1987

Kindergarten:

From what I hear, and from the few traces of memory I still had of that time, the first day of school, I cried when my grandpa left me. I had never been alone, by myself, without my parents or anyone from my family before. I was 5 years old.

After entering a new phase in my life where I would no longer be with my family 24/7, I had started integrating with the rest of society. I remember pictures where I had birthday parties at school. I looked like I actually had a lot of fun in school. Ah the good old days.

The few bits of souvenirs I have left from that time are my pictures, my identification card, and my report card.

This report card was from preparatory school.
School year: 1987-88
Section: B
Teacher: C. N. Blanch

Subjects I took: Christian Living, Reading and Phonics, Language and Spelling, Filipino, Mathematics, Writing, Music, Art, and Physical Education.
According to this, My best subjects were Reading and Phonics and Christian Living Education. I had weird grades in math - went from moderately satisfactory to highly satisfactory to satisfactory to moderately satisfactory.

Learning behavior:(attentiveness, neatness in work, diligence in study, independence, and ability to finish given task). The highest grade I got here was a satisfactory, lowest was needs improvement.

Attendance: I missed a total of 13 days in school, 12 from the first month (june). I was tardy only once, in july. School started in June and ended in March in the Philippines.

Comments made by the teacher: (We were on a quarter system)
1st Quarter: Michelle is a slow worker. She needs constant prodding in order to make her finish her work.
2nd Quarter: Michelle's grades have improved. She has adjusted to class routine. Keep it up!
3rd Quarter: Michelle has maintained her rating.
4th Quarter: Michelle has completed the minimum requirements for Prep.

I graduated March 15, 1988 (The principal was Sr. Clare Cecilia, AA)

1988

Elementary School:

My elementary years were spent at Colegio San Agustin at Dasmarinas Village, Makati.

Section Assignments:

And you think a class of 30 is big. Try a class of about 45 students. In grade school, we used to have to stick with one classroom. With so many students per classroom, we all took the same subjects, had the same teachers. One good thing about this is that it was the teachers who had to walk around from class to class, students just stayed in place. These sections would be what we would call homeroom sections in the states.

Subjects From 1st to 2nd grade(what we would call grade one to grade two), we had to take the following subjects: Reading & Phonics, Language & Spelling, Filipino, Elementary Mathematics, Science & Health, Soc. Studies/Civics & Culture, Christian Living Education, Writing/Penmanship, Art Education, Music, and Physical Education. We started Work Education 4th grade (I believe this is similar to Home Economics). Computer Education began 5th grade.

And, we had to take a National Elementary Assessment/Achievement Test(NEAT) exam 6th grade wherein I got a 91 in. I believe this was how they tested if we should keep 7th grade or let people graduate 6th grade. We were graded on a letter grade from Christian Living on, but numerically from Reading & Phonics to Soc. Studies/Civics & Culture. All I remember is that my History grades sucked. I don't know whats wrong with me and History.

The subjects were all taught in English except for Filipino and Soc. Studies/Civics & Culture. Filipino was just like the Language & Spelling class. English Grammer translated in filipino. Filipino was just hard when people started whipping out deep tagalog words.

Deportment/Conduct: We were graded on Courtesy, Sociability, Neatness, Punctuality, Application, and given an overall Conduct grade. I always got As for conduct (well most of the time anyways). My lowest grades were in Application and Neatness and Sociability. Figures. I was very quiet those days. I had the best courtesy grades though.

Clubs: By 3rd grade, we had started getting graded in a club we had to join(we had our choice of clubs. I believe I was in the Shalom Club, the Friends of St. Agustin Club, and by the latter years I had started joining the Math Club).

Eagles: This was a form of reward for grades that were high enough to deserve them. A blue eagle was awarded for people who got around an 88%, red for 89%, and gold for 90%. I got my first eagle during my 3rd grade in elementary school. After that I didn't get any other eagle's until 6th grade. For some reason my grades shot up around this time. I became smart! =) I got a blue eagle the 2nd quarter, red on the 3rd, gold by the 4th! I got a blue for my GPA. 7th grade was similar. I got a red, gold and blue eagle that year. I believe that was also the year when I reached semi-finals in the science contest(I think I also beat out the reigning academic in class, Adrian Dimacali).

I graduated the 31st day of March, 1995.
Batch picture: first half | second half

1999

College of San Mateo

CSM was the junior college I went to for one semester (and one summer). Since I got accepted into Berkeley in the Spring semester, I had my choice of deciding what to do during the Fall semester of 1999. I decided not to waste my time lazing around as I usually do and actually spend my time doing more productive things such as going to school. I wanted to get as many units under my belt as possible so I went to summer school here the summer of '99 and stayed for the fall semester.

I was able to take a huge variety of classes. I believe the classes I took at CSM sparked an interest for humanities classes. I was able to, for the first time, think of a class as something more than doing drone work and memorizing. I took anthropology, ethnic studies and philosophy, the best class there was there.

I was following IGETC (Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum or something like that) when I didn't have to. This was for transfer students who wanted to get into Berkeley's College of Letters and Science. I had to go to www.assist.org to figure out which classes I was supposed to take.

2001

Cognitive Science

Why Cognitive Science? Because its the only major I can declare at this moment with the prerequisites I have. I was an intended Computer Science major under Letters and Science (I should've chosen EECS). I took CS3, CS61A, CS61B, Math1A, Math1B, Math55, which is cool since I have all these techie friends now =D. However, I had not been able to keep up with the competition so I figured I'd go into Cognitive Science since its basically half technical and half humanities. I'm hoping this is the right major for me since I love technical classes although they are hard, and I love humanities classes although they require a LOT of reading.

Why Anthropology? Cuz it satisfies a lotta breadth. And also i got interested in the humanities side of things when I first started talking 19 units of breadth requirements my first semester in college.

My Starcraft History:

Starcraft had been this one topic that the guys kept talking about all the time. Whenever they ended up leaning towards that topic I made them stop. It was an addiction to them. The game didn't seem all that interesting when I was watching them play. All you did was build stuff, point and click. I was confused about the game play. I was interested enough to see it, but what I saw didn't catch my attention all that much.

It all started when Chris handed me a copy of the game the week before finals week. I had the game for a few days without installing it. Chris started complaining that everybody was gone for the summer and he had nobody to play with. So I figured, might as well give it a try. I love playing games. Usually console games more than computer games. I'm better with the controller than the mouse. At first I had trouble installing it because it wouldn't install completely. I couldn't play any single player games on starcraft but I was able to run multiplayer on broodwar. I finally got into Battlenet.

I chose random for my first game. I got zerg. Chris from then on became my trainer. It was a two hour game, teaching me what to build, where to attack, how to infect and all that. I began playing Terran for the rest of the summer just because people said it was easier to learn. So I learned the tank push, the bunker defense, the supply depot - barrack, etc build order, how to build science vessels and even nuking. I played every day except for a couple days before finals. By this time it was the hardest thing to give up for school. I became addicted, just as Chris was. I became a pretty good backup for the team with all my tanks and marines.

People began rushing me with zealots at the beginning of the game so I was dead at the first few minutes because marines were weaker than zealots. Hai even kept zealot rushing me. It was pathetic. I turned to protoss as the next race I would learn. It seems to be a lot of people's favorite race. Everyone keeps rushing into each others base. The person with the most zealots won. Now I just practice, and learn from the others. Sooner or later I'll be good enough.