Combining our creative and innovative powers with artificial intelligence

First Lady of the land, attorney Marie Louise Araneta Marcos, retired chief justice Artemio Panganiban, board members of the Foundation for Liberty and Prosperity, friends, good evening. Many congratulations to all the awardees of the foundation; it is an honor to join the fellowship of scholars and winners.

It is always gratifying to meet talented young Filipinos – be they lawyers or gymnasts – because I get to feel the hope and ambition in our youth. Like yourselves, I was a scholar in my academic life.

When I was about to graduate from college at the Ateneo, I yearned for an MBA degree in the US.

Coming home from school one Saturday afternoon, I mustered enough courage to talk to my father, and tell him I wanted to get to the MBA program at Harvard or Wharton. I was met with silence. His unspoken message was plain and clear – “Hijo, we don’t have the money to send you abroad.”

It was a Procter & Gamble scholarship that allowed me to go to Wharton. I had to earn the scholarship in national competition. The irony was when I applied with P&G for a job post-Wharton, I was turned down. Tough luck, right?

Being only 20 years old when I stepped into Dietrich hall, I didn’t know how cold winters were in Philadelphia – and the suits my dad had made for me proved rather thin for the arctic weather. Seeing the Penn campus totally deserted during my first Thanksgiving was an entirely new experience in loneliness.

I also learned that going straight to graduate school from college at that young age was sub-optimal. My advice is to have about five years of experience in the real world before grad school. As an example, I did merger Accounting in Wharton, and knew how to do the sums – but I couldn’t relate the numbers to the real world of business.

Finally, I now know what President Hoover once said about American “rugged individualism.” I prepared my own dinners, did the laundry, managed spending holidays by myself since I had no money to go to New York – all the while competing with the best of the best at Wharton.

It does occur to me, however, that your grad school experience is likely to be wildly different from my own.

For one, there is the age gap of two generations.