Honor and Excellence

I had just finished my bloody losing battle with Chem exams yesterday, and tomorrow I shall face the wrath of Physics.

Oh the seemingly never-ending stream of exams we all dread because we all know we didn't study well or that even if we did, well, we aren't prepared enough for it.

But, well, we do still have dreams that we want to achieve, and we all struggle to keep that in mind as we go about our normal routine of learning and (almost quite immediately) unlearning lessons, of plugging values and plotting graphs, of counting living things under the microscope, that despite the seemingly endless "suffering" we have we hope to see something that can help us make a connection between learning all these things and living life. We all do seem to be so focused on getting that "matamis na tres" that we tend to forget that come employment, lives may be at your own hands and there will be no one to tell you that passing or 'just winging" it is enough.

I do admit that I myself am guilty of this immature "learning and unlearning" process. Learn the night before exams, forget it the next. Hell, I am even guilty of cram studying right now. But somehow I do hope that we all find a silver lining that we can hold on to as we go on this dreaded "hell weeks". Yes, I do admit I am guilty of being easily disheartened on the subject if I could not understand the professor well. And as of the moment, I am trying to recall what it was like to feel interested in a subject while studying. There have been a lot of subjects that I have loved when I first met it but then hated it in the long run as I reached college. However, as a scholar, we have the duty to understand the complexity of everything. We need to have more and more patience in dealing with our "struggles". As my father had put it, "Ilang years of suffering lang yan. If you do well enough, you'll be perfectly fine after".

I salute those professors who manage to pique the interest of their students, even if it's difficult and dubbed as "boring" by many. You guys are amazing to have been able to explain such complex and sometimes quite abstract ideas and explain it in such simpler terms. As a student who has experienced having that inquisitive phase that soon faded away because of terror profs and incomprehensible teachers, I highly appreciate you guys. The world clearly needs more of you.

As students, we must all learn to be patient with what we are studying. Honor and Excellence - these are the values that our university values most. Honor, that in everything we do we are honestly doing our best, and excellence, that in doing our best we may harvest what we sow. Indeed, we are stuDYING, but you can't always enjoy the sunshine without a little rain.

Just my two cents (aka self-PEP talk as I study).

Oh well.