Crossing the Tracks

How the realities of college life lay the groundwork for what comes next

I saw the posted news on a weekend afternoon, the way you see most things now, scrolling past it on my phone, half-distracted, not really looking for anything in particular. Someone had shared a graphic showing the top schools preferred by companies when hiring across Philippine industries based on a JobStreet survey. I almost kept going until I saw my alma mater sitting at the very top of the list. One in five employers said they would choose graduates of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) over other schools, which people usually say with a certain quiet reverence.

A few hours later, a friend reposted the same social media card with his own caption. He found it absurd, with the kind of genuine disbelief you feel when something does not add up.   His point was essentially this: “How does it make sense that students who have to run across railroad tracks to get to class end up being the most preferred by most multinational companies?” I did not respond. But I held the question for a while, because I knew exactly what he meant, and I also knew, from years spent on that campus, earning a degree in Broadcast Communications and pursuing graduate studies in Mass Communications, exactly why he was missing something important.

Because the thing about PUP is that it never looked like what it produced.

What most people do not realize is how old the institution actually is. The school that would eventually become the Polytechnic University of the Philippines started in 1904 as the Manila Business School, the first business school in the country, founded under the American colonial administration in a small two-storey building on Calle Gunao in Quiapo, Manila. It went through several names over the decades, the Philippine School of Commerce, the Philippine College of Commerce, before becoming PUP in 1978 through a presidential decree, by which time it had already moved to its permanent home in Santa Mesa, Manila.


After more than a century of reinvention, the core mission has never really changed.  The university made education available to the people who needed it most, and made sure what they leave with actually means something.

By the time I enrolled, PUP was already known as the People’s University, not as a slogan but as a lived reality. The Manila campus was enormous, sprawling, and perpetually crowded, with tens of thousands of students drawn from every corner of the country.   Most of its students are from families where the cost of a degree was not an abstraction but a genuine calculation made at the kitchen table. The cost of completing college in this institution reflected all of that. Back then, what I paid for my full course was the kind of number that people today would assume you had gotten the decimal point wrong. Put it this way: a couple of coffees at Starbucks on a Friday afternoon costs less than what most on the PUP Dean’s List have paid for their entire college education back then. The whole credential, the degree that opened the first door, costs less than what many professionals carelessly spend on a single weekend outing nowadays.

That was not an accident. It was a philosophy, written in policy and enforced year after year.  It realized a lesser-known belief that where you could afford to go should not determine how far you could eventually get.

I remember arriving on my very first day at the university, still figuring out which building was which, when I realized the energy around me was off in a way I could not immediately place. A student group was staging a lightning rally in the middle of campus, flags, megaphones, organized chanting directed at the government, and just like that, classes were suspended before they had even started. I stood there for a moment, a freshman with nowhere to go, watching this unfold around me and wondering what exactly I had gotten myself into. It was not the beginning I had imagined. But it made a strange kind of sense in retrospect, because the campus had a long history of exactly this – students who felt the weight of the country’s contradictions personally and said so loudly. A handful of PUP students had marched during the First Quarter Storm in the early 70s, when a series of massive demonstrations shook the Marcos government before Martial Law came down. Political consciousness was not a club activity on this campus; it is the air you breathe on the way to class.

That disorientation faded over time, as it always does when a place becomes like your second home. You learned the routine. You work on a schedule built around three class days a week, not because the program was light, but because the university understood that most students were stretching their allowances thin on jeepney fares, leaving extra money you got to keep. You learned that lunch meant the goto place on Teresa Street, a small, cramped joint that fit maybe ten people comfortably and routinely held twice that. You would squeeze in with your classmates, order a bowl, eat quickly because there was always another class pulling at your attention, and you would be back on your feet before the table had fully cleared. Nobody lingered. The margins were too small for that, as the day was always moving.

And then there were the mornings when you miscalculated the Philippine National Railways train schedule. The railroad tracks ran close enough to campus that they were simply part of your geography, a variable you factored into your morning the way other people factored in traffic. You would be on your way to your first class, already cutting it close, when the train would come through, and the crossing would close. There was simply nothing you could do about it except stand there with everyone else, shift your weight from foot to foot, check your watch, and accept the math. You were going to be late and walk into class, mid-lecture, find a seat quietly, and catch up on what you missed by borrowing someone’s notes. It happened to everyone. After a while, you stopped treating it as a crisis and started treating it as a variable, one more thing in a long list of things you could not control but had to work around.

None of this felt significant at the time. It was just the texture of an ordinary day.

The campus had a rhythm to it that felt almost village-like after a while. You saw the same faces every week, the guy who always fell asleep in the back row, the group that claimed the same table outside the canteen every single day, the security guard who knew everyone by name. It was that kind of place. Familiar, predictable, comfortable in its own unhurried way. Every once in a while, the universe threw you something unexpected, like that one afternoon I wandered past the gym and caught then-commercial model Richard Gomez, years before Ormoc and Congress, shooting hoops with other students like it was just another Friday. I just kept walking. These are things you just file away and move on from, because that was how state university life worked.

It was only much later, out in the working world, that I started to understand what all of those ordinary days had actually been doing to us.

