Day Three – Day Two of the Prep Course
May 27th, 2011
Today went so much better than yesterday. After consoling myself through my blog and accepting that I should just work hard to stay in ME rather than beat everyone else, I started the day feeling tentative. I had no idea how the advertising game would go, and how it would make me feel.
Today was also a pretty weird day. So weird, in fact, that it seems almost unbelievable. For starters, let me tell you about the Secret Task.
Each team (if you can recall the teams) member of a team has to do a ‘Secret Task’ that only he/she knows about. It’s scribbled on a piece of blue paper with your name on it. Mine was ‘Tell a knock-knock joke to 5 of your team members.’ I had to ask help from my very special and very helpful friend, Alex who told me about a few knock-knock jokes that made me laugh. The problem was actually getting the courage to tell these to my teammates.
EDIT: I realized that I wasn’t able to do the secret task because it slipped my mind. I wonder if Aldrich and Bea know...
I planned on telling them during lunch, but when lunch came, the timing just wasn’t right. I decided to just go after them one on one. So during lunch my other teammate, Chrissie, was reacting to her Secret Task. While she was trying to convince my other teammate, Matthew, to help her do it without actually telling him what it was, my mind wandered…
I imagined if my Secret Task was to do the thing in 500 Days of Summer when you have to say ‘penis’ and the next person has to say it louder and you keep going. After lunch, we were asked to head back to Escaler Hall when Chrissie came up to me and asked, “Do you want to help me do my secret task? Did you watch 500 Days of Summer?” and I said, “Hang on… I think I know what you’re task is!” and she said “Yeah!” and then we laughed and laughed.
She did it with our other team mate as we walked back to the Hall, they were yelling ‘PENIS!’ although Enrique was saying it like ‘pee-NISSSS!’ to hide the fact that he was actually saying ‘penis.’
This task eventually led to the changing of our Star Wars team yell to ‘Vwoosh, vwooosh, PENIS!’ (the ‘vwoosh’ is the lightsaber sound)
And BELIEVE ME, I had no idea that that was her secret task at all. I didn’t even subconsciously know that that was her task, so it was really weird that I thought of the 500 Days thing out of nowhere. Mmmm... female intuition...
Another weird thing that I can’t explain is my other teammate Micx (I don’t know his last name or his real name but I know he’s on Facebook). It’s like I’ve seen him before, but maybe that’s just because he looks like a thinner version of Jag-Jag’s older brother. He’s white, wears glasses, and has acne. And he is also a dancer and walks kind of… you know... (I know because I walked a few paces behind him on the way to the bathroom). Anyway, he has this older brother who was part of the Traveling Salesman game. I think I better explain to you the game, or else you’ll be slightly confused.
So on the first day of ME Prep Course, towards the end we were asked to make a Hollywood star. (Make her top, bottoms, and accessories and give him/her a whole new persona) Yesterday, we also completed the ‘prototype’ of our design. To give you a brief description of what my group mates decided (emphasis on my group mates because I, having no interest or experience in fashion, didn’t really participate in the designing part) it was like this:
We all had to buy one plain white shirt because that was what we mainly had to sell to the people. So our plain white shirt was decorated with a black and red gothic star look with other splattered-looking designs. It was really very simple which—today—turned out to be a really good thing. (EDIT: Because we had to make the shirts talaga so the simpler the better so we could finish faster. There was a time limit kasi.) **(EDIT: Oh, God, I'm such a conyo loser.) The upper part of the shirt was bare because the boys managed to haggle a couple of beaded necklaces that we could use as accessories.
The skirt was made up of three layers of scrap cloth—yellow, green, and purple (it was likened to many things, among them halo-halo and eggplant) masking-taped, yes, MASKING TAPED, together. We opted against buying thread and needles because they cost so freaking much.
If I hadn’t already told you, the people selling (it’s all fake selling, we used imaginary money) have really high mark-ups apparently (I don't really know what that means, but I'll use it for now). For example, a P7.00 paint brush was sold for, like, P40.00.
