Commencement Speech of UP President Alfredo E. Pascual for the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (University of the City of Manila) 47th Commencement Exercises on 13 April 2015, at the Philippine International Convention Center Plenary Hall, Manila
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UP President Alfredo E. Pascual
Isang mapagpala’t mapagpalayang umaga sa inyong lahat
Congratulations to the 2015 Graduating Class of the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (PLM)!
Sincerest thanks to PLM for the opportunity given me to address the University’s graduates this year!
And of course, grateful appreciation to PLM for conferring on me the title of Doctor of Sciences, honoris causa. With this honorary degree being awarded to me as part of this commencement exercises, I consider myself a virtual member of the PLM Class of 2015.
Dear graduates, today is your last day as students of the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila. After this morning’s commencement exercises, you will no longer be PLM students. You will be PLM graduates who are expected to soon venture into the world outside the academe, compete in your chosen fields, and, hopefully make a mark for yourselves.
But how do you succeed in the outside world? Well, let’s look at a couple of successful people and see how they did it.
There’s Henry Sy, Sr., the founder of the SM Group of Companies and currently the richest Filipino according to Forbes’ 2015 list of the richest people. He has a net worth of 14 billion US dollars and his companies are major employers in the country. How did he become so successful? Where did he study? He enrolled at the Far Eastern University in the early 1950s but had to drop out after only two years. He decided to attend full-time to his growing buy-and-sell business, the forerunner of a shoe-retailing store that would, in turn, give birth to the SM business empire.
Then there’s also William Henry “Bill” Gates III, who, from 1995 to 2014, was widely recognized as the richest man on earth. In its 2015 list of the richest people, Forbes puts Bill Gates’ net worth at 78 billion US dollars. He enrolled at Harvard in 1973 but, like Henry Sy, he also dropped out of college after two years. The reason? So he could work full-time on putting up an ambitious little IT start-up called Microsoft – a company that has created much value and has changed our world.
So what can we learn from these two personalities. For one, both have the name “Henry”; so “Henry” must be a lucky name! Well… But more interestingly, both did not finish college. Thus, it would seem that you don’t need a college degree to succeed in life. Does this mean you wasted the last four years of your life studying at PLM? Certainly not! What the two stories tell us is that a college degree – the diploma you’ll receive from PLM – won’t guarantee your success in the real world.
When talking of success, though, you must keep in mind that it is not just about making money, but more about creating value that benefits society.
What will it take to succeed in the job or work you’ll do after graduation? Let me give you four tips – four pieces of advice.
To succeed you will need to do a lot of things, but, above all, you’ll need to work hard. That’s my Tip No. 1. Here’s what Henry Sy says about success: “Success is not just good luck. It is a combination of good credit standing, opportunity, readiness, timing and a lot of hard work.”
On his part, Bill Gates once compared himself to Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple and another IT icon who, by the way, was also a college dropout. Here’s what he said: “Steve and I were very different. But we were both hyper-energetic and worked super hard.”
Work hard. Or, as Bill Gates puts it, work super hard. That’s what you should do. Luck favors those who have worked hard getting ready for opportunities. But how do you do that? Working hard is easy in the beginning, when the task you’re working on is still new to you and you’re still excited about discovering how things work. But after a while, the job becomes routine and, sometimes, even boring. So how do you maintain a high level of energy? How do you keep yourself excited and interested?
Here’s how. And this is my Tip No. 2 for you: Find the work you love.
After your graduation, your work – the job you’ll take, the career you’ll pursue – will fill up a large part of your life. In fact, for you who studied hard over the last four years so you could land a good job after graduation – so you could give yourselves and your family a more comfortable life – your work will be pretty much your life. So make sure that you find the work you love.
But, unfortunately, finding work that you love, work that will keep you constantly interested, work that will inspire you to work hard every day, isn’t easy. So what can you do? My advice: learn to love the work you do. I’m sure you’ve heard this before: If you love your work, it stops being work. This is true from my own experience. You know, running a university like UP is a very demanding job. But I love the job, so for me it is not work.
In today’s tight job market, finding work that will just give you a decent income is hard, even for a college graduate. Unless, of course, you have a really outstanding school record or you topped a licensure exam like what one of your College of Nursing alumni did recently. He was immediately given a job at the Ospital ng Maynila by no less than Mayor Joseph Estrada, who, I understand, also offered to give him a scholarship should he decide to go to medical school after working a few years as a nurse.