When employers say they are looking for resilience, they mean they want people who have already been tested before they arrive. People who know what it feels like when things do not go according to plan and those who have developed, through experience, the instinct to adjust rather than freeze. What they want is someone who has already stood at that railroad crossing enough times to stop being rattled by it, who has already eaten lunch standing up in a cramped stall and gotten back to work, who has already walked into a cancelled class on their first day and figured out what to do next. Resilience is not a personality trait you are born with. It accumulates, through years of navigating an environment that never adjusted itself to your comfort, and you do not even notice it happening until one day, you are in a difficult meeting or a collapsing project, and you realize you are the calmest person in the room.

Problem-solving at PUP was rarely the kind that happened in a controlled setting with clearly defined parameters. It was the kind that happened when the photocopier was broken, and your thesis was due. It is when your group member did not show up, and you had to present anyway, or when the power went out during a production exercise, and you had to improvise your way through it. You solved problems not because the course required you to demonstrate problem-solving skills but because the day demanded it, constantly and without warning. Over time, that demand became a kind of fluency or ease with figuring things out under pressure. 

Hard work was perhaps the most quietly radical thing about the whole experience. Not an ideal that was preached, but a condition you learned to live with.  When timing your mornings around jeepneys and trains that do not consult your schedule, you do not have the luxury of going through the motions. You are already spending too much energy just showing up, so you make every hour of class count.  That urgency becomes a habit, something that you will remember even when you are no longer in school and into every office and every meeting and every deadline you will ever face.

None of these is to say that PUP produces the only graduates worth hiring. The list itself makes clear that employers are drawing from many institutions with good reason.

University of the Philippines (UP) graduates carry a certain sharpness with them, an analytical rigor, a comfort with complexity and ambiguity, a habit of questioning until things hold. De La Salle University (DLSU) produces graduates who know how to present and communicate, who carry themselves in boardrooms with a confidence that feels grounded rather than performed. University of Santo Tomas (UST) is consistent and structured, its long history producing generations of steady, reliable professionals.

Mapúa Institute of Technology (MIT) and Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP) turn out engineers who are precise and applied, comfortable working through problems with both their hands and their minds. Alongside them are institutions that have built their strength around industry alignment and practical training, such as Asia Pacific College and Treston International College, where the focus is less on theory alone and more on how learning translates into the workplace.

And then there are the schools embedded in their regions, Batangas State University (BSU), University of Cebu, and University of Mindanao, whose graduates bring a strong understanding of their local industries, shaped by close connections to the communities they serve.

Each school produces a distinct way of thinking because each one is shaped by a different environment. Academic institutions shape people in ways that no syllabus ever fully captures. What employers are responding to, when they look at school preferences, is not really institutional reputation at all.  It is the pattern of qualities that each environment tends to develop:   the thinking habits, the work ethic, the way someone reacts when the plan breaks down, and when nobody is there to tell them what to do next.

The graduates PUP has produced across the decades offer a glimpse of what a single environment, built on a stubborn belief in access and purpose, can shape over time.

One path led from a classroom in Sta. Mesa to Beijing, where Jaime FlorCruz would eventually serve as Philippine Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, following a four-decade career as one of Asia’s most respected foreign correspondents, including roles as bureau chief for both TIME and CNN. What began as a student trip to China in 1971 became something far more defining.

Careers took form in different ways. Benjamin Punongbayan founded what would become one of the country’s most respected auditing firms, P&A Grant Thornton. Fernando L. Martinez built Eastern Group and Eastern Petroleum into significant enterprises. Artist Carlo Pagulayan brought his work to an international audience, illustrating titles such as The Incredible Hulk and Elektra for Marvel Comics.


In other fields, Architect Royal Pineda went on to design some of the country’s most recognizable structures, from the New Clark International Airport to Mactan-Cebu International Airport Terminal 2 and the Philippine Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020, helping shape a distinctly modern Filipino architectural voice. 

Engineer Rosella “Seya” Belmonte built her career in construction and development over more than three decades, working across technical services, sustainability, and urban infrastructure. As an engineer, she has been instrumental in shaping Bonifacio Global City, contributing to the development of one of the country’s most prominent urban centers.

These are not people who succeeded in spite of where they studied. They succeeded in ways shaped by the conditions in which they were formed –  resourcefulness, tolerance for difficulty, and the habit of moving forward without waiting for things to become ideal.

So when I think about my friend’s comment about PUP students running across railroad tracks, I am not defensive anymore. The feeling is something closer to quiet recognition.

The tracks were real. The goto in Teresa Street was real. The rally that cancelled my first day of college was real. The tuition that cost less than a weekend’s worth of coffee was real. They pointed to a quiet, stubborn idea: that a degree should be within reach of anyone willing to work for it, even when the odds were not exactly in their favor.

None of it was romantic while it was happening. It was just life, and we moved through it the way you move through anything that becomes routine, without fully understanding how much it would matter later.  The qualities employers say they are looking for, like instinct and a genuine willingness to put in the work, do not come from being told those things matter. They come from a thousand mornings where the only way forward was to figure it out and keep moving.

Universities never promised anyone a smooth road. They simply gave you the kind of days that made you better at walking on uneven ground or waiting for the train to pass.