ROCK MISS WORLD, ROCK!

The recently concluded beauty pageant Binibining Pilipinas 2008 created upheaval amongst many Filipinos as according to some, judges’ decision seems a bit controversial. Foreign and local media highlighted the event focusing on the announced winner Bb. Pilipinas- World, Janina San Miguel and it’s being widely criticised on the internet.
This is one of the most anticipated events to most Filipinos along with Manny Pacquiao and other pinoy boxers’ match on an international arena as the delegates selected will represent the country to various worldwide competitions. This year’s winner for Philippines’ delegate to Miss World pageant extremely made her greatest breakthrough. A seventeen year-old, Mass Communication freshman is from the University of the East – my alma mater.

As I read some news clips on the internet about this and learned that one of the winners is a UE student, I went on further and to my dismay, saw several video clips at youtube about the controversial question-and-answer of Ms. San Miguel.

I can hardly believe that this situation did really happen and it’s just unbelievable as this could only be heard on common jokes about obnoxious pinoy English knowing that Philippines is one of the call centre capital of the world.
In my honest opinion, Ms. San Miguel did a great job as she finally made it to win the crown and she caused wakefulness to most of the Filipino people. In the middle of continuous political turmoil in the country, at least there are some other things that our people could divert their attention at. In addition to, this may have called the attention to improve our educational system as Philippines is not going far behind to progression.

University of the East and all educational institutions could play an important role on this particularly by improving its system to help students to be academically and socially prepared on situations like this. I could recall when I was at UE, 8 years ago, Speech classes were provided but it really didn’t help us at all. Our Speech Comm. Professor couldn’t even pronounce English words correctly and unbelievably most of us finished the course without understanding and learning the basic and Standard English Vowels and Consonant applications, which is very important in accent training and oral and conversational English. We were introduced to the Mock Radio facility for vocal modulation but never used it ever. Entirely, the whole speech class was in writing.

Philippines has a very promising future in Call Centre industry and many Filipinos are doing well with a call-centre career. Trainings are provided efficiently and this is becoming the starter to many Pinoy aspirants, in which they should have it in their high school and college courses. Few years back, there were reports about 2 out of 20 applicants for a call centre makes it and 1 out of 2 makes it to the final interview. Evidently, Filipino people are genuinely diversed people who could easily adapt to any learning advancement.

Janina San Miguel’s journey to win the Miss World crown is going further if Filipinos would take the situation in a positive light. This may be funny but not enough reason to make fun with, instead, why don’t we help each other to improve each and everyone? Foreign people doesn’t really care about speaking a perfect language, afterall, it’s the thought that counts and the person’s overall personality.