But you don’t need to be a licensure exam topnotcher or have a glowing transcript of records in order to succeed. Entering the job market may be tough but if you persevere, do your best and work super hard, and love what you are doing, you’ll be recognized and opportunities will begin opening up for you.
And this brings me to my next point. In a world driven by rapidly evolving knowledge and technology, you cannot anymore expect to have a career for life, but most likely, you will have a life of changing careers. Years from now, most of you will be holding down jobs that have nothing to do with your academic degree. Again, does this mean you wasted the last four years studying at PLM? And again the answer is no. That’s just how life is. You never know what opportunities await you.
Take my case. I finished BS in Chemistry, but I never had a job directly related to Chemistry in my life, except for one semester and one summer term I spent right after college teaching Chemistry in UP.
So how do you cope with our fast changing world. That’s my Tip No. 3: Keep on learning, never stop learning. Don’t be satisfied with the knowledge and skills you now have. Be interested in the things around you, especially with the exciting things technology is bringing about. Read. Surf the net. Expand your horizons. Don’t be afraid to venture into new areas. The bright future you’ve been dreaming of might just be waiting for you there.
Keep on learning. Make every experience a learning experience. Learn from your mistakes. After all, very often, you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes.
Remember Thomas Alva Edison, the great American inventor? According to the story, when he was trying to invent the first practical electric bulb, he conducted 10,000 experiments, all of which ended in failure. When a visitor to his lab offered sympathy for the failed experiments, Edison reportedly said: “I didn’t fail. I just discovered 10,000 ways that won’t work. After I’ve eliminated the ways that won’t work, I’ll find the one way that will.” And he sure did and, thus, became the inventor of the incandescent lamp.
What really is college education? To me, it’s not so much about what you learned in college; it’s more about how you learned it.
Your President, Dr. Lenny de Jesus, told me that PLM students, much like UP students, are very active, highly competitive, and driven individuals. Most of you were probably already like that when you came to PLM. But your stay at PLM made you even better. PLM taught you diligence, discipline and focus. It taught you how to be effective students; it gave you the tools for learning. So if you need to know something, you know where to get the information, how to get it, and, most important of all, how to use it. PLM also developed in you the so-called soft skills you need in whatever work you do – the skills of communication, critical thinking, and leadership.
Now my final point, my fourth and last tip: Pay it forward, serve and transform society.
PLM and UP share a common heritage, a common public service focus that mandates our two institutions to empower the marginalized through quality education. In PLM’s case, this is explicitly spelled out in your Charter: to provide high quality education to underprivileged yet talented high school graduates of the City of Manila.
You graduates are the beneficiaries of this vision. Although most of you come from economically disadvantaged families, you were given the privilege to study in a university that, over the last 50 years, has established a reputation for academic excellence.
But this privilege given to you has a concomitant responsibility. If UP students are mga Iskolar ng Bayan, you, PLM students, are definitely mga Iskolar ng Lungsod. As such, you have a responsibility to the City of Manila to be good citizens, not only of the city but of the country as a whole. It is your duty to be productive and upright citizens who care about the community, who lead socially-relevant lives, and who work for the common good. After all, the best way to express gratitude for the opportunities given us – for the blessings we have received – is to be a blessing to others.
Serve and transform society. This is how you pay it forward. Doing so may not exactly guarantee you big earnings, but you will be a success. You will be rewarded with a life fulfilled after college.
Let me end by summarizing my four tips that I hope will guide your life’s journey after college:
1. Work hard, if not super hard, in whatever you do;
2. Find the work you love, or love the work you do;
3. Keep on learning, learn from your mistakes, make learning a lifelong endeavor; and
4. Pay it forward: serve and transform society.
Again, congratulations to all you graduates. And congratulations, too, to your families.
Mabuhay ang Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila!
Maraming salamat po.
![UP President Alfredo E. Pascual speaking to the graduating class, faculty, administrators and guests at the Pamantasang Lungsod ng Maynila Commencement Ceremony.]()
UP President Alfredo E. Pascual speaking to the graduating class, faculty, administrators and guests at the Pamantasang Lungsod ng Maynila Commencement Ceremony.
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