Jessica Soho tells UP grads: `So what if you’re from UP?’
University of the Philippines | PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons / Ramon FVelasquez
During her speech as a guest speaker at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman commencement exercises on Sunday, veteran broadcast journalist Jessica Soho asked the graduating students, “So what if you’re from UP?”
“‘So what if you’re from UP?’ asked one of my cameramen when I was still starting out as a reporter, 40 years ago to be exact,” Soho said in Filipino. “He even told me, ‘carry those things and the tripod. Learn to do lighting and how to plug in the microphone.’”
“Work is an equalizer,” she added. “So what if you’re from UP? I throw that same question to our graduates now.”
For Soho, being educated at UP means having a connection to the communities within and around the campus. She reminded the students to “stay grounded,” instead of being boastful, and be one with the community and society.
Soho explained, “UP is not a vacuum, and more importantly, not an ivory tower. It is easy to connect what we learned to the realities of life, because just beside our academic buildings and hangouts are the homes and small businesses of workers in the campus.”
READ: 241 UP Diliman students to graduate summa cum laude
As a “gentle reminder,” Soho noted that being able to study at UP is a “privilege” made possible by taxpayers, who are composed of everyday Filipinos struggling to go to work and make ends meet.
“Yes, there are high expectations for each of you. Not for you to feel entitled or superior, but to be humble and thankful,” she said.
She also highlighted the importance of forming meaningful relationships, which can be a useful tool once the students start working in their respective fields, recalling a conversation that she had with a soldier many decades ago.
“Before March of 1989, a soldier told me at the press office in Camp Aguinaldo that there is an area within the waters off Palawan called Spratlys Island,” Soho recounted. “According to him, he was thrown out to the Spratlys as punishment for ‘misbehaving,’ his own words.”
She noted that at that time, not many people knew about the island, but it was now a “hot issue” with Spratlys being a highly contested area in the South China Sea.
“[R]elationships are important. Your lives will be richer if you include people who are not like you,” Soho said.
“Reach out to more people. Get out of your own circles or silos or echo chambers. At this age where we all have a voice that can be amplified through social media, we also need to listen well. You will be surprised at what you can find out,” she added.
READ: Graduations 2025
The veteran journalist also urged the graduating students to appreciate the people they would come to work with, as she expressed her gratitude to her colleagues in the past years.
“I cannot claim sole credit for my body of work for the past four decades, that also belongs to every single person I have worked with, and those who survived with me during the most difficult and dangerous assignments,” she said.
“I would not have stumbled on another story, ‘Kidneys for Sale,’ if an old acquaintance did not trust me enough to lead me and my team to one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tondo, Baseco Compound, where poor men were selling their kidneys to be transplanted to patients who have the money, including foreigners,” the veteran broadcaster recalled.
“Because of our exposé, the government now regulates kidney donations,” she said.
However, Soho added, “there are still many who are selling their kidneys.”
“Forty years and counting, what have I learned? Our problems kept on repeating, as if it was being recycled. It was not being solved, instead more are being added,” said Soho.
But despite her experience being humiliated, scolded and “bashed,” Soho told the audience to never stop asking the “hard” questions and “be disruptors for good.”
“The status quo is not okay. The system is broken. We need to keep asking the hard questions. If we are free to dream, we should also be free to ask questions,” she said. /mr
