Page 37 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Passenger on a Ship

in the same company or profession. David took up mechanical engineering in the
University of the Philippines (UP) and then mining engineering in Colorado. Having
a head for numbers but shut out of banking, Wash settled on accounting.

Wash first went to UP, which was then on Padre Faura. As the valedictorian of his
high school class, he was automatically entitled to admission and free tuition at UP.
However, the school and its new student proved a far from perfect fit. “The dean then
was Conrado Benitez, but it was not really a business school,” Wash says of the UP
he briefly knew. “It offered a liberal arts program where you could major in business
or something. I did well there, but I don’t even remember having any accounting. I
wanted to study commerce and we were getting into all kinds of other things.”

Wash and his classmates had also heard of a very capable American professor by the
name of Stanley Prescott, who had been assigned to the Philippines by Haskins &
Sells, a big American accounting firm which had set up a local practice after buying
out the British firm of Clark & Larkin. After a few years, and finding that he liked
teaching better, Prescott resigned and served as dean with three schools—Santo
Tomas, La Salle, and Letran.

Wash felt a strong urge to study with this man, so he transferred to the University of
Santo Tomas (UST) after just a semester in UP, convincing his father that the move
was well worth having to pay tuition.

The fact that the nominally Presbyterian Wash was entering a staunchly Catholic
school didn’t seem to faze him. “Aside from regular courses, we had to take Religion.
But it wasn’t a problem because Catholics don’t read the Bible!” Wash says with a
chuckle. “So I knew more about the Bible than my Catholic classmates, and I still
got the gold prize in Religion.”

A glutton for studying, Wash would be accelerated three times in elementary school,
breeze through high school, and complete college in two and a half years. (“I never
knew Wash to let a single school day pass without thorough homework, and his report
cards were consistently beautiful to behold,” Alex would write.) Not surprisingly,
Wash barely had time for anything else, including sports and any proper semblance
of a social life.

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