-What a UP student is NOT-

Some people said that when you’re an UP student, you must be smart and studious. They had big expectations from you. They were thinking that these students belong to the intelligent people here in the Philippines. Even I had experienced that, when my friends or relatives would asked me of what school I am now studying they were always saying that I must be smart, very industrious, hardworking and studious. Teachers would say that we should not waste the money given by the people because we’re the “iskolar ng bayan”, we’re the Isko’s and Iska’s. They believed that UP students were intelligent people. Well, it flatters us but some people don’t know what UP students are in the negative side.

When you’re told by your parents to study in UP (University of the Philippines), your reaction would be either happy or sad because for some students, entering UP will make you crazy. They thought that students in UP were geeks and always thinks about their grades.

All I can say is that these people thinking that way were wrong. I admit before I entered here in UP, I thought that UP students were nerd and that I wont be happy here but instead I’ll be going crazy because of studying too much. That was before, but now when I already studied in UP I learned that all of my thoughts were wrong. I really thought that students in UP were very quiet but then on the first day of class, I was surprised to heard people talking so loud and sometimes going everywhere inside the school campus, they were very noisy.

After months of studying in UP, I learned that UP students made no different from other schools and sometimes even worse than expected. The number 1 comment or complaint of our teachers was the noisiness of the students. Even how many times you warned them, they’d just kept quiet for about 15-20 min. and then after that they’ll be noisy again. Some students also were late comers especially during Mondays even if they were given enough time so that they won’t be late. And sometimes they became late even if they went to school very early, it’s because early in the morning, they (especially boys) go directly to the internet café and play games and sometimes they skipped classes just for this.

And when there are tests or assignments, cramming is always present and never been absent in these cases. Some students also were not taking their studies seriously. They didn’t care if their grades were low, for them having a passing grade was enough.

In our section, we lacked cooperation that’s why when there were competitions in our school needing many participants, we always fail and sometimes we rank the last. We always fight or argue against each other for just a simple matter that resulted to a worst performance.

UP students were also hardheaded because sometimes we didn’t follow the rules of our school.

I think we should improve our self-discipline and learned from the experiences we had by not doing it again.