Terminal expectancy

Terminal: the word used to describe eventual death is the same word used to refer to students in their fourth year and above in De La Salle University. Endearing is the last word that comes to mind. While it seems like the scariest thing about college is whether or not you can get in, the second scariest has to be when you will get out. This fear comes from every class you fail or any course you shift from. These things take time and sometimes more time than you are willing to give. Join The Menagerie as we learn more about the lives of the few of many that extended their stay in DLSU.

Senior wisdom

Gerome, a LIA-COM 110 student, was in DLSU even before the Henry Sy building was opened for students (it’s not really a long time ago), but this doesn’t stop him from being the street-smart student that he is.

Since he’s been a student for five years, he knows a rope or two in dealing with a professor. In dealing, we mean flirting. And by flirting, we mean academic flirting or how to fall on the good eye of the professor. All professors are different in personality and teaching style, and the success of academic flirting is almost inevitable if one has gone through a ton of professors.

Being a LIA-COM student, Gerome is exposed to very diverse pools of studies and people from CLA and COB. The theories he learns as a Psychology major, he can apply to the world of business. But Gerome says that another perk of meeting different people from different backgrounds is gaining a vast and diverse contact list. Gerome maintains a friendly rapport to the people whom he sees are genuinely good (and if he remembers them). A great contact list is only great if you know how to use it. Gaining connections is especially helpful if one wants to be successful in the workplace. But while benefits are convenient, it can easily disappear in an instant, while friendship and good times cannot.

Of course, connections don’t magically appear. One actually has to interact with people. And what better place to meet new people than in a classroom? Gerome shares that in some of his classes, there are those not-so-extinct beings that have no drive to initiate anything on a groupwork—people more commonly known as freeloaders. When in contact with beings like these, Gerome shares that he has no choice but to step up as the pack’s leader, feeding the freeloaders constant reminders in order to at least have them contribute.

Shift happens

Working abroad in some multinational company to earn a fair amount of money for yourself and your family: are these also one of your goals after finishing college? For Carly, this was his initial plan when he entered DLSU as an Electronics and Communications Engineering (BSECE) student, a path in which his parents carved out for him. But come his sophomore year, his life took a shift for the better.

Carly knew his life as an engineering student was going to be long and difficult; he even considered taking less units every term to ease the academic stress even if it meant staying in school for seven to eight years (which isn’t actually allowed).

His sophomore year came and with the multinational company plan still in mind, he was starting to feel some pressure from his family. Not only was taking a course he didn’t choose getting into his mind, he was also having a hard time adjusting to the culture of COE and balancing his studies with Baseball varsity duties. “When it got to my 5th term in DLSU, I knew it wouldn’t work out anymore since the things I was doing in Engineering didn’t really fit to what I was really good at,” he says. Carly eventually quit baseball and shifted to Marketing (BSMKT) a term after, hoping to be much closer to what he thinks he’s really good at.

“Shifting out of Engineering saddened me at first since a lot of my family members looked up to me for being in the course; however, shifting into COB made me realize how much potential I had in business,” Carly says when asked if he ever regretted taking up Engineering in the first place.

Come Carly’s 9th term, Marketing still didn’t swing the bat for him as well as he had wanted it to. He decided to shift again, but this time he was surer on where he wanted to go: either to Finance or to Business Management.

It was Finance that Carly really wanted but as his interview came with the Finance Department, they advised him that he was a better fit in Business Management. “The fact that FIN said MGT would be more suitable for me might have been someone up there giving me a hint,” he shares. So he took a chance on that advice from the Finance Department and shifted for the second and last time to Business Management (BSMGT), the course that on February 2015 will officially and finally be the one he finishes. Home run!

A bit of heartbleed

It’s normal to fail in the College of Computer Studies. That is what Ryanwell’s friends from an upper batch told him when he was just a freshman in DLSU. It comes off more as a welcoming than a warning but that still troubled Ryanwell. He eventually recognized it as truth but on his last year in school, it was not only the idea of it he had to accept.

On the fourth year of a four-year course, he soon realized he was going to need more time. He was already feeling uneasy a week before his defense. A thesis on security vulnerability called the Heartbleed bug seemed impossible to their panelist. While he and his group had faith in their work, they knew that getting past the defense would be very difficult. Unease became certain sadness when they finally knew for sure that they would not pass thesis just yet.

If everything went according to plan he would have graduated this past October. He did attend that graduation, but only as a videographer. He was shooting the video that was to be shown to the graduates. He saw so many familiar faces that day and they all asked the same question: when will you graduate? You can’t blame them as it is the go-to small talk question for the 110 and older around school. Ryanwell learned though not to beat himself up for it because he knew that doing that wouldn’t do him any good.

If you ask him what he does with his time nowadays – being forced to underload units does give a student a lot of free time – he will tell you all about his freelance work in web designing and photography, among others. When asked about his plans after his much-awaited graduation, Ryanwell will tell you about his four-year plan, which includes a stint abroad. Ryanwell has always been a journeyman since his days as a frosh. Joining multiple organizations in hopes to find one that suited him best never seemed like a chore but a need. So all this extra travelling should not and does not faze him at the slightest as he knows college was never supposed to be a race.

It can become debatable whether graduating on time is supposed to be a blessing or expectation. However, while those extra terms of a delayed student may seem like hell on earth at the time, it really just becomes an anecdote you tell over dinner with family and friends.