High School is filled with many precious, lingering moments, but few of these will actually leave lasting impressions in our changing and growing minds. The SCO experience is an example of a precious high school memory.
Somehow, the training leaves an aftertaste of sweetness and satisfaction however sour and discontenting the experience may have seemed before. The sweat and toil of the long hours under the sun, the aching muscles from the marching and drilling, and the polka dot insect bites from the wargames were all recompensated for by the pride and honor of being an SCO. Such pride may as well be incomprehensible to everyone else, but to someone who has been an SCO it is a matter of course, and our chins are held high and our shoulders pulled back even until now when reminded of our doubtful achievement: the completion of the training.
The training shall perhaps always be held up for debate and discussion, but the number who represent it cannot deny the love that the SCO’s develop for the system. The officers who humiliated us, embarrased us, drove us to physical exhaustion and at times emotionally tortured us have, inspite of these or because of these, gained our love and respect. This is not due to any perversion of loving one’s torturers, but due to the realization that these officers, in some way or another, knowingly or not, have instilled some indefinable feelings of self-esteem and pride in each of us through all the humiliations and ridicule. To learn to love someone you have every reason to hate is a paradox that happens again and again, year after year, within the gates of Philippine Science.

Physically, we all benefited from the training. Not so long ago the male SCO’s could not complete even ten push-ups; now they can do fifty, and sometimes, one hundred. The girls, at the beginning, were easily exhausted by one round of jogging around the campus; before the year was over they were doing seven rounds. Perseverance is the key, after all.
The emotional development due to the training takes various forms for us. Who would have thought that x had officer material in him? Or that y could be so hardworking and efficient? For some the training was an aging process that turned boys and girls into young men and women.
For others it was just a year of living a school life different from the ordinary. Every one of us who underwent the training learned something different and changed in different ways. Its effects were not universal, yet with one thing in common — for most of us who were lucky enough to have been SCO’s and later, officers, the SCO training was not merely a year, but a lifetime of experience. All of us who graduated March from the TCOCCO are, in little and big ways, different from those who enrolled as SCO’s last June 1985.
The SCO Training touched several aspects of our lives, and helped make growing up quicker and to some degree less painful. Because of this it may last as one of the most precious fruits and sweetest memories of our high school days were in Philippine Science.