Reunions and giving back

One would think that organizing a high school reunion in the age of social media would be easy, or perhaps hard. In our case, the task was initially daunting until someone from our high school batch came up with a bright idea.

Here was once a varied and eager bunch of high school students, now in their early 40s, wonderful and well-intentioned, who now have to put their busy schedule on pause in order to pull off their 25th year batch reunion.

The hard part there is somebody would suggest something, everybody in the Facebook Messenger group thread would laugh and agree, or add his or her two cents worth, and then there is no follow through or action.

The brilliant idea that untied this knot, so to speak, was from the businessman in the batch Snyder Su: “The one who makes a suggestion should accept the honor of summoning the resources and doing it himself.” That quickly moved things along. Today, July 28, our University of the Philippines Cebu High School Batch of 1993 will have its 25th anniversary reunion.

Not only that, we will be unveiling our UPHS Cebu ‘93 Robotics Project as our group’s way of giving back to the school that gave us free quality education. Hopefully we could do more for the school but we are starting with this project because we are inspired by UP Cebu High School’s achievements in the area of robotics.

In 2015, the team from UP Cebu High School won in the programming category of the first inter-school Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Festival Robotics competition. They beat competitors from top private schools in Cebu and a team from South Korea, with only borrowed Lego sets to boot.

Our batchmate Serge Ybañez, who earned his credentials in Systems Design and Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pressed the need for our batch to support UP High’s very capable and deserving students by providing them robotics kits.

“Robotics is near and dear to me, we used it a lot during my systems engineering tenure at MIT. It’s very fun, and challenging at the same time, and really develops creativity and logic and analytics all at the same time that you are having fun!” Serge wrote. Following our cardinal rule, he automatically becomes the point person for this project. Right, Serge?

We thank Professor Catherine Rodel, UP Cebu High School principal, for giving us this opportunity to extend a project like this to our alma mater. A great thanks also goes to Jill Carungay-Figueroa, Ira Jon S. Kiener, Ging Guangko Baylon, Jaiye Villanueva Iway, Donald Lauron, Marites Cinchez, Agnes Estrada, and many others in the batch who all did their part for this reunion. Jill suggested breakfast at the UP High grounds with our dear former teachers, so now Jill is going to provide the breakfast. Thanks Jill!

Some say high school reunions are passé in this age of social media. Social media has lessened the nostalgia because Facebook has kept us in touch with former classmates and allowed us to follow their lives, at least that part they make public in our social media feeds. Yet there are those of us who are looking forward to the nostalgia of meeting our batchmates and former professors, and of course, the walwal session (millennial-speak for “a night full of drinking and revelry”) filled with “remember that time” moments.

Like what we are doing, high school reunions are also a good time to organize a “giving back” project for the school. Interesting and relevant projects unite everyone in the batch with a shared purpose and on such a level that trumps all petty issues reminiscent of Romy and Michele-type reunions (if you remember that 1997 movie). Later on, we hope to get more support within our batch and from our networks to add more sponsors to join in our robotics project.

Of course, we’ll still try to keep things simple and fun in this reunion. There will be no discussion about politics, although we are aware that there are among us who may or will be involved in it. It’s been 25 years, but there shall be no discussion about getting old; just about good diets and raising kids maybe.

Happy 25th Year UP High School Cebu Batch 1993 and to all batch ‘93s out there!