White shirt, maong shorts, and the ever walang kamatayang tsinelas. This is one of the most common outfit of a typical VSU student. You can even add up the negative “walang-liguan” habit as another character of the VSU student. Well, for us students of this institution, these are the normal things that we normally see everyday.
These “common” outfits seem to perfectly fit us. We always think that way. But how about after graduation? Would you still say its normal wearing the typical outfit of an VSU student somewhere in Makati and applying for a job? This doesn’t mean that we are not normal students per se. We are normal and even excellent in the fields of agriculture, forestry, and agricultural engineering. But do you know that along with the tag VSU alumni is tagged “out of fashion?”
Ouch, it’s something we don’t want to be tagged with, right? One contributing factor for our being out of fashion is that, again, our school is strategically located at the foot of a mountain. So, it would seem absurd wearing a three-inched high-heeled sandals and a microminiskirt to school everyday as early as seven in the morning. That is why most of us, especially those students whose departments are on top of the hills, especially DLABS, Forestry and VetMed Departments, wear the you-can-always-count-on SSS (Shirt, Shorts, Slippers) or SMS outfit (Shirt, Maong, Slippers).
An VSU student does not live in a peachy world. Everyone knows it. Aside from the fact that most of the instructors and professors make the lives of their students difficult, or shall I say, challenging by giving them nerve-wrecking exams and out-of-this-world quizzes, another fact that makes student life even more challenging is living up to the demands of the world outside the campus.
These demands include the current fads in the society. Admit it or not, most of the students tend to take their appearances for granted that they don’t even care about the color of their shirt, the type of the jeans they wear, the style of their hair, or even if they are able to take a bath or not.
True enough that our school is a bit far from the key cities of the province like Tacloban and Ormoc. That’s the reason why what’s ‘in’ a few months ago in Tacloban is ‘in’ just now in VSU. It may be ironic to think that a school as good as VSU may not be as “in” in fashion.
It’s a good thing that some colleges or courses have their own prescribed uniform. Education, HRTM and VetMed students have their own attire that we could guess their identity miles and miles away.
I’m not saying that we should be like those models in Vogue or in the latest teen magazine. At least, we should try to get pass the kupas na shirt and pants matched with shiny black leather shoes. The mixture would all be too bad, in other words, baduy.
Good grooming should not be taken for granted. And if we want to look good, or not that look-at-me-people-kinda-way, we should dress with something we’ll be nice to look at. For example, a clean shirt matched with clean pants and a clean snicker. We can’t live our whole life according to what we want and how we wanted it to be. At some point in time, we need to adopt in order to survive. First impression does not really last forever, but, why not start it with a good one?