Refreshing Freshie Orientation

Last week, a co-worker and I was part the University-wide Freshie Orientation. It was truly a refreshing experience for me! Laughter filled the auditorium as the two hosts (a woman and a gay student) mimicked stereotypes of students from different colleges (e.g. a College of Science student would even identify the stone thrown at him by his girlfriend as "igneous" rock with some mineral content and a CHK student would do some acrobatic rounds before giving the ballpen to another student). They also did some segue ways before introducing our unit such as saying "is there a female version of the Oblation". So, I gave some trivia before elaborating about our unit such as the female Oble resides at UP College of Medicine. She is also naked; only one breast showing because she wears a sablay. The male Oble used to be totally naked but a former president placed a leaf on his organ for moral purposes. The whole auditorium was also filled with laughter when I noted that there are already twenty more genders and we only knew seven of them. In their age now, they must have known only two but later in their college years, they would be expressing other gender preferences. Another exciting part of the Orientation was the UP Street Dance. They taught several dance steps such as "jump (2x), shrug (2x), roll (2x), beat (2x)". The next day, the UP Pep Squad taught the students several UP chants like the "UP Fight', "Hey", "Hey, Hey" and the most difficult was the 'pagbabaybay ng UP'. But the one I loved most was the rendition of the UP Singing Ambassador of Leo Valdez's 'Magsimula Ka'. Oh! I could not ask for more. I hope those activities somehow inspired them to be the best persons they could be.