NSTP

It's a bit late. Look at me. I'm a college graduate already. But one of the things I think about whenever I think of college is NSTP.

NSTP: National Service Training Program

NSTP was well and nice. The program forced Ateneo kids to remove their blinders, get out of their comfort zone, and assist the community in a way they saw fit.

But it could be improved because, to tell you honestly, the process sucked. You have a bunch of kids every semester. They do a project, implement it, and move on. Then another batch comes along and does the same thing.

The problem about this approach is that, first, there's no sense of continuity. The community knows its needs and, most often, these needs cannot be addressed in a single semester. Most needs are complex, requiring special intervention for months or even years.

However, since kids are only in the area for one semester only, the solutions they propose is equally piece-meal in proportion to the community's needs. And since a given class is not entirely sure whether their project will still be implemented even after they're gone, the timelines for these projects are limited to that single semester alone.

This situation is a recipe, not for community building, but for pent-up frustration and waste over time. It also doesn't benefit the students as well as it should. By focusing on short-term solutions, students miss out on the discipline of planning and implementing multi-year community work, work which is best done in stages and which will involve hundreds of actors, including the other batches who will be working in the area in the next few years.

If I had my way, facilitators of this program would have done the community a greater deal of service by mapping out what exactly the school, as an institution, should do. There must be a 'road map' about what kind of service the community needs and how the different classes can meet these needs in the future.

By establishing where to start, there's a lot of waste that is eliminated. Currently, every semester begins with a class brainstorming about what to do with the community and they do it. Then, the next semester begins and the cycle starts anew. The community members tell the class what they need, the class figures out if they can do it, and they start a project. Over and over again. On the other hand, by agreeing on a set condition of what must be achieved through the school's NST Program, both the facilitators and the community are saved of this redundant fact-finding stage.

Through a road map comes a more unified vision of what the school intends to accomplish over the years. And with a vision comes a more comprehensive plan of what to do, a plan that will transcend the limitations of what a 'one-semester' timeline can impose.