Aim High
Coffee Scented Keyboard, 2nd Sip
The New Builder, Mapua Institute of Technology
April - May Issue
It is the fourth and final quarter of SY 2006-2007. And besides literally being one of the hottest terms I’ve ever had to endure, it is also the final quarter for batch 2003, at least on paper it is. Kudos to my batchmates who are about to take that fated march. Lord knows you’ve have earned it. Just don’t rest on your laurels too much. Let me put it this way: if college was a mountain you had to climb, there’d be another one standing on top of it. It’s called
In reality, only a fortunate few will actually graduate on time. The rest have either stopped, changed colleges, or are just plain delayed. Delayed – now that’s a word worth looking deeper into. Although varying in degree, it is almost always negative in connotation. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about flights, monthly periods, or payments, we’d be better off without them. Simply put, delays are merely situations where things don’t go on schedule. But we all know that the things that happen when you get delayed are anything but simple. You can lose money, time, opportunities, or even decent futures when the wrong thing gets delayed.
When you’re a college student struggling for that diploma, being delayed is one of the hardest and most humiliating things to have to deal with. Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, your parents are working themselves dry just to cough up enough money to keep you enrolled. But in Mapua, being delayed is not such a bad thing, and despite the fact that that acceptance really lightens the blow of a ‘5’, I’m really concerned about the fact that failing some subjects and falling farther and farther away from your graduation is an accepted norm among Mapuan students.
I asked around and the most prevalent answer I got is that’s the way it has been for decades. It’s not actually the failing and getting delayed part that Mapuans have accepted. It’s the knowledge that no matter how long it took for you the graduate, as long as you graduated from Mapua, you’d have something to be proud of and, more importantly, a great job waiting for you. The rigors of Mapuan life today, according to my sources, is a cakewalk compared to what our predecessors had to go through. You can only be proud of a ‘3’ if that was the best possible grade you could have gotten. Don’t flaunt yours when your classmates are getting 1’s and 2’s. The Mapuan of the past would laugh in your face – he is not your equal.
My challenge to my fellow students is this: don’t hide behind the excuse that Mapuan spirit is dead. It lives in you, in all of us. No matter who owns the school, it is its students, its graduates who will be judged. Don’t just keep blaming the admin if our board exams passing percentages are lower. Everybody knows that the reason we dominated the boards in the past was that it was so damn hard to graduate that only those who were really gifted or really worked hard got their shot at the licensures. You keep clamoring for better education, but do you know that the price for a higher standard of learning is a higher standard of passing? I was vague in my previous column about prices and paying. Well here it is in plain writing: the only way we are ever going to be better than any other engineering school is if we worked harder than any of them. Admit it, as long as we REALLY study and not play DoTA, watch Big Brother, or think of our GF’s/BF’s all the damn time, most of our exams are quite easy. There. I said it. React if you want but it’s the truth. Our college life is a cakewalk, provided of course that you don’t treat it as one. I’ve had my fair share of failures and they really did hurt because I know I could have passed if only I worked harder.
And yet all the coaxing and inspiration in the world will at best only keep us working for a short time before we go back to our bad habits. That’s where our teachers come in. But of course, you can’t just set standards and fail everyone who doesn’t measure up, you’ll end up failing the whole class. Though there is this professor who did that with my Advanced Math once. He failed me and my unfortunate batch about three times, but under all the cursing and hate, I respected him, because he tried to send a message the only way he knew how, without fear or concern for appearances. That subject was a taste of what a REAL Mapuan had to go through and I realized that I, myself, couldn’t hack it. But 2 or 3 people did in each succeeding term, and that made me realize that he wasn’t a terror for the sake of giving students a reason to commit murder or suicide, but for the sake of fairness. He didn’t coddle us or change his standards from what we were truly supposed to learn into what would make most of us pass. And for that I respect him. I hate him still, but I respect him.
Now imagine a school where all the subjects were like that. That is what Mapua was and that’s what made it great. But we don’t have to go back to that to achieve excellence. So we have it easier now, big deal. The Mapuan of the past is just jealous that we don’t have to work as hard to pass. But then again, we still have to work hard for excellence. And that’s where we’ve gone wrong all these years. The Mapuan of the past’s passing grade WAS the level of excellence, so he was forced to reach it. Times have changed, merely passing doesn’t cut it any more. And those of us thinking that way are doomed to mediocrity.
If the Mapuan spirit does die, it will die of neglect.
