Extraordinary Times, Extraordinary People: Ugnayan 2012

Professor Charles Xavier tells Erik (or Magneto) in an X-Men film: “We can start something incredible”.

Last January 21, 2012, two hundred student leaders gathered together and did something unexpected, rare, and indeed incredible at the De La Salle University. It’s something I believe so great that Professor X would’ve nodded his head in approval.

Imagine this – under one roof, and one room no less, were 200 students from the two fiercest rival universities, Ateneo and La Salle. This wasn’t for some UAAP event though. There was neither a crowd visibly divided into two colors nor that palpable atmosphere of hostility one always experiences in UAAP basketball games. The students there, not all sports fans even, were leaders coming together for the project of the Council of Organizations of the Ateneo (COA) and DLSU’s Council of Student Organizations (CSO) – Ugnayan 2012: the Ateneo-La Salle Leadership Summit. The councils organized this event with the objective of encouraging the student organizations to establish relationships with their counterparts from the other school, to make way for future collaborations.

The summit began at the William Shaw Theater where participants listened to inspiring welcoming remarks from COA President Ken Abante and CSO President Candice Co. The participants were then introduced to their groups – which were aptly named after superheroes in line with the event’s superhero theme – and their respective facilitators and TnTs (yes, like OrSem TnTs!). With colorful signs in hand, the facilitators and TnTs led their teams of around ten students to the classrooms for the World Café.

In the World Café, participants in each group were seated in a circle and with the help of the facilitators, shared each their organizations’ (best and worst) practices in terms of different fields. Some points of discussion were member recruitment, finances, and human resources. Since I was a participant myself, I saw first-hand how my groupmates were very much immersed in the discussion. Some were clearly shocked (i.e. org membership fees fetch up to P300 in DLSU) and amazed (i.e. DLSU have to completely fund for their own orgs since they don’t have a budget provided by their OSA) at what the participants shared. I even saw some of them actually jotting down notes when very helpful information and insights come up. After two hours of the World Cafe was the one-hour lunch break where some of us even continued the World Cafe, this time including not just sharing of org practices but also of school culture and identity, and personal lives.

After lunch, the participants went back to the theater to listen to guest speaker Lloyd Luna, a motivational speaker famous for his talks on career planning and leadership. He gave us an introduction to his own philosophy (dubbed as the Toilet Philosophy), which is about how we spend most of our time thinking, imagining, and conceptualizing and not really actualizing these thoughts. He ended his talk with a speech on encouraging us to do that – to actually come together and do something.

Then came the somewhat staple of any leadership seminar – a teambuilding activity which, in this event, came in the form of the Amazing Race. The race had the participants going around the whole DLSU campus, even going up elevators, and bending both their minds, such as in the COA/CSO quiz, and bodies, such as in the nuclear fence station.  The stations ranged from the simple (surprisingly, the human Sudoku was one of them) to the tiring (who can forget the tarp flipping?). Nevertheless, the whole Amazing Race experience was an exhilarating and memorable one. It definitely helped build camaraderie within the participants of the groups.

Nothing seemed more appropriate after that tiring Amazing Race than a set of snacks and refreshments, which also served as the last leg of the summit and the last chance for participants to share stories and exchange contact details with each other. This also served as somewhat an awards ceremony, which recognized groups and participants who really stood out from the crowd, such as the winning Amazing Race group, and the earliest and friendliest participants (the award names still had that superhero flair, of course).

Being both an organizer and a participant of Ugnayan has indeed been an incredible experience. What will be even better though is if this summit isn’t an end in itself but instead, a catalyst for Atenean and La Sallian leaders to put their differences aside and come up with things even more incredible this.