UST, SERENDIPITY AND ME: THE DAY I BECAME A THOMASIAN

A Tribute to My Beloved Alma Mater

Note: I started writing this piece last year hoping to be able to post it on my blogsite at the onset of UST’s 400th year anniversary celebrations. The year-long Quadricentennial festivities are now drawing to a close but I guess it is just as good a time as any to pay tribute to my beloved alma mater, and to my college, the College of Fine Arts and Design (formerly Architecture & Fine Arts), as well as to my batch (Advertising 1981) which celebrated its Pearl (30th) anniversary last year.

Exactly a year tomorrow – on January 28, 2011 – history unfolded as the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas formally ushered in its Quadricentennial (400th Anniversary) celebrations. On that most auspicious event I was – as probably all Thomasians were – overcome by much joy and great pride.

Today marks the end of the year-long Quadricentennial celebrations and I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic as I reminisce the day I became a Tomasino.

During my teen years I have always been fascinated by UST. Perhaps because it was the oldest university in this part of the world. Maybe, too, because it counts among its alumni national heroes and presidents. Perhaps because I knew it was one of the best schools in the country. Or maybe because my paternal grandfather – Dr. Teodulfo Luna Mendoza, Sr. – graduated from its medical school. Perhaps it’s all these and more.

So I really felt bad when I missed taking the UST entrance exams for the school year 1976-1977.

After graduation in high school from Don Bosco Mandaluyong I was still in that state of confusion as to what course to pursue and what school I should go to (having missed the chance of being a Thomasian). Although when I was in elementary school I dreamed of becoming a scientist or chemist I have always been inclined towards the arts. I always excelled in art subjects and would often have my works displayed by our teacher in front of the class. I also had a knack for writing. I remember our English teacher in second year high school making a sample of my essay about “Why am I afraid of the dark?”.

I also remember flipping through the pages of architectural magazines and even doing house designs and floor plans myself. For a while I thought I would be designing houses as a career. I took the Architecture exams at a state university and got into the so-called “floating group” which I think meant that I passed but I didn’t make it to the quota and that I would be taken in as a student if – and only if – anyone from those who made it to the required quota would back out, or for any reason would be disqualified.

Meanwhile, I was still confused. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to take up Architecture. Besides, I hated Math and I knew there was a lot of it in that course. With opening of the school year just several weeks away I started to cram. I thought I’d just take Commerce. I enrolled at the University of the East (UE) in Recto. I submitted all the requirements, picked my class schedules and paid the tuition.

However, when I got home I felt uneasy. I didn’t really like Commerce. I wanted Fine Arts. An aunt whose friend was an official at that state university I took the Architecture exams in suggested that rather than waiting in the “floating group” why don’t we talk to her friend and explore the possibility of being taken in at the College of Fine Arts. So her friend referred me to someone in the said college. I still had to take a special exam though, which was perfectly fine with me anyway. However, when my mother and I got there the person we were looking for was out. When we asked a group of students if we could just wait, one of them replied in a very arrogant tone “kayo bahala”. Now I’m the type of person who is easily turned off by rudeness and arrogance and that incident was enough for me to tell my mother “Nay, tara na, ayoko po dito.” As simple as that.

When we got home I was flipping through the pages of that day’s newspaper when I saw this ad about the UST College of Architecture and Fine Arts (CAFA) still admitting enrollees for a two-year vocational course called Commercial Arts (sort of a crash course in Advertising). I thought that was what I’ve been waiting for. I thought it would be my passport to eventually being a full-fledged UST Fine Arts-Advertising student. I knew I could easily shift from the vocational Commercial Arts course to the real thing – Bachelor of Fine Arts in Advertising.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

After a year I shifted to that much desired baccalaureate course. On my second year in Advertising my father went to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and for that I will be forever grateful. For if he hadn’t I wouldn’t have been able to continue my studies at UST. I was very proud of being the son of an OFW.

As a student I was not the outgoing type. My daily routine was the boring home-school-home thing. I don’t remember cutting classes and I rarely went malling. Besides, the only mall at that time was Ali Mall in Quezon City. My idea then of unwinding was sitting on one of those concrete slabs by the football field. I would sit there for hours waiting for my next class or just before I go home. Home was in Mandaluyong, to and from where I would commute daily by mini bus plying the Divisoria-Antipolo/Tanay/Binangonan route. Those buses used to pass by Lacson (known then as Gov. Forbes).

My college years in UST wasn’t really significant as a whole. But there were a few things that somehow made it a bit exciting and memorable.

I remember seeing Lorna Tolentino (who was taking Interior Design in the same College) who often hanged out with friends in a car parked in front of our building (or was it the Education building?). I remember one of my two best friends, Herky, and I chasing Tetchie Agbayani (an Architecture student then) to her classroom just so we could take photos of her, to which she always obliged. Even then she was really pretty and looked exotic. How were we to know that much later she would become controversial for being the first Filipina to pose in Playboy? I wonder if Herky still have her photos. I don’t, unfortunately.

