Superhero graduates

It’s the season of college graduations and of course, all graduates are heroes of the day, but I thought I’d pay special homage to superhero graduates, the ones whose college experience involved overcoming so many more obstacles than others.

The most common challenge, especially in a country like the Philippines where college education—even in state universities and colleges where tuition is free—is a day-to-day struggle for living expenses, books, and other supplies.

The term “feeding programs” evokes scenes of young children queuing up with their parents for food given out by charities or by the government. But at University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, we had feeding programs for our “iskolar ng bayan” (people’s scholars), students who were identified during medical check-ups as malnourished and who did not have enough financial resources to get full nutritious meals three times a day.

We got help from different sources like the Protestant Church of the Risen Lord, and alumni but here’s a story of unexpected good Samaritans: I found out some years back that staff from some of our offices in UP would pitch in to buy lunch for students who they felt were scrimping and skipping meals.

We also had what I called the marathon sprinters, so close to the finishing line but suddenly finding themselves without support in their junior or senior years, often because a parent working overseas would ghost his or, more rarely, her child and family.

There are many stories, too, not so much of absconding parents but of emergencies that abruptly transformed the fortunes of our fragile middle classes, families once comfortable and able to provide for their college students would suddenly find their savings wiped out by a business failure or catastrophic illness. I’d send out an SOS to a small corps of alumni ready to shoulder a stipend for the last year and I hear some alumni are still on call for these emergencies.

Moving beyond financial pressures, I want to pay tribute to superhero students and their superhero parents who supported their children with disabilities through college. I’ve shared in past columns about the long sojourn of UP student Alexander Miguel Bautista, who had to move around in a wheelchair (often with a small army of people helping—his parents, UP staff, security guards). His parents and I knew his condition had no cure, but shared his determination to have him get that UP degree, which he did in 2018. He was still able to work on a project to improve access for people with disabilities but passed away two years after graduation, certainly a fuller life than many other people.

Much more needs to be done for other students with PWDs, including having their stories told, but I wanted to have some space to talk, too, about superhero graduates of another kind. There are many of them in the Philippines, where children are often pressured into a degree program to carry the family line, to find a way to immigrate, or, simply, to get rich or richer. The superheroes are the braver students who struggle to follow their hearts and shift courses.

In an environment like UP Diliman, with 77 undergraduate degrees (excluding law) to choose from, students are dazzled by new horizons and possibilities, especially if they are not comfortable with the degree program they were pressured to take.

I knew one such student who entered the most difficult natural science degree program at Diliman. A brilliant student, she could have finished the program with minimal difficulties but faced many obstacles, more of them personal, as she half-heartedly pursued the natural science degree. She and her family came to me when she was in her third year. She was distraught and it was clear she might end up disqualified from her program.

I found out her real passion was in music. She was not the first science student to have discovered music as a possible life choice. I think of two of our past engineering deans who would have pursued music together with engineering during their undergraduate years but, alas, UP Diliman still does not allow concurrent degrees.

This student did finally convince her family to let her shift to music, where she flourished, with grades mostly 1.0, the highest in the UP System. She will be graduating this Sunday. Her thesis inspired my title for today’s column. It was an analysis, complete with complicated references to musical scores from superhero films made in Hollywood and the Philippines.

There are more students like our new superhero music graduate and I write about her hoping families and schools can find ways to allow students to follow their hearts. More than superheroes, we talk about diamonds in the rough, waiting for their full brilliance to shine through.

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