Aisyah sat on the worn wooden bench at Universiti Sains Malaysia’s Engineering Campus, watching the afternoon rain slide down the window panes. She was in her second year of Mechanical Engineering, and lately, the weight of endless assignments, group projects, and lab work had started to feel suffocating.
Her friends seemed to be moving ahead—internships with big companies, research projects, even overseas exchange programs. Meanwhile, she felt like she was running on a treadmill, always moving but going nowhere.
It was during one of her evening study breaks that she stumbled across the story of the Chinese bamboo. For five years, nothing grows above the soil. But beneath the surface, strong roots are forming. Then, in just weeks, the bamboo shoots up to 90 feet.
“Maybe that’s me,” she thought. Maybe I’m still in the rooting phase.
So, she kept going. Day after day, lecture after lecture, she laid her own “roots” — mastering thermodynamics, learning the rhythm of machining, and developing a quiet resilience that only sleepless nights and failed experiments could teach.
Four years later, with her degree in hand, Aisyah faced her next challenge: she joined as a cadet engineer in a palm oil mill deep in Sabah.
The first months were brutal. The air was thick with the smell of fresh fruit bunches, the boilers roared like restless beasts, and the machinery demanded constant attention. Some days, the pressure made her doubt herself again.
But then, something shifted.
She began solving problems faster, giving confident instructions to operators, and anticipating breakdowns before they happened. Her supervisors noticed.
One evening, standing at the edge of the mill, watching the sunset paint the sky over the palm plantations, she realised — this was her bamboo moment.
The years of invisible effort, the quiet struggles in university, the endless nights of study… they had all been roots. And now, she was growing tall, fast, and strong.
She smiled. The rooting phase was over. It was time to rise.
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