The College Week is an event at Asia Pacific College where almost all of the students look forward to. It has a plethora of activities for everyone, activities that are designed to engage all the students and personnel of APC and to celebrate the spirit our unity as one school.
Also, the College Week celebration this year (2016) was particularly special as it also celebrates the Silver Anniversary of Asia Pacific College.
There were many activities that happened during the College Week celebration, activities such as talks from industry professionals, sports competitions, the APC Epidemic - where people dress up as zombies and chase other people that are trying to solve the puzzles in the event and of course the highlight of the College Week, which is the Mr. And Ms. APC Pageant Competition.
But out of all the activities during the celebration, there was one that really stuck out for me. It was the "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire: ERC Edition," the only event in which I was directly a part of but didn't want to join, I was only chosen by my professor in Technical Writing because a lot of my classmates suggested me when he was looking for participants.
Everything was fine until the day of the competition came, it was March 8, 2016. My heart was pounding even though I didn't want to be a part of this competition, there was still pressure from my blockmates and my professor because they chose me and my other two blockmates to represent our block.
It also didn't help when I found out that this was a competition for all the students in the school, which meant that we weren't only up against first year students but also against higher batches. *Sigh...
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| Mr. Lapira and Mr. Yuzon preparing the stage for the semifinals. |
The competition had three rounds (Easy, Medium and Difficult) just like the original "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire," the only difference is that this is the "ERC Edition" which means that all of the questions will somehow be related to English. I assumed that we were going to be eliminated from the first round, it's not that I didn't have faith in my teammates but because in my experience, in school competitions involving all levels of students, the higher batches tend to win.
To my surprise, we were able to reach the top five in the semifinals and for a moment I thought to myself "Wow, we could actually win this..." Then the final question came, the question which would decide if we're going to compete with another block for the trophy in the final round, the question that would earn us enough points to be crowned the second placer or the first placer if we won.
The question went a little something like this: "In which publication did Ian Fleming first published his novel Dr. No?" The choices were "Oracle," "Playboy" and two others that I forgot.
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| Me (In the black shirt), realizing what I've done. |
Since I'am a person who is fond of movies and I have seen the movie adaptation of Dr. No, I thought this was going to be a breeze, but it wasn't. I ended suggesting "Oracle" to my teammates instead of "Playboy" and this costed us the chance to go in to the final round.
Long story short, that is how James Bond made my sad for a day. We lost the competition but we gained something in the process. Now I know that even as first year students we could still go toe-to-toe with the higher batches and more importantly, the experience reminded me that there is still a lot that I don't know; the reason why trying to learn something new everyday is now one of my core philosophies in life.
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