Last week, I was invited to speak the Computer Science Day at the Lyceum of the Philippines University (Lyceum) and it was a very refreshing experience, like most of my talks.

First, it was my first time to be there! The university is inside Intramuros, or the historical walled city in the heart of Manila, and it is adjacent to other higher learning institutions such as the Mapúa Institute of Technology and Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila. The welcoming committee was very excited and very accommodating. After getting there, I was ushered to the College Secretary’s office and met the College Secretary himself and a few faculty members. The mood was very festive since it was a college-wide event, and perhaps a lot of students’ classes were canceled in lieu of the programmed activities.

Second, the talk itself. Drawing from speaking engagement experiences, there’s never a same audience profile. There may be some similarities, but they are always distinct. In this case at the Lyceum, the audience was lively and participating, and seemed to have an affinity for Piolo Pascual. My talk was about current trends on the web and it’s a bit surprising that all of them have a Friendster account but, as Computer Science and Information Technology students, they have limited appreciation of contemporary web platforms and technologies. It may be because the web has become such a pervasive media that it’s no longer interesting to “look under the hood.”

My talk clocked in around an hour and I was still able to take a brief tour of the school afterwards. Talks like these really make me look forward to the next talk I’ll be giving.