I also remember my other best friend, Rey, and I being wrongly accused of stealing things in a female CAFA student’s locker just because we were the last persons she saw standing beside her locker. I remember being stranded along with several other classmates in Silang, Cavite when our van bogged down on our way home after a beach outing in Batangas. We had to spend the night in a hut in the middle of a coconut farm where there was no electricity.

I remember a group project we had where we did a mural which for a few years was displayed at one of CAFA’s corridors. I remember being appointed Art Editor of Vision Magazine, the official organ of CAFA. What made it more meaningful was that I handled the publication’s issue commemorating CAFA’s golden anniversary.

I remember, too, writing our Dean asking to be reconsidered for the cum laude award (having incurred two 3.0s) which was turned down despite my having been a half-scholar for a few semesters and a Vision Art Editor. I wanted the award very badly, not so much for myself as it was for my parents (a wonderful payback gift it would have been).

I remember a lot of things. But there were some that I don’t, until classmates started telling their own stories during our class reunion on December 28, 2011 at Chocolate Lovers, that brown castle on P. Tuazon, Cubao that you’ve probably seen from the MRT. Chocolate Lovers, incidentally, is owned by our classmate Annie or Chef Annie as she was popularly known here before she and her family migrated to Canada (she used to have her own cooking show on TV, long before such shows became in vogue). Which brings me to what have become of us Fine Arts-Advertising Batch ’81.

Well, aside from artist-turned-chef Annie there’s a male classmate who I found out became a US Marine. Another applied as display artist in a chain of department stores (which now is a very famous chain of malls) right after graduation and is now its AVP for Visual Merchandising. And how about the classmate who now has his own design studio, a successful one at that. At least five others, as far as I know, went on to become professors/instructors at the College (with one becoming head of the Advertising Department and the other a successful painter following in the footsteps of our former professor and a truly great painter Mario Parial).

I can go on and on enumerating the successes achieved by our classmates. Or the, should I say, less successful careers of others. But then, how can success really be measured anyway? At the end of the day, there’s only one thing that really counts. The one thing that binds us all together. Being Thomasian.

I count myself very lucky for being part of a great educational institution, a part of history. Lucky for having as fellow alumni such illustrious names as Jose Rizal, Apolinario Mabini, Marcelo del Pilar, Manuel Quezon, Jose Laurel, Diosdado Macapagal, and countless others.

Serendipity – one of my favorite words – is defined by Webster as “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for”. Loosely interpreted it means “finding something that one didn’t really seek in the first place”. To me, however, serendipity means “a beautiful accident”. And that to me is how I would like to describe how I became part of UST. For indeed, while I originally sought to be a Thomasian, the circumstances leading to my having been accepted at UST – missing the entrance exams, coming across that newspaper ad after having enrolled already in another university, until eventually getting in – were nothing short of a beautiful accident.

After earning my degree Bachelor of Fine Arts Major in Advertising on March 27, 1981 I took a rest for more than a month, after which I applied for a job at Jose Cojuangco & Sons Organizations in Makati. On June 17 I started to work as Staff Artist/Photographer in its Corporate Communications Department. Later I was told that more than sixty people applied for that position. It was narrowed down to twenty five and further shortlisted to seven, until they chose me. I’m proud of that, not because “magaling si Rhoel Mendoza” but because “magaling ang UST graduate”.

I have always carried that Thomasian pride and I have every reason to do so. When I started working for my third employer (my second in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) I was surprised when my Saudi boss told me that he knew about UST and that he knew it was one of the best in the Philippines.
As I was wrapping this up I came across a link to an article which was posted on Facebook. It was the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s (PDI) January 23, 2012 editorial entitled “Philippines 2050”. It says, among other things, that “the nation should take inspiration from UST. As a cradle of higher education in the Philippines, UST is also the oldest university in Asia: it’s in fact the alma mater of the founders of Asia’s first republic. The recent ruckus over its grant of a doctorate in law to Chief Justice Renato Corona has hardly ruffled the feathers of the Dominican institution. After all, it has gone through worse: it has survived global tsunamis and the vicissitudes of history, such as the British invasion and the Seven-Year War, the colonial regime change at the turn of the 20th century, and World War II when the Japanese turned the campus into a concentration camp.”
“Today, with some 5,000 graduates performing well in licensure exams, UST is, according to the Commission on Higher Education, the biggest producer of Filipino professionals. Moreover, in her study, Tan has concluded that graduates of UST perform much better in state exams than other schools charging higher fees.”
“The marvel is that UST has been doing all of this quietly.”
“Confidence comes with institution-building: UST has become a no-fuss colossus, unflappable and sometimes impenetrable, but a truly Filipino institution. While the nation is looking forward to 2050, UST is looking forward to its fifth centennial in 2111. Its confidence should inspire us.”
Need we say more?

Indeed I, we, have so many reasons to be proud of UST and of being Thomasian. I can rant on and rave about my beloved alma mater. Suffice it to say, however, that I am simply, proudly, Thomasian!

Maraming salamat po UST! Sulong sa ikalimang siglo!