The Best Thing

What's the best thing that happened to you lately?
For me, bar none, was going back to school after I was accepted as one of the nine new fellows of the Ateneo's Center for Journalism MA in Journalism program this school year.
The program is something like 70 percent online learning and 30 percent on-campus. We started the online classes last June 14 and it was some experience. But the bext thing yet happened on August 8. On that rainy Monday morning, I finally came face to face with my classmates when we took part in the on-campus component of our masters' class, in Ateneo's SocSci building. Imagine putting a face to the name I only encountered online (although I already met my batch days earlier on August 5; we had our orientation and entrance examination that rainy Saturday). This was the special part of the whole experience - meeting my classmates majority of whom are practicing journalists in the country as well as from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Burma/Thailand.
What followed was two weeks of tough classroom sessions, hurdling through thick readings, doing assignments and group reports and bonding with classmates after class.
The close of the campus sessions was tough - it was hard to part ways with people that I felt I've known for a long time. After taking a two week leave for the campus sessions, I return to work feeling reinvigorated yet sad after the whole experience. Here is a link courtesy of my classmate from Singapore - Trix, to some pictures she took of our classmates and class. Also, here is another link to another classmate's site - Chingbee's . These photos are but only a few of those taken of the wonderful people that I had for company. Look them all up and see what a wonderful time we all had. (Attending to school matters was what also took my time away from blogging that's why it's only now that I'm able to post again here).