Believing in Ourselves: What are We Capable of?

by Charlotte Macabuag

In celebration of Divine Light Academy - Bacoor’s Science Week, a TED Talk for the Junior High School students was held on Wednesday, October 6, 2021, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon via live that was posted on DLA’s official Facebook page. With the members of the Science department hosting it and with Mr. Jeremy C. De Leon as guest, it was a blast!

Mr. Jeremy C. De Leon, a DLA alumnus from Batch 2012, was the sole inventor of the well-known “Makecroscope” that went viral on Tiktok weeks ago. He was a graduate of Mapua University with degrees in BS Electronics and Communication Engineering, as well as BS Manufacturing Engineering. He branded the Makecroscope the "first keychain microscope for your cell phone." It has a magnifying power of up to 265x, and he also mentioned that he has a plan to give out 1,000 Makecroscope kits to students. The keychain microscope and sample slides are included in the set.

He delivered a few pieces of advice at the end of his TED Talk that left an indelible impression on the students who were watching and listening live, one of them being, “Do not compete with others; compete with yourself.” It is not always you versus others, because it is you versus yourself—you, versus the you of yesterday. This piece of advice that he had mentioned is timely, considering the situation we are currently in, because as we undergo online classes during the pandemic, students become prone to being overly competitive to the extent that they may end up suffering from burn-out and anxiety due to excessive pressure.

Instead of competing and comparing ourselves to the people around us, we should trust ourselves and our capabilities. “You’ve got to believe in yourself, before others believe in you.”— For no one knows us the way we know ourselves, and we will be able to broaden our capabilities only if we practice them and recognize them as a part of us, as a valuable asset to us.

This goes well with Mr. Jeremy’s experience — he believed in himself; he competed with his past self rather than of the people he was around with, he worked with a team for a while, and was able to polish his skills and capabilities into pursuance where he was able to invent something crucial for the Science community.

Having such a mindset, wherein we believe and acknowledge our skills and capabilities, can allow our simple what-ifs to make a tremendous difference in the world. Like the prominent scientists we know today, they began by asking themselves what-if questions, such as, “What if I can view the world on a wider scale?” A question that Galileo Galilei pondered which led to the discovery of the telescope.