You were a good dream

I remember the exact moment the screen flickered to life. And how the loading screen almost felt like it held its breath with me. And there it was: CONGRATULATIONS. I stared at it longer than I should have, afraid it might vanish. I made it. I actually made it. I was one of the lucky 12.44%.

For so long, University of the Philippines (UP) wasn’t just a university; it was a dream I had kept reaching for. Home to the country’s finest, they said. A sanctuary for honor, excellence, and service, a bastion of Filipino resilience. An institution built for those who dared to transcend greater than their circumstances. I had built my life around that hope and I carried it like a promise. A promise that the day will come where I would wear the Sablay and become something more than what the world had made for me.

And in that minuscule moment I felt that I finally held everything together.

But dreams, when uncultivated, shatter.

“Where is that validation and that passion I once had?” The question drifts in my mind during quiet moments. While I sit in the AS lobby, the air thick and the heat prickly, and with the echoes of people’s footsteps rendering a heavy gait like they’ve given up long before we did. I thought being an Iskolar ng Bayan meant realizing potential or a privilege worth carrying. But alas, reality admitted me into a different kind of struggle.

Here, survival has its own curriculum.

You learn how to fight for units like air. Every semester begins with uncertainty. With an approximate student to teacher ratio of 9:1, enlisting the minimum 15 units is a tall order to issue. Many students become delayed and even consider shifting or transferring to continue. In some cases, others can’t even graduate. Even more so, imagine the sheer pressure this imposes on students. Once you get a slot in a class, dropping becomes an irrational choice. Even at the cost of one’s well-being.

You learn how to make yourself smaller, quieter, and reach all sorts of compromises just to fit into systems that were never built to hold all of you. You learn how to carry the burnout like a second skin. And somewhere between deadlines and doubts, impostor syndrome finds a home in your chest, whispering that maybe you were never meant to be here at all.

I used to believe in the UP dream like it was armor. But now, it feels more like a weight you have to drag on even when your legs are already giving out.

And then there’s everything else you can’t unsee.

The way glass and steel rise so quickly in places like UP TechnoHub, UP Town Center, GyudFood, and DiliMall gleaming and indifferent, while the College of Arts and Letters Faculty Center remains frozen in its hollow memory of fire and neglect. 

I hear it in the quiet worries of vendors within campus, whose fight everyday against the threat of being pushed out to make room for merchants deemed more “profitable.” Millions of pesos stripped from a system that once prided itself on serving the people. An entrepreneurial venture they say. As if privatization is the most rational choice for subsistence. But we always feel and see the costs.

Ten years, and still it stands like a wound that refuses to close. But does the college and its students have a choice? In a temporary building, seats, and tables thousands of students are held by the college to attain most of their required general education (GE) units. In such a setting it is as if, the students all the same are something that can be moved or replaced.

Iskos and iskas and the rest of the UP community make do with what we have. But we’re not supposed to. Sometimes it feels like we are being demanded to learn in the margins of our own university.

The more I look around, the more it feels like something sacred is being slowly traded away.

Yet still, I stay.

Because beneath the disillusionment, there is a truth I cannot shake: I am here because millions of Filipinos have laid down their labor, their taxes, their own quiet sacrifices for my shot at education. This slot I occupy is not just mine. Indeed, it is  borrowed. It is owed.

So I cannot afford to just endure.

Iskolars have to witness. To remember. To use our voices. And to fight.

The dream I once held was fleeting, something I cradled carefully, afraid the world might break it. But the dream I carry now is different. It is heavier, yes, but also sharper. This cognizance burns. It burns like something that endures and something that demands to be used.

UP, you were a good dream.
But I am awake now.

And if this university is slowly losing sight of who it was built for, then I will be here. Alongside others iskolars who refuse to forget and the incoming generation who will continue to resist, insist and surmount the odds.

Because being an Iskolar ng Bayan was never meant to be glamorized.

We are meant to be relentless.