Thursday, September 3, 2015

The St. John Baptist De La Salle of the 21st century

 
I studied in DLSU Taft for 4 years and had a chance to study in DLS-CSB for 2 terms before transferring. When we hear the word “La Salle”, first things that come to mind now are: “school”, “university”, “college”, “prestige”, “high tuition fee”, “top 3”, “luxury”, “conyo” and etc. Even after graduating college, I was still guilty of not having known the saint to whom our school was named after.

I’m not here to talk about the life of St. La Salle as explained in the movie. What I would like to talk about is keeping his legacy. How can I, a future DLSU MBA graduate, live up to St. La Salle’s principles?

In class, we discussed St. La Salle being: a risk-taker, an innovator, a servant-leader, and a mentor. Being all at once is not easy to achieve even in a lifetime. But for St. La Salle, pursuing his passion, helping others, and ultimately achieving self-actualization became part of his journey. And I would like to take on the same journey with my loved ones.

Being a risk-taker would take one person a lot of courage to take a certain leap of faith. For me, the biggest risk I could possible take is to take on the path of entrepreneurship. This will entail losing my financial security from my current job in order to achieve higher purpose. I just have this feeling deep inside that I’m truly destined to be an entrepreneur, that’s why I decided to take up MBA. Though I may not have a solid business idea yet, I know God will take me to the right path one day. And when that time comes, I will be more than willing to take that big leap of faith.
 
Innovation is all about thinking out of the box. And I have learned that innovation is not just about creating your original idea; it’s also about meeting the consumers’ needs by creating a solution to resolve the gap. Nowadays, the global trend towards technology is geared towards mobile apps (e.g. Uber, Spotify, Grab, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.). I mentioned this because my dream is to have my own tech start-up in the mobile app space.  And my personal commitment to myself before I turn 30 is to come up with, at the very least, an innovative idea that can resolve a specific problem trough a mobile app.

Being a servant leader and a mentor would take one person to make sacrifices for himself in order to serve other people through leadership. Mentoring is still closest to my heart as I had a great experience to teach in DLSU as well for 1 term. Due to financial needs, I needed to look for a corporate job to earn myself a living. I had sworn to myself that when the time comes where money is not a problem anymore, I will continue my passion to teach in DLSU, even as a part-time professor.

These are the commitments I have for me in order to keep St. La Salle’s legacy. Though it may not be 100% related to education, I guess these commitments are good enough not just for me achieving altruism but ultimately to contribute to the society as well, one step at a time.

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