“UP made you in such a way that when the world is sitting, you would be standing; when the world is standing, you would stand out; and when the world stands out, you would be outstanding; and when the world tries to be outstanding, you would be the standard.”
I don’t know from whom this quotation came from but it’s one of those circulating around UP campuses to boost our collective pride and ego. For sure, it would also be one of those drilled into the heads of freshmen during their honeymoon semesters, sort of brain washing them that only it would be UP and the rest would be chopped liver.
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The UP micro-culture teaches independence and national pride, I guess, in every campus you go. I attended the Diliman campus slightly more than a decade ago and it’s the same mantra droned over and over again, back then, and now. Back then of course, wearing flip-flops to class would be an insult to then trendy fashion sensibilities. I dread the day when we can wear flip-flops to job interviews.
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No one really does anything for you at the UP. You do everything by your own. You make things happen by your creative devices. Learning is “learning centered”, without any homage to mentor nor pupil. In fact the system is so absent of any reference to it’s educators it forgot to compensate them properly. Let us reserve this angstsy topic for another blog, shall we?
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Going back, yes – UP students are not spoiled by the system either. I remember my freshman year when class enlistment would require you to stake out at Palma Hall at 3:00AM just for you to secure your slot in a class you would regret taking anyway. Back then, when DLSU and ADMU were already highly automated, we were swimming in this sea of humanity that was the lobby of Palma Hall hoping to land a slot in a class that would otherwise have been just a keyboard stroke away had they discovered the wonderful invention called the computer. I heard the UP kids now have it better.
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But I am not complaining. It is this very atmosphere of toil that we probably were able to produce the Ninoys and Ferdinands that govern us. I almost forgot that Gloria waddled her way out of a doctorate class at the UP too. By infamy or otherwise, there is still this nagging weight that bears on the shoulders of every student that wears the “sablay” to end up in greatness short of the legendary kind.
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I teach in another rival university. Let me be defensive by saying that it is by circumstance that I am not teaching at the UP and not by choice. Let me say one thing too. On a pound-per-pound, brain-cell-per-brain-cell, flip-flop-per-flip-flip comparison, the UP kid wins. And that is not by a slim margin.
