Regent Robert Lester Aranton, Regent Gladys Tiongco, Faculty Regent Carl Marc  Ramota, Student Regent Sofia Jan Trinidad, Staff Regent Marie Therese Alambra,  Chancellor Lyre Anni Murao, EVP Jose Fernando Alcantara na kumakatawan kay  Pangulong Angelo Jimenez na kasalukuyang nasa Thailand, VP para sa Planning and  Finance Yrin Balmores, VP para sa administrasyon Augustus Resurreccion, VP para  sa Public Affairs Rolando Tolentino, Tsanselor ng UP Cebu Leo Malagar, Tsanselor  ng UP Baguio Joel Addawe, AVP para sa administrasyon Richard Javier, mga opisyal  ng UP Mindanao, mga kasamahan at kaibigan sa hanay ng kaguruan, REPS at mga  kawani ng administraston ng UP Mindanao--na nagbibigay buhay, nagpapaunlad at  sumusuporta sa comunidad akademiko ng UP Min--mga kasamahan sa Tanggapan  ng Kalihim ng Unibersidad at iba pang Tanggapan ng UP System, kagalang-galang  na mga panauhin, mga magulang, tagapag-alaga, mga katuwang, at mahal sa buhay  ng mga nagtatapos—na walang pagod na nagsakripisyo at sumuporta sa mga kanila at higit sa lahat, sa mga minamahal na nagtatapos—na ating binigyang pugay ngayon,  isa pong magandang umaga sa inyong lahat.  

I am deeply honored to congratulate you, the graduating class of 2024, for your patience and grit in completing your degrees despite the challenges posed by the  SARS-COV-2 virus.

I also express my profound appreciation to the UP Mindanao faculty and staff who have contributed to your intellectual and personal growth in the last four years. They coped with unprecedented demands at the height of the pandemic, including preparing detailed, if not modular, course packs—even worrying about the logistics of printing and physically delivering volumes of paper to those of you who could not access your lessons from the University’s Learning  Management System due to weak internet signals, or its absence and the lack of gadgets. Additionally, they adapted to blended learning delivery modes without previous practice and faced the pressure of tracking your academic status and emotional resilience. Today, therefore, is an auspicious celebration of your remarkable achievements and those of the mentors and staff who supported your educational journey.  

I was Vice-President for Academic Affairs when the pandemic upended our world. I  can confess now that my blood pressure shot up from sleepless nights, wondering how to shepherd our academic community in uncharted territory with the marching order to ensure learning continuity as equitably as possible, mindful of the highly infectious and deadly SARS-COV 2 variant that killed some of my friends. My only consolation is that we were not alone. Globally, our partners in the network of leading research universities in the Asia Pacific region—including some of the top universities worldwide, of which UP is the only Philippine member—were in the same boat.  

Thankfully, the online sessions of this network, the Asia Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), strengthened our resolve to begin implementing a much-discussed plan years before the pandemic to change how we teach and learn. This plan was crafted against the backdrop of a disruptive future shaped by climate change, pandemics, the  Fourth Industrial Revolution, artificial intelligence, the normalization of lies, fake news, and disinformation, geopolitical polarization—the South China Sea being a battleground in a much colder Cold War—and the global drift to authoritarian rule, among many other disruptors. Such a future requires universities worldwide to ensure that our students, the future leaders in different branches of knowledge given the status of the APRU universities, to flourish in today’s 21st-century world with  “intellectual acuity, mental agility, and fortitude, critical digital and media literacies, learning how to learn skills, communication and collaboration skills, empathy, social engagement,  environmental awareness, and civic-mindedness”* among such competencies and capabilities. The pandemic pushed Universities out of their comfort zones, catalyzing much-needed academic changes. Although I must admit, and this is well documented,  that universities worldwide are among the most conservative institutions when it comes to changing academic practices despite their progressive stance on social issues and internal equity concerns. UP, for instance, continues to struggle between tradition  and the promise of a system more responsive to the “evolving requirements of the labor  market and the need to master the changing timeframes and rhythms of individual  existence.”**

You, the Class of 2004, are a special batch because you were the first class we welcomed in the first semester of our University’s struggle with its first steps towards a much more significant reform--that we are still just beginning to scratch the surface of even now. Like new parents about to give birth to their first baby, we prepared for your arrival that semester, anxious that our untested and iteratively changing course delivery was not fully ready for you. If the challenge of my generation’s first semester was how to negotiate long lines and deal with teachers with “attitudes”—some of them genuinely terror types you no longer find today, who let you sink or swim because that for them was what UP training was about. Your challenge was even more fundamental—going through a class with much uncertainty, without any face-to-face interaction with teachers and fellow students, not knowing whether you were lagging or even if you were out of the loop, apart of course from the challenge of securing GE  slots and other aggravations. But believe me, without my justifying the hurdles and inconveniences thrown your way, the teachers of old may have been wise to think that the resilience developed in surviving big and small vexations to the spirit in UP is a valuable contribution to your growth.  

Up to this day, I still worry that we did not adequately help you develop the necessary habits of mind to cope with the challenges of a fast-changing world; for example, and here I quote the University of California’s Commission on General Education, “the ability to read critically, to read between the lines, to recognize how rhetoric and argument are deployed… the ability to generalize from one course or topic to the next, to write fluently and critically, to master a body of material…to communicate logically about a common body of evidence and common rules of inference orally and in writing, and to link scientific or humanistic materials that seem disparate”***—In other words, the ability to connect the dots and construct a big picture that reflects the intersection of biography, scientific developments, history, and society as well as unpack underlying assumptions. On the more mundane side, I worry that we may not have been able to adequately hone the competencies and problem-solving skills that employers will test in your job interviews—if employment is your career path—or the entrepreneurial skills needed to carve a path for yourselves and for the others you will employ in the event your future is to create jobs.  

But whatever our institutional omissions, we are confident that most, if not all of you, will thrive regardless of the limited 21st-century competencies we managed to hone.  You are, after all, the crème de la crème or the intellectual elite of your generation. You were among the approximately 100,000 UPCAT applicants whose combined  UPCAT scores and High School grades merited a slot to UP—if you don’t know it yet,  60% of your admission grade was from UPCAT and 40% from your high school grades. You came to UP with the intelligence and aptitude for academic work and leadership. You had two years of everyday campus interactions and activities. Equally important, your brains are wired to the technologies, unavailable when I graduated college in the 1970s, adapting quickly to every new technology. 

I have nothing to offer you now except a few tips from my own life and those of my  friends that may help you face the challenges of life ahead:  

First, while you belong to the intellectual elite, at the end of the day, enhancing your emotional intelligence will matter more than your cognitive capabilities at the workplace and future social networks—unless, of course, your expertise is deemed exceptional, in which case, you may not need to consider other people because they will adjust to you—although ideally, the impact of the contributions might be more significant if the geniuses among you are also emotionally intelligent. Your first job will depend on your interview—your ability to think on your feet, your problem-solving experience, and indicators of your attitude towards life and work. Being emotionally intelligent means respecting the rights of others and putting yourself in their shoes to understand their perspective. It also means—and I underscore this for 

us being from UP--- embracing the virtue of humility—medyo mahirap ito para sa atin dahil sadyang mayabang tayo—always remember that the more you know, the more you don’t know. Therefore, you must NOT have the yabang and confidence of those who don’t know what they do not know, for it means you know very little. 

Second, hone your competence to learn throughout life. In today’s world of qualifications frameworks, skills frameworks, credit transfer and equivalencies, credit banking, and recognition of prior learning, degrees are no longer THE key that opens doors, whether it be the door to advance in the workplace—except perhaps in academe where doctoral studies and for the natural sciences, postdoctoral work still matter—or simply multiple doors towards self-actualization. Ours is increasingly a world of certifications, nano badges, and stackable micro-credentials. You will no longer be judged merely by your degrees, honors, or what you know, as was the case during our time, but by how you apply knowledge and skills in context—in short, by the competencies you possess and bring to the world of life and work.  

My niece dropped out of UP Diliman’s Electrical and Electronic Engineering program over a decade ago. Her parents cried buckets because she would be the first one in our immediate family without a college degree. I assured them not to worry and to let her pursue her interest in IT, for we are now approaching a world of certifications. True enough, she was hired for her competence in Hong Kong, moved on to Germany, and, last I heard, occasionally travels to the US from her base in Berlin to meet with Spotify 

there. But even if you do not care about stacking credentials, retooling, and acquiring qualifications, please keep learning. Be fascinated with new knowledge, learning, and applying new skills. This will make you happy.  

Third, each of us has a mission in life or a series of connected tasks that we must discern from our experiences. This mission is not laid out clearly but comes in disparate bits and pieces: through assignments, menial tasks, duties, significant challenges, small challenges, heartaches, and joys. It is delivered by many people,  including those we may not get along with, who might not even know they are contributing to our mission. Given this big picture, we are urged to give our best in everything we do, regardless of the outcomes, because everything we do is part of our mission, no matter how small. 

Since our mission comes in bits and pieces, we must value patience—a challenging trait for your generation of multitaskers with extremely brief attention spans—value diligence, perseverance, fidelity to work, and grit to continue despite frustrations and uncertainties. The mission's connection to the bigger picture will drive you to find meaning and purpose in all events of your life, to aspire for excellence, and to give your best in all tasks, whether they are domestic chores, academic work,  extracurricular activities, community work, or significant work beyond your small communities, whether your efforts are appreciated or not.  

In his book Outliers****, Malcolm Gladwell found that successful people turned the baggage of their history into opportunities, honed their skills through dedicated practice, and used them to improve lives and address contemporary needs. He argues that 10000 hours of practice is what we need to hone a skill.  

In her book Thrive*****, Arianna Huffington argues for a third metric of success beyond money and power, a metric composed of well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving. Yes, giving. In Huffington’s book, she quoted Renaissance Indian Rabindranath  Tagore as saying:  

“I slept and dreamt that life was a joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted,  and behold, service was joy”. 

This brings me to my fourth tip.  

Your purpose in life is always bigger than yourself, and it involves serving others— your family, the people served by your organization, your friends and colleagues,  your geographic community, or the nameless, faceless nation and the marginalized in your midst. For UP’s Iskolars ng Bayan, a deep sense of mission, the call to serve our people, the resolve to give your all in any circumstance, and the perseverance to strive for excellence despite extreme challenges is reflected in UP’s maxim of “excellence and honor” not for oneself but always in the service of others and the nation.  

One of the constraints to your service as an Isko or Iska, with profound implications for your emotional resilience, is the virtual world of social media, which inadvertently draws you to yourselves and to compare yourselves with others. Since young people are more exposed to this virtual world, we have had higher mental health and suicide cases among our youth today than in my time. Interestingly, going beyond the preoccupation with the self is not only the essence of honor and excellence in the service of others but also an effective antidote to mental health issues and depression.  

Sadly, not all of UP’s graduates lived by UP’s motto. A number of colleagues, even friends, strove for excellence and occupied honorable posts for themselves and their cliques. I fervently pray that you will not join their ranks.  

One way to avoid joining their ranks is to nurture the life of the spirit. In preparation for its centennial year, one of the faculty conferences affirmed the need not only to nurture the life of the mind but also that of the body and the spirit. Yes, the spirit. By maintaining a sacred space where you can reflect, process thoughts and emotions, find purpose, and discern your destiny. Nurturing the life of the spirit—whether you believe in a Supreme Being or not—is essential for maintaining integrity while facing life’s challenges. A solid inner core is crucial for meeting moral challenges without sacrificing integrity for expediency. Solitude and reflection also prevent disillusionment, resignation, and despair, fostering a positive spirit to face severe problems and difficulties. A wise man once said that the limitations faced by people who try to make a difference—and as future leaders, making a difference will be your  mantrap—have nothing to do with a lack of energy and capacity. They have to do with disillusionment, resignation, and despair.  

In our fast-paced world, getting lost in pursuing wealth, power, and fleeting material gains is easy. As you enter the world of work amid future disruptions, remember your core values, who you are, whom you live for, and why you are alive. Reflect on your evolving mission, seek the grace to excel with honor in whatever you do for the mission, and develop the strength to persevere. Remember that a mission always entails selfless service amid countless vexations to the spirit. 

Congratulations, my dear UP Mindanao graduates. May you strive to be your best selves and thrive in the rapidly changing world of the 21st century! May you do your best to develop your community, Mindanao, the Filipino nation, and humanity! May you find joy, laughter, and lightness-of-being, especially in trying times! May you move from strength to strength to fulfill your life’s purpose! 

And may you keep the spirit of honor and excellence in selfless service to others,  especially the poor and marginalized, acknowledging and appreciating the legacy of the University of the Philippines, your beloved Alma Mater, and mine.