DARE TO BE, XXV!
August 04, 2025
by Mitchell Jared De Silva, UPCM Class of 2025
In August 2020, over a hundred strangers opened their laptops and logged into a virtual classroom, each in a different room, a different city, and for some, even a different country. There were no white coats yet, no bustling hallways of the Philippine General Hospital, and certainly no scent of formalin in the air – just a grid of unfamiliar faces, anxious smiles, and muted microphones.
That was how the UP College of Medicine Class of 2025 began: not with a bang, but with a bandwidth test. From that quiet beginning grew the courage to dare to be.
Dare to Begin
The first days of school used to mean handshakes and classroom chatter, name tags, and meal breaks with new friends. For the class, it meant introductions over Zoom and navigating asynchronous modules from the corners of our respective homes. We learned the majority of anatomy through pixelated cadavers, physiology with patchy WiFi, and biochemistry through long, drawn-out videos.
Some days felt too quiet, almost unsettling. We missed the usual noise of shared academic struggle. But from that silence, we built something new: message threads that became lifelines, Discord channels that turned into hangout spots for our new barkada, and video calls that stretched until dawn. In isolation, we found community. We dared to begin, not in the halls of UPCM, but in the uncertain space between the pandemic and our aspirations.