VSU’s Future: Exciting infrastructure projects pushed for Centennial year

Abraham Lincoln once said, “The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it.”

As we celebrate our 100 years of excellence here at the Visayas State University, I’m proud to present to you the following exciting infrastructure projects that are currently on the pipeline that we will soon build to push for greater development of our beloved university.

Some of these have been provided with initial funding from the national government while others are being considered for development grants coming from international organizations.

We start with the Smart Classroom Building that is currently being constructed beside the Multimedia Development Center or MMDC. 

This will become the new home of the University Integrated Media Center and will be accessed by all faculty and students who wish to use current broadcast technologies and other digital learning tools in the delivery of quality instruction.

Part of this project is the distribution of smart classroom tools to 20 academic and research units across the VSU system that can also be utilized by faculty members who wish to conduct HyFlex setup. 

The newly created Department of Arts, Languages and Literature (DALL) is the first one to institutionalize their localized smart classroom setup and we expect that the other 19 recipients will also be able to follow suit very soon.

Next, I’m sure that you already know this. Our very own College of Medicine, a pet legislation of Congressman Carl Nicolas L. Cari was signed into law on December 20 by President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos. 

We are currently at the last phase of designing their own building while the Benchmarking and Feasibility Study is also ending soon so that we can finally implement and offer this much awaited curricular program.

The national government will fund the construction of the building where we will be housing our College of Medicine while allocations will also be provided in recruiting faculty members and equipping the laboratories to industry standards.

We will become the first state university in the province to have a Medical degree program and just like our Bachelor of Science in Nursing, I’m hopeful that one day, we will also make it to the roster of becoming one of the best medical schools in the region and in the country.

We also have the Morgue Construction of the Vertebrate Anatomy Laboratory that will soon provide hands-on study of vertebrates from simplest to most complex. In this new facility, students will be able to examine changes in structure/function at the gross anatomy and microscopic levels.

This laboratory will not only be useful for biology students but also for pest management students and even to our students who will be taking human and animal anatomy including some of our upcoming medical programs and courses.

One of the big ticket infrastructure that we are currently working on is the establishment of our very own Science, Technology and Innovation Park. We wish that this project gets funded by the Asian Development Bank through a grant from the Department of Trade and Industry.

Our very own Science Park is a purpose-built cluster of office spaces, laboratories, workrooms and meeting areas designed to support research and development in science and technology, something that will push us to conduct advanced and high impact research that will hopefully power up the local and regional economies.

To jumpstart our Science, Technology and Innovation Park, VSU is very fortunate to have been initially identified by a team of experts from the ADB to be part of a project called Promoting Research and Innovation to Strengthen Transformation of Industries and Enterprises (PRISTINE).

This project is consistent with the push of DTI to establish national innovation gateways across the country which shall be implemented through a development loan from the ADB.

And VSU will be part of the four state universities in the Philippines as chosen site for this big ticket project along with Mariano Marcos State University (MMSU), Batangas State University (BatStateU), and University of Science and Technology in Southern Philippines (USTP).

We wish to take agricultural and environmental research to the next level with these new modern facilities that will be added to our already existing Research Center Complex. 

But more than pushing the boundaries of research, our intent by building this megastructure is to also develop startup companies and unicorns who can spur local and regional economic development. 

We’re also thankful that for our 2024 institutional budget, the national government provided us a total of 80 million pesos to build a 30 classroom, three-storey building to augment our current classroom shortage especially that we have increased our absorptive capacity for students for the past academic years.

We are particularly grateful to House Speaker Ferdinand Martin G. Romualdez for inserting these funds in our 2024 institutional budget that will soon be implemented by the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).

If completed, this building will be used and accessed by all our students taking general and elective courses.

We also officially launched during the last Commencement Exercises our Learning Resource Center (LRC), a modern hub that will soon provide an important learning-opportunity resource necessary to support the educational and training programs of our students, faculty and staff.

It will consist of a growing collection of books and special projects with a strong Internet facility for accessing e-journals and e-books. It will also be the home of our very own world class indoor auditorium for cultural and scientific events that will be named after one of our founding collaborators, former Leyte Governor Benjamin T. Romualdez.

While the needed budget to complete this modern academic hub is estimated to be at 400 million pesos, Speaker Romualdez also funded this project with an initial investment of 40 million pesos from the national government.

The rest of the money needed to complete the LRC will then be appropriated for the next fiscal years.

Another infrastructure project for implementation this year is the Eastern Visayas Biotech Hub that was granted with a budget of 32 million pesos.

This new facility will be used for an ongoing research project on developing antivenom treatment for the very deadly Samar Cobra that are endemic in Southern Philippines.

The research is being conducted by VSU along with researchers from Nagoya University as the Samar Cobra has been listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a category 1 venomous snake species of medical importance.

And lastly, part of our biggest push in the next decade is to legitimize our claim to become the National Green University of the Philippines that meets our local needs for natural resources—such as energy, water, and materials—without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This is consistent with the many efforts that we did in the area of environmental conservation, agricultural sustainability and climate change adaptation.

As part of this vision, we are now close to institutionalizing our very own Campus Sustainability Hub after our successful visit in the Netherlands and some local universities who have been known to practice green initiatives in their day-to-day operations. 

We hope that by becoming the first National Green University of the Philippines, we can push for carbon neutral initiatives that will inspire many communities so that we can protect our environment and in turn secure the future of many generations.

These are just but some of the many things we wish to do and we hope that all #ProudViscans around the world will help us in our future endeavors so that we can cement an even more sustainable and relevant future for the Visayas State University in the next 100 years.

Mabuhay po tayong lahat!

[This speech was delivered during the 100 Days to Centennial Countdown held on January 10, 2024 at the VSU Amphitheater.]

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