What We Stand For: Fostering Academic Excellence

“For a modern apostle, an hour of study is an hour of prayer.”—St. Josemaria

Kapuluan Study Center. From the name alone, one could gauge that the Center fosters in its fellows academic excellence, focusing on “study” as a vital part of a student’s formation. If a professional’s way to sanctification is through his work, the Center views studying as a student’s material for his personal holiness.

Kapuluan holds several activities that foster this idea, not to mention the emphasis on having daily study time. Among these activities are the UNEX, Study Wars and Dies Academicus. They try to instill the importance of diligence and excellence in a student’s life.

The University Expectations Seminar (UNEX) is designed to orient freshmen to university life through talks, get-togethers, and fora with professors and scholars. Held at the beginning of the school year, the seminar teaches participants time management, study habits and the university culture. UNEX also promotes camaraderie among the freshmen and the upperclassmen in the Center.

Study Wars, meanwhile, is a semester-long contest where teams of students take turns accumulating hours of studying in the study room. The last Study Wars, for instance, had the Engineering Team leading by a whopping 5,801,364 hours of study, effectively winning the prize of a free eat-all-you-can dinner courtesy of Atty. and Mrs. Nibungco.

UP Industrial Engineering graduate Mark Goroy, part of the winning team, recalls how their team banked on each member’s diligence, and how they called the study room their “second home.”

Dies Academicus, on the other hand, is an academic exchange between professionals and students from different fields—biology, sociology, economics, philosophy, history, engineering, mass communications, theology, and others—where each speaker tries to relate his field of expertise to the other fields by providing the participants an appreciation of the interrelatedness of the different academic fields, for a truly integrated “Universitas” experience.

There are usually three speakers in Dies Academicus—one holding a Bachelors degree, another a Masters degree and a third holding a doctorate degree. One of the speakers in the July 18 forum was a K25 Professional Mentor, Mr. Sid Garcia. He is currently a District Governor of Rotary International. He spoke about his core values which are service, excellence and integrity. He encouraged the scholars to be beacons of hope “because there is so much helplessness around us.”

During exam periods, some groups of fellows organize “study weekends” on a quiet place outside Manila in order to help them concentrate better on their studies and unplug themselves from their gadgets.

These are only among the different activities in the Center that try to foster a deeper understanding of one’s academic life, excelling in it, and using it to help others do so while at the same time getting closer to God in the process.