JC Punongbayan

Featured on May 10, 2021

Hi! I’m JC Punongbayan, a PhD candidate and teaching fellow at the UP School of Economics.

For Motivation Monday, I’d like to share how I came to pursue a PhD. My economic career so far has been far from straightforward.

The thing is, I didn’t really plan to be an economist at all! I graduated from QueSci in 2005 with either medicine or law in mind. I ended up choosing BS Econ at UP, but only as a pre-law.

I went straight into UP Law later, but realized I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I stopped after my 1st year. It was one of the biggest turning points in my adult life, but one I never regretted.

It took some time for me to find my bearings again. After a few months in the private sector, I went back to UPSE to work as an RA. There I found myself reinvigorated by the mentorship of the UPSE