So anyway, we were talking about Micx, right. But I have to explain the game so please keep up.
After we dressed up our model, which was Chrissie, we had to perform a commercial. We went with Lady Gaga and her song ‘Poker Face’. The boys in my team were mostly dancers, so they played Lady Gogo’s (yes, the name is extremely lame and so is the reason: ‘because she’s always on the go-go’) back-up dancers. I played a fan and the designer of the shirt when I actually just helped in making it.
Our performance was okay, but the other teams’ were just really nice and well thought-of. No bitter feelings here haha, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was really fun. I had never been less nervous about going on stage in front of 200+ people before.
So our comment from the freakishly strict Bianca (?) was that the dancers were really good, and she was also the one who called our skirt eggplant-looking. Oh! And she said that it was fitting that we chose Lady Gaga because Chrissie looked ‘ewan’ and everybody in the Hall went like “Ohhhhhhhhh!” and the hosts were like saying, “Hey, there’s another Mean Girl here!” (One of the teams was Mean Girls, so that's kinda supposed to be a joke...)
So anyway, the next part of the game was going around campus and trying to sell it to people. The MEA really planned this out well because they stationed two people in different parts of the campus as prospective buyers. They had their own personalities, which made everything so much more fun.
Our first stop was Paris Hilton, her stuffed dog, and her bodyguard at the Cafeteria. The main objective was to try and sell our shirt, the white shirt cost P40.00 (isn’t it weird how everything seems to cost 40 haha) and if we added the price of paint we realized we needed to sell the shirts for P75.00 each or more in order for us to earn a profit (it’s not really our profit and it's not really real money).
If the celebrity wasn’t convinced (which, I think, is a scripted part, they were told NOT to be convinced) we would ask stuff like, “What can we do to make you buy it?” so Paris asked our team to produce a girl and boy, and the boy would take her stuffed dog and pole dance around the girl. It’s not as dirty as it sounds, but it looked dirty hahaha. Rica (the girl from Philippine Science High School) volunteered herself to be the pole, and judging from her face as Sam (my other teammate) danced around her, she totally regretted it. Sam looked like an expert pole-dancer.
But still, Paris was not convinced. She asked us what other talent we knew and Rica bent her fingers backwards and I was freaked out by that. Then Rommel made his tongue dance, but what made Paris really laugh was when… crap, I forgot his name… Rey, maybe, touched his nose with his tongue. So she bought, I think two shirts for P95 each. Not bad, eh.
Our next stop was Miranda Priestly (?) and her assistant from The Devil Wears Prada. Man, was she a bitch. She was totally not impressed by us, so we danced for her. In the end she only bought one shirt for P60 and we had to settle because she was threatening to, well, not leave, but you get the idea.
Next was (don’t worry, we’ll get to Micx’s weird thing soon) these two really funny ballet dancers. The theme was Black Swan, they spent the entire time ballet dancing which was really funny. They also talked in this weird, otherworldly voice and they kept saying that we should dance with them and “lose ourselves in the music.”
At first we were just standing there and saying stuff like, "Sige na, P150." Then they would say "Whyyy aren't youuu danciiiing? You must loooose yourselves in the muuuuusiiiic..."
So we all danced in slow-motion ballet, and while we haggled the boys started speaking in the weird voice that they were doing and they asked, “whyyy are you copying our voooooice?” and Sam said, “Because we lost ourselves in the muuuuusiiiic…” and we all laughed.
So the next stop was Hannah Montana and this short girl wearing a striped jacket and a beanie. I didn’t know who the little girl was until we left. I found out she was Lily haha.
So Hannah Montana was probably the coolest one, because we had to do the Hoedown Throwdown and that was soooo fun. I never liked dancing but this was a dance I didn't mind doing. Speaking of my lack of dancing skills, there was another cool dancing experience but I’ll tell you about that later.
