My Name

My Name is Yulistian Pancawijaya and my nickname is Aan or Y Pan. I admit that my name is too long, but it was given by great loving parents to their fifth, beloved child. Because of the sure long name, my family and friends call me Aan, a very short one. However, for English-speaking friends, both Aan and Yulistian Pancawijaya are difficult to pronounce and remember.

When I had a chance to pursue an MBA in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998-2000, I often introduced myself as Y… yes the letter “Y” pronounced WHY. Introduction with this name seemed easier for me among the English-speaking community. What about my last name? Pan sounded best so that if I had to introduce myself, I would say, “My name is Y Pan, Pan as in Peter Pan.” ;-)

Indeed, my idea to use Y Pan as my name was not rendered all at once. It began when after graduating from one of Indonesia’s top universities, with some friends, I learned to work formally and landed in Riau, close to Siak River. The company for which we worked as programmer-analysts is a US-affiliated oil company. Therefore, it was not a surprise that we got emails only after two-three days working. It was great since at that time email in Indonesia is a luxury. They gave me ypancaw@ptblablabla.com as my email address. User ID ypancaw off course was taken from the first letter of my first name and combined with my last name. Perhaps since it was still too long, Mr. Admin had no option but to cut ypancawijaya to ypancaw.

During 1994-1995, I got a lot of good experience, but the one that I want to talk about here is that one of friends often called me YP, Y… P… pronounced in English. There was I identifying a new identity. In short, after a quite long evolution, once I fell comfortable with a short, cool name Y Pan and decided to use it as one of my nicknames. Nonetheless, the name given by a pair of loving parents is still perfect and awesome. I'm always grateful to have such great parents!