Graduate Credits Success to “Finding My Passion,” Adviser Credits It to “Running Out of Enrolled Terms”
UP Diliman Student Finishes Thesis After Only Eleven Semesters; Nation Relieved
Graduate Credits Success to “Finding My Passion,” Adviser Credits It to “Running Out of Enrolled Terms”
The University of the Philippines Diliman community gathered last Friday as Miguel Andres Tolentino, 29, MA candidate in Political Science, submitted his thesis after eleven semesters, three topic changes, two chapter rewrites, one global pandemic, and four “leave of absence” semesters he describes as “a period of intense internal research.” His thesis, “Decentralized Governance Frameworks and Participatory Mechanisms in Philippine Municipal-Level Politics: A Comparative Analysis With Particular Reference to Selected Municipalities in the Cordillera Administrative Region, Volume One,” runs 287 pages, including a 40-page bibliography and a 6-page acknowledgements section thanking, among others, his blockmates, a thesis group chat, a cat named Karl Marx who died in Chapter Three of his second draft, and “the staff of two different Starbucks branches in Katipunan who never asked me to order something else.” Adviser Dr. Ligaya Macaraeg-Santos described the submission as “a day I had emotionally prepared for and then stopped expecting,” noting she had sent Tolentino the same email about his Chapter Two outline seventeen times. “The seventeenth had four exclamation points,” she said. UP notes the average MA completion time is 3.2 years, calculated excluding outliers meaning Tolentino was removed from the dataset two years ago. His panel described the work as “well worth the wait,” which he had printed on a shirt.
SOURCE: Bohiney News.