So Hannah was really REALLY nice, but we only got to sell her a couple of shirts for P60 because we were almost out of time. She was really flattered by us because we said the star on our shirt was for her.
Oh! We also had to sell our product to Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Since our theme was Lady Gogo, it went really well. She asked us to sing and dance Poker Face and we did (yeah, I did! Can you believe that? I actually danced haha) and then Katy Perry asked us to sing some of her songs so we sang Teenage Dream . In the end they bought five shirts for P120 each. That was the most expensive shirt we sold.
Next comes the weird part. We went all the way to the farthest building, which looked like the place for Med students, where the supposed Troy and Gabriella were. The guy playing Troy was Micx’s older brother (there were similarities) and the WEIRDEST thing was, I felt like I knew them already, which was impossible. But seriously, I felt like I already met these two brothers before.
The older brother was like this, cool, I-don’t-care guy who always had one eyebrow raised and Micx was this dorky, slightly gay, dancer boy. (EDIT: He did a really crazy thing in the last day, better watch out!) You wouldn’t understand because obviously, you’re not me haha, but this was just really weird.
By this time, we only had five minutes left, and I could see my faci—short for ‘facilitator’, sophomore students who were in charge of the teams—Bea was getting worried.
So in the end, after dancing ‘We’re All in this Together’ we were unable to sell any shirts to Troy and Gabriella. Some of my team members felt that we should just sell one more shirt for a high price. We stopped selling many shirts for a small price because that would mean more work for us.
The last celebrity we tried to squeeze in were Brad and Angelina. It was hopeless from the start. We only wanted to sell one shirt for a lot of money, but Brangelina needed to buy a lot to give to the children of Africa. My teammates' argument was that they could give it to their favorite child but they said no. So we just gave up. Oh, not before they asked us to do 30 Jumping Jacks.
So the next weird thing happened when we were making the shirts. I worked with Rica to paint the shirts while the others made the skirts. I think we had sold only 17 shirts and 7 skirts. So I was smearing the shirt with red and black paint when I remembered this dream I had this summer. I wasn’t even sure if it was a dream because it could also be déjà vu.
I was sitting in the exact same place, to my left were the stairs that led downstairs. I remember in this dream/déjà vu that I was sitting on the floor working, when my older brother, Francis, who graduated BS Mgt years ago, came up and told me he going to start teaching at the Ateneo.
Well, my brother didn’t show up, but I remember in that dream I was doing the exact same thing: hand painting a T-shirt. Weeeeeird...
Okay, so what else do I have to tell you… oh, the funny dancing thing. And the game show!
So funny dancing thing. This was the first activity that we did. We (the freshies) had no energy in the morning so they decided to have this exercise activity. The first was what they called the traditional ME breakfast. It was not a real breakfast, it was this crazy fun dance where you prepare your own breakfast. The funniest step was when we had to put bacon on our sandwich so we had to ‘kill the pig.’ We looked like the Spartans of 300 stabbing invisible pigs with our spears.
So after that they called on a guy who made us do some dance steps. It was really cool because at first, it seemed like he was just thinking of the steps on the spot. The song playing was California Girls by Katy Perry. So we did the steps and they were really fun. Then the next song was a Justin Bieber song, I think it was ‘Somebody to Love’ and we were all like, ‘woahhh’ because suddenly the dance steps coincided with the song. Like, there’s this one step where we look like we’re playing the violin and there was actually a part in the song when Justin says ‘violin’ haha.
So anyway…
Before I talk about the game show, I’ll tell you how my day got lifted up. Remember yesterday I was really bummed because I felt so stupid? Well, we were having this batch picture where we went into the grassy part and had to form the Hollywood star on the floor thing.
