Posts tagged with Vinzons Hall
Last April 20, we had a turnover ceremony for the University Student Council (USC). That pseudo-officially ended our terms as members of the University Student Council. Good luck to incoming USC for 2009!
The turnover ceremony was a joint ceremony. The outgoing and the incoming editorial leadership of the Philippine Collegian also had their part of the program.
It felt a little anticlimactic for me. After all, involvement in campus issues has never really been confined to the USC, for me. And I didn’t feel that anything ended that day. Even engaging colleagues from the other parties in debates, surely, didn’t end that day–even if it was goodbye to the long and harrowing GA’s we regularly had, when we just couldn’t agree on some issues at all. Though, I’d have to say despite all that, we managed to get along somehow in the end, some more than others, politics aside of course.
Simultaneously, UP Administation officials, USC 2008 and Senator Richard Gordon unveiled a bust of Wenceslao Vinzons, which the Senator commissioned to do, in honor of the hero to whom the historic and quintessential hub of university activism and politics was named after. There were also dozens of brods present too–since Vinzons, the Senator, and a handful of members of the incoming and outgoing University Student Council are members of the Upsilon Sigma Phi.
May 3, 2008. The University Student Council (USC) General Assembly (GA) last May 3 turned out to be a controversial one, especially after I allegedly posted a “colorful” report of the proceeding–which honestly for me was equally colorful–at the USC website. Party lines were obviously drawn. Anyway, the issue is over and moot, and internal and personal issues have been resolved. All’s well, I guess.
After that said GA, we held a USC pictorial for the website and other such future publications of the student council. It was a pretty cool pictorial, despite the fact that we had to do a group picture in the middle of the afternoon near the signage of Vinzons Hall, the university’s primary “student union” building.
We had individual shots and shots by committee. I was the photographer, of course, as always.
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April 30, 2008. This was more than two weeks ago. Since I need to catch up on a long backlog, I’ll just re-post a ‘press release’ I wrote and sent to some newspapers and news networks. This was one of the first things I did as the student council’s official ‘media liaison’ or public information officer. Just a disclaimer, until then, I didn’t have any previous experience writing sending press releases, so I found this task problematic. But I’ve gotten the hang of it now, I guess.
The University Student Council (USC) of the University of the Philippines (UP) today held a press conference and forum at Vinzons Hall, the university’s main student union building, regarding the rice crisis the country is currently facing. Together with representatives from residents of the UP’s residential communities and transport groups in campus and a representative from the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), the student council demanded that the government take immediate, sustainable and pro-people solutions to the crisis.
According to its statement, the student council demanded that the government “increase its support to the National Food Authority (NFA) in its procurement of palay, dismantle the rice cartels and impose a crack down on illegal acts of price manipulation, implement a moratorium on the land-use conversion of agricultural land, and increase its investment in the agricultural sector.”
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a film school graduate, a former law student and student council officer in UP Diliman, currently part of the legislative staff of the sole youth party-list in Philippine Congress.