blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

We have this science graduate who got his biology degree this year with a magna cum laude to show and now is quite in the dumps. After having won accolades from the university like best thesis research and of course the McL plaudit, he applied to work for a top notch hospital as part of the research team dealing with patient satisfaction. Given the good scholastic record he has, he got accepted. But one month into the job he quit. The reason is that he was placed under job training first (where he got a pay he did not expect to get) and the change of orientation from the grade oriented life as an undergraduate to the output and team building orientation of life in the corporate private sector was quite of a shocker. He complained to me about "poor labour practices". And this leads me to think that our undergraduate training philosophies are horribly out of sync with what is to be expected in the world at large. Note that I refuse to use the cliche "real world" sinc...

I got the email about University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman retired janitor Meliton Zamora getting 0.92 pesos as his retirement pay. I have known Zamora aka Mang Milton since he swept the floors whilst singing early in the morning before my 7:00 AM English 1 class. However some students had a closer relationship (financially) since he guaranteed their loans with the student loan board. Even with its then low fees, students had a hard time making ends meet since money was needed to pay for paper, food, school supplies and dorm fees. In a sense the socialized tuition fee scheme was meant to answer this but it could never do so completely. As for student loans, one of the first things that a newly hired prof or instructor learns is NOT TO GUARANTEE student loans since students rarely if ever pay for these. Even if the loans are quite small, when retirement time comes, the process of clearing accountabilities with the university becomes a tedious process. One may have his/her retirem...