Our team was part of the star so we were placed in positions. Some people were on the roof, directing the other MEA members to fix the arrangement. While we were waiting, we got to chat with my other faci, Aldrich, who is really handsome haha. So we were talking about Math 18 a/b, which is the Math for ME freshmen. He told us about his first Long Test. You see, in ME, if you fail your first two LT’s in Math, you’re out of the program. Harsh, eh? But apparently, this year it’s different, if you fail your Ma18 a/b, you can take basic Math and come back to ME, that would take longer, but at least, right?
So anyway, he said he got a low score on his first LT because he was really nervous and got mental blocked. So he advised us to just relax. And the thing he said that somewhat made me feel good was when he said that he didn’t know what polar coordinates were and he asked if we studied that in High school, I nodded and he said, “Yung may flower na graph, diba?” and I was like, “Yeah!” and so I felt relieved because there was finally something I know that my other teammates didn’t! I knew they didn’t because they said “no” when he asked if they studied that in High school.
So I felt really good after that. Next was the game show (these events are not in order, mind you). It was themed like that show… Hollywood Squares, I think. I remember watching this on Star World when I was really young, after or before that show was the Brady Bunch haha. Anyway, it wasn’t the tic-tac-toe way, since we were many teams.
There would be a question, and the hosts would call on the TLC’s, that’s also what they call the faci’s, it stands for… ‘Teaching and Learning Catalysts’. It was scripted again, because obviously they had to know the answers. The questions were about random things, but there were also Math questions. I didn’t answer much of the Math questions because I knew the others would answer them better and correctly haha. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel bad. I was more into the game than trying to be good at math this time.
There were other questions anyway. Like, what was the name of the new POTC movie (On Stranger Tides) what did Lindsay Lohan say her Halloween costume was in Mean Girls (Ex-wife, I tried asking Alex what the answer was but then Rey answered it like *snap* and we all looked at him and he said, "Ano? Kakapanuod ko lang.."), what’s the name of the photocopy lady in Ateneo (Ate Alma), how many D’s can you have to stay in ME (One overall, yes that’s scary), and others.
The math questions, honestly, I could have answered. Or at least tried to answer, and I would’ve gotten the correct answer. But I didn’t bring a pen so I didn’t take a piece of scratch paper.
There was also a question worth five points. It was taken from the movie 21 probably because it was related somewhat to probability or statistics. It’s the one that goes like:
If you have 3 chests and one of them contains the prize, and you chose A, and the hosts opens chest C and shows you that there is nothing in there, will your chances increase if you switch chests?
This was a tricky one because the question is a little weird. We answered No at first because when there were 3 chests your chances were 1/3 or 33.33% chance, and when he took away one, it became 50% chance, so if you switch your chances would be the same, right? But somehow in the end we changed our answer to Yes because we understood the question to be ‘would your chance to win the prize increase ?’ and yes, from 33.33% it increased to 50%.
But while our answer was waiting to be checked, we were thinking the answer is ‘No’ again because there was still the question of ‘switching chests’ after the guy removed one. But ‘Yes’ was the correct answer anyway. So I guess we just didn’t hear the question right or the question was wrongly stated.
Oh, and we had a talk with Professor Chan Shiao…or something like that.
EDIT: It was Christian Chan Shio
Finished BS and MS Mathermatics in ADMU
Sir Christian Chan Shio is an instructor in the Math Department where he has taught among others the usual ME Math subjects: Ma 18, 21, 22, and 151.
EDIT: The whole treasure chest thing, was actually a probability concept called the Monty Hall Problem. Math 151 talks about Elementary Probability Theory and basically the explanation to that lies in the fact that you had a much greater chance of picking an empty one first.
[If you don't want to read my explanation, you can click on the link to go to a YT video, or you can just skip this altogether. and read the paragraph after the next.]
