing anything. They reported the incident to their apartment management, but received no information, let alone an explanation of who shot the bullet. There was no suspect, no source, no answers as if a bullet had passed through their home without announcing itself. Since that one morning, Nizar has always stayed on his guard, whether heading out on the weekend to downtown or simply walking home after a long day on campus. But even at campus, he would later realize, it is not always a safe place.
Nizar arrived in Tallahassee in 2020 amid the chaos of the global pandemic to pursue his doctoral studies in physics at Florida State University. Over five years living as a student in Tallahassee, his life has had a series of ups and downs, but he kept going. Nizar is a prolific researcher, juggling multiple projects since the beginning of his Ph.D. After years of persistence, he is nearing the finish line, and he will wrap it up with a study that can potentially be a breakthrough in physics. Nizar’s path to Florida State University did not immediately start in the United States. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, borders and campuses were shut down. Nizar couldn’t get the student visa he needed to fly to the U.S. at that time, forcing him to begin his studies online from Indonesia. Nizar was still working as a physics lecturer at Universitas Islam Negeri Jakarta. “It was not a good decision, managing my time was quite difficult. There was a lot of homework,” Nizar recalled. The 12-hour time difference didn’t help. It just added more problems on top of balancing his work as professor and as a student.
In December 2020, he finally obtained his student visa, and thankfully, there was no travel ban. He arrived at Tallahassee airport in the cold winter weather. Stepping out of the airport, he didn’t see much going on. The town was almost empty because of the lockdown order. “It looked like a ghost town,” he joked. But Nizar genuinely likes Tallahassee for its green landscape and fresh air. Compared to the city he used to work in, Tallahassee is quite small and not too crowded. “In Jakarta, pollution and traffic jams are normalized, but here, traffic jams rarely happen,” he explained. These days, Nizar’s life is organized and balanced. His mornings typically start with reading the news, then he heads to campus, creates a daily to-do list, attends meetings, presents research, and works on his projects. He hits the gym in the evening at around 7 p.m. after having dinner. This structured day didn’t come instantly. The first year of living in Tallahassee, he consumed mostly fast-food — fried chicken buckets and sandwiches were his go-to meals almost every day. He used to work long hours — 10 to 12 hours a day. He gave himself little time for rest. This unhealthy lifestyle gradually took a toll on him. In the third year, he was diagnosed as pre-diabetic.
It was a wakeup call for him to rethink not only his diet and fitness but also how he balanced the demands of work and personal well-being. He realized, “life is not only about working.” In the beginning of his Ph.D. journey, the pandemic forced Nizar’s life to be confined to a computer screen — mostly online classes and research meetings. Nizar didn’t mind the isolation as he loved being on his computer. He eventually met his classmates and research team early on. He also started to make friends with the local students. But loneliness began to cloud his mind during winter break, when most of his friends had returned home for Christmas.
“At some point, I felt like I didn't really have anyone here,” Nizar said.
He was determined to expand his network; he began attending campus and social events — from international coffee hours hosted by the Center for Global Engagement to student communities like InterVarsity — where he became friends with the members. Nizar learned to build a support system himself. Florida State University does not have an official Indonesian student association, and fewer than ten Indonesian students are currently studying on campus. He found a community outside — through the small Indonesian diaspora in Tallahassee, he found a sense of home. He meets them occasionally for dinners or tennis games. That sense of stability he built in the past five years was tested again when the fear of the 2023 shooting incident came back two years later — a shooting incident occurred again, and this time was at the student union in FSU. Although Nizar was not in Tallahassee at the time because he was in Virginia for almost a year conducting collaborative research, the news still left him feeling unsettled. He becomes even more cautious and alert wherever he goes. “If we’re unlucky, we could be the victim,” he said.
After half a decade going through the journey as a doctoral student and a researcher, Nizar has completed multiple research projects. But the pinnacle of his academic journey is being a part of the GlueX research collaboration. The project has helped him grow not only as an independent scientist but also as a collaborator who works alongside scientists from different cultural backgrounds. The research focuses on finding exotic particle which made of quark-antiquark and excited gluonic field. Nizar was a part of a team that first develop the methods in the project. As he prepares to close this chapter, Nizar remains grounded in the uncertainty that defines scientific discovery.
“Trying to discover something in physics is sometimes based on luck,” he said. “Because we don’t tell nature — but we find something in nature.”
Nizar can be reached out on LinkedIn