Closing Remarks

My fellow research enthusiasts, Ladies and gentlemen, good day! I believe that all of us
have done our best in the planning and implementation of these two days fora. It is my great
pleasure that we had fruitful discussions and collaboration.

In this year’s Campus RDE Fora, the main theme is “Advancing Innovative Research,
Development & Extension in the New Normal”. This is our first Campus RDE activity under the
new norm. It is expected that we gained essential learnings as much as we committed a lot of
mistakes. Hence, I invite everyone to be embrace resiliency and open-mindedness. Those are
two of the best traits of a productive researcher. First, being resilient or adoptive to change.
Under any conditions, if you are naturally hungry for knowledge, you will find a way to
discover new learnings, create new tools despite of the situation. Second, be open-minded.
Accept constructive criticisms, it is the only way you can improve your work. Negativity has no
place for research and development aspirations.

One of the abuses of doing research is using it to justify what we want to do (playing or
rigging the data) instead of letting the facts guide us to the right answer; making incorrect
assumptions and failing to test them, failing to consider alternatives seriously and using
incorrect or insufficient decision-making criteria; and keep on postponing decisions because we
are always dissatisfied with the data and analysis we already have. If we practice these, then
our analytical decisions need scrutiny.

That is why we should not rush things, as what wise men say, only fools rush in. Be
reminded that research according to Webster is a carefully, systematic study in a field of
knowledge, undertaken to discover or establish facts or principles.

Albert Einstein said: “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59
minutes defining the problem and only one minute resolving it”. But some of us do the other
way around, we carelessly do abrupt decisions or actions and waste spending a lot of time
figuring out why it went wrong and did not turn out to what we expect it to be, and then…we
opt to twist data again and that is a wrong move for a sound decision-making. I invite you to
Please reflect on that.

Personally, I would like to pay my deep respect to all the participants for your engaging
involvement in the two days RDE fora. I hope that you won’t end up by just simply learning but
you shall transfer these learnings in the exercise of your duties and responsibilities and together
we dream to realize the vision of becoming a research university in the future.

Finally, on behalf of the CapSU RDE Team, I would like to express my appreciation to
the well-esteemed evaluators, research, development & extension participants, faculty and staff
for taking time out of your busy duties both in work and at home to attend these fora. Thank
you also for the very supportive CapSU administration, spearheaded by Dr. Honey Lee E. Casa
in making this endeavor a success.

I would like to close my remarks and officially announce the end of this two days
Campus RDE fora, wishing you all prosperity and wellness in this time of pandemic. Thank you,
thank you, and Mabuhay!