Daybreak

As she goes down from the hill, scholar, student leader, and Program Awardee for Psychology Trisha Anne K. Reyes reflects on how her pre-collegiate AJSS experience helped her find her daybreak.

There is a moment when, if you catch it at the right time, you can feel the Ateneo campus come to life. 

It sounds like the leaf blowers in Zen Garden, clearing away fallen orange leaves. The breeze is cold as it dances down empty corridors. The fluorescent lights are still lit from the evening prior. The smell of food prepared early in Gonzaga wafts out of the cafeteria doors. Laughter trickles in through the air, carried by other early birds meeting friends in Gonzaga for breakfast. Notebooks, books, and laptops are sprawled out across tables for the last-minute cram study session. Then slowly, everything gets louder. More cars rumble past the drop-offs or into parking slots. The sleeping students on the Kostka benches wake up, and chatter fills the air. What was once empty is steadily being filled with footsteps and conversation: corridors, classrooms, MVP landings, and org rooms. Finally, someone switches off the fluorescent lights. The soft rays of the rising sun filter through the windows and down the corridors, between the branches of trees lining the pathways. And so the day begins. 

It is this quiet transition that I miss the most about being on-campus. It is my favorite moment to catch. For sure many of us miss the big moments on campus一the org event you worked on for months on end or the sheer relief after the final exam of a challenging semester. But ask any recent graduate, and I bet they’d talk about missing their quiet moments too: joking with seatmates to keep awake in class, walking along Katipunan or Regis looking for a place to eat, praying in Gesù or the LS chapel before a big test. Magical, in-between moments that let you breathe before the next big thing.
 

I first encountered this in-between space the morning  of the 49th Ateneo Junior Summer Seminar (AJSS) opening, the day I started my journey with Ateneo de Manila. I remember sitting on a bench outside Faber Hall, watching the sunrise just beyond Bellarmine Field, feeling nervous about meeting new people. AJSS was a special program offered to only a few top third-year high school students in the country. The program boasted of classes in the Ateneo campus under the best professors the university had to offer. Along with the academic classes were the promises of meeting other bright young minds, engaging in fun bonding activities on-campus and off-campus (field trips!), and getting a taste of that “college life” without the risk and fears of actual college. 

In short, AJSS was a nerd camp. I didn’t know it yet that quiet morning, but it was exactly what I needed at that time. I entered AJSS as a big fish in a small pond. I needed AJSS as an eye-opening, growing-pains kind of experience. It was incredibly humbling to be surrounded by so much talent, both from my peers and professors. Despite being a nerd camp, what AJSS really taught me was that there was so much more to life and learning than simply excelling. AJSS allowed me to open myself to the lessons Ateneo had for me later in my college life. 

AJSS also gave me a home in Ateneo before I was even in Ateneo as a college student. The Office of Admission and Aid (OAA) gave AJSS kids a standing invitation to drop in whenever we wanted to. The OAA is and always will be open to scholars, but I found a special place in the OAA particularly because of my AJSS experience.In addition, older mentor figures in the form of our AJSS facilitators inspired me to join organizations that I was part of until I graduated. One of the reasons I chose to go to Ateneo, actually, was the organizational culture that I encountered in AJSS. Youth organizations were already an essential, formative part of my high school student life; the vibrant organization life in Ateneo called to my student leader-heart. 

The biggest reason I chose to go to Ateneo, though, was the privilege of becoming an Ateneo Freshman Merit Scholar. Being a merit scholar meant the option to study in Ateneo; I would not be able to afford an Ateneo education without a scholarship. The merit scholarship enabled me to choose to become an Atenean confidently. We often use the phrase "privilege to study in Ateneo'' when speaking of having a scholarship; privilege here, to me, means both opportunity and responsibility. Yes, the merit scholarship gave me a chance. But being a scholar in Ateneo also taught me that being privileged carries a responsibility to eventually pay that opportunity forward through whatever brand of service you find yourself in一monetary or otherwise. I think the scholars’ organization in Ateneo uses the word pagtatayâ to capture this duality perfectly; may nagtayâ para sa amin, kaya't nagtatayâ rin kami para sa iba. As a merit scholar, I was happy to volunteer and work with the OAA on special events for scholars. From Scholars’ Nights to Merit/Director’s List Receptions to Open Houses, I had the opportunity to share my experiences with other scholars in the hopes that they find something they can resonate with and maybe choose to become an Atenean as well. 

Informed by my experience in high school and AJSS, I entered college determined to let go of the “high expectations” I had for myself regardless of the merit scholarship. I excelled academically in high school since I was on scholarship, and I was so overburdened by this expectation that I'd crumble under it sometimes. I wanted a clean slate: I didn't aim to get honors or awards. I wanted to actually experience and enjoy things. I chose professors primarily for what I could learn and how I could be challenged. I wasn't perfect; I’d sometimes slip into old habits of wanting an ideal semester for the sake of it. But I surprised myself with how willing I was to let go of these impossible standards and allow myself to grow through the process一and to let the fruits be the rewards I reap from that growth, instead of being the goal themselves. 

I like to believe that growth has manifested itself in how I live today, especially in how I serve. Being an Atenean has taught me that serving others starts with meeting them where they are, listening to their story, and walking their path with them. So often, we use reasoning and frameworks to create projects that respond to certain needs, regardless of field; Ateneo showed me the value of identifying these needs and solutions by starting with the people before anywhere else. This is the education of care I take most pride in as a graduate of Ateneo. 

This is by no means unique一and I think we should hope, really, that all Ateneans graduate as this kind of person. To borrow the words of one of my Philosophy professors (who was my professor both in AJSS and in college): Ateneo education is a "disturbing" education. Many Ateneans, myself included, come from positions of relative or extreme privilege. Through its education and community I think Ateneo tries to challenge that and calls us to be disturbed by realities that we should find disturbing. We should be disturbed by injustice, discrimination, and systemic oppression一even if, and especially when, we can be insulated from these by our privilege. We study and build skills in specialized areas within this larger, all-important context of justice and hope. We are called to choose the more loving option. 

In a world that is getting increasingly more complex, gray, and muddled, too often, the right choice is obscured.  So It's a given that we won't always know or do the right thing. This is why I think it's so powerful to ground ourselves to act in and out of love一something that, despite obscurity, will still stand out the clearest. "I scarcely know where to begin," Emily Dickinson wrote once in a letter, "but love is always a safe place." 

Ateneo has reshaped the way I look at the world, with its emphasis on seeing and loving the "others" in our lives. The loving option we learn as Ateneans, will always include a connection with others that we advocate for and try to be with. Whatever else I end up doing after I graduate, it is this loving option for the other that I will always know to seek.

I haven’t been able to feel the campus come to life in a long while, because we all continue to face a massive, devastating, terrifying pandemic in our lives一a disruption that many uses to define the passage of time. But, for my fellow batchmates, a new kind of disruption has entered our lives: graduation, and the need to start from square one again in whatever world we enter next. 

Time away from the campus has also given me time to miss the quiet transitions the most. In the face of big moments, big fears, and big changes that we use to define our lives, I hope we don’t lose sight of the quiet transitions. Mark the passage of time with both the big and small wins, especially these days where the small always seems not enough and the big always seems insurmountable. Find those magical, in-between moments that let you breathe before the alarm clock rings or the big moments call. Let the sun filter in. Let the day begin.