Felina Co Young asked for a sign from the Holy Spirit

By Felina Co Young’s own recollection, she went to Baclaran Church and asked for a sign from the Holy Spirit, “maybe flowers, although corny.”

After three days, somebody knocked on her office door and presented her “a beautiful bunch of flowers with a bright sunflower.”

And yet Young remained hesitant to accept the offered presidency of the College of the Holy Spirit Manila, of which she is a true-blue alumna, having attended it since she was in bobby socks up to the time she collected her bachelor’s degree in mathematics (cum laude) in 1969.

She thought it would be an ultra-tough job that she didn’t need and urged her husband, businessman Vicente Young, to go to the “temple” and seek another divine answer. But the question to be posed was now different, suggesting that the sign of the flowers had somewhat clinched the deal: If she does decide to accept the appointment, when should she start working?

The reply was swift: July, which was what she and her husband agreed on four months earlier.

“So that was it,” Young told members of her high school class of 1965 in an e-mail. “My promise to the Holy Spirit and all of you is that I will give my best.”

‘QPP’

By her classmates’ reckoning, that promise is assurance enough that the school founded by Belgian nuns will not only survive but also, and most significant, keep a competitive footing in the modern era where the delicate greenhouse atmosphere of an “exclusive school” appears out of place, indeed obsolete.

True to form, Young, who holds Ph.Ds in business administration and in management, is hard at work and developing a “QPP” structure:

Q for quality programs, industry and business linkages, competitive curricular programs, quality teachers and scholarships (catalyzed by the alumnae foundations based here and in North America).

Quality covers CHSM’s graduate school programs in business administration (even an MBA for health professionals), in special education, and in tourism and hospitality management (the last being “the only one of its kind—two specializations for the price of one master’s degree”).

Efforts are likewise being made for linkages with South Korea, Indonesia and China for additional enrollment.

P for productivity, including streamlining operations for higher efficiency and examining “leaks” in terms of utility use and personnel productivity—all with the end in view of improving financial operations.

P for promotion, with the “marketing collateral” prepared (“We successfully went out to market as early as July 1,” Young said.)

Promotion—and quality—also include minutiae such as repainting the school’s outer buildings and perimeter walls, upgrading its restrooms and dormitories, improving its website, and updating and restructuring its library system to include e-references and e-books.

True grit

In the new management of CHSM, Young is assisted by the director of finance (Sister Marides) and the director of administrative affairs (temporarily Deanna Go Bio).

She is pragmatic in envisioning the task of “moving CHSM forward” in this high-technology, high-octane age as a slow but steady process that requires spade work and plugging leaks.

“Rome was not built in a day,” she reminded her classmates, indicating a reservoir of grit that appears to be part of her makeup.

Grit, yes, and a quiet, diligent determination that Rosalou Soriano Lamson, a former president of the alumnae foundation, remembers in the young “math wizard” Felina.

This “seriousness … both in her looks and in her studies” so “intimidated” her, Lamson laughingly told Batch ’65, “that I don’t recall letting [Young] write in my slum book!”

In a conversation with the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Young recalled having had Renato Reinoso, now this newspaper’s senior vice president for sales and marketing, as a student when she was a young teacher at San Beda College.

Reinoso himself, remembering that long-ago time when he was a 15-year-old learning algebra from Young, described her as “one of the most brilliant, meticulous and detail-oriented teachers” he had ever had, “who had this penchant for numbers and excellence in her craft.”

Two years shy of its centennial, CHSM is evidently in capable hands.