The problem goes: you have 3 chests, one contains the treasure and two are empty. You have 2/3 chance of getting nothing, and 1/3 of getting the treasure. The host, who knows which chests are which, opens one that he knows is empty. Now he asks if you want to switch, so you weigh your options in terms of probabilities. You're now thinking, you have a 50-50 chance of getting the treasure since only two chests remain. 1/2 is much better than your odds the first time, which was 1/3. So your odds increased. But do you switch? You'd say it doesn't matter. However, the correct answer is counter-intuitive. You should switch because the probability that you picked an empty chest is 2/3 at the beginning, and if the host opens the only other empty chest, you're certain that the other (not yours) chest has the treasure! Now you say, yeah but that's assuming you know that you did get the empty one. What if you got picked the one with the treasure first? And you'd have a point, but in terms of probability you are more likely to pick an empty one than the treasure one anyway. That's why I said the explanation is basically the fact that you have a higher chance of picking an empty chest first. So this problem would work even if you had 100 treasure chests and the host opens 98 of them so you're left with two. Since you had a 99/100 chance of picking an empty one, and the host opens all the other empty ones, the one he left unopened is MOST PROBABLY the one that contains the treasure.
[Continuing from Chan Shio]
Our faci’s said he was the best professor we could get for Math. UN-FRACKING-FORTUNATELY, he would NOT be teaching Ma18 this year.
Instead, we have a high possibility of getting the ‘terror profs’ that the ME students call GCF—it’s a play on the mathematical ‘greatest common factor’, it actually means… uh… Garces (?) C-something and Francisco. They are the WORST teachers you could possibly get. Francisco is actually nicknamed FFFF because her name is F-something F. Francisco and the last F is your grade.
Funny and terrifying at the same time. The worst of them is Cabral! I think that’s her/his name. I think it’s a she. She doesn’t give partial points (it’s what Aldrich calls points profs give for just writing the given or having a solution). My other faci, Bea, told us about her prof that got pissed at one student and walked out of their class and just said, “see you at the long tests!” so they had to self-study until the long test.
So, what else… Oh, we also had another talk from an ME student who graduated last year. He is now an Asst. Brand Manager at P&G in charge of Gillette and Growth products. I don’t know why I remembered this and not other important stuff. Anyway, he talked about his love for Marketing and he gave away some P&G stuff to those who asked questions.
EDIT: He was Raymond Castillo
Graduated BS ME in 2010 and is currently an Assistant Brand Manager in Procter & Gamble
He graduated with an Honorable Mention Awards last 2010 under BS ME. Presently, he works as an Asst. Brand Manager for Growth Brands for P&G Philippines. Some of his incredible achievements include the following:
Being a National Finalist in the L’Oreal Brandstorm 2010: Named Champion for the University of the Philippines Junior Marketing Association Major Marketing Event Electrify last August 2009; Name Best Intern for Johnson and Johnson Shine Internship program last May 2009.
What else… what else… I tried using the vending machine but I couldn’t get it to work so I just gave up.
Okay, just a reflection. I really think this ME Prep Course thing was really helpful. We got to understand more about our course and how it is true, what I’ve read about in forums online, one of the BEST things about ME are the people you meet. All the upperclassmen, the faci’s, the members of MEA, they all seem to be really good friends. And they all seem really fun people. And they also have time to participate in orgs like the Blue Repertory, Ateneo’s theatre group where Aldrich is a member of. Or the Blue Babble, the cheerleading org, where Bea is a cheerleader.
So, you see, the students at ME are not only smart, but they’re talented, too. And sometimes that makes me feel bad, you know, like, can I be as talented as they are? And it also makes me feel more comfortable because you start to think that, if they have time to be a part of orgs and still maintain in ME, then I could, too. It’s just all about working hard.
It’s also hard to adjust to the fact that everyone around me is SMART (and I don’t mean the SIM card, but it's true, I think Ateneo favors SMART over GLOBE). I can’t find any GG people here haha. I’ll miss hearing people say “GG ako sa exam!”
Anyway, it’s already 8PM and they asked us to get a lot of rest because we will be having a REAL Amazing Race tomorrow. We’re gonna get down and dirrrty.
EDIT: Steps O'Fifteen didn't upload any new pics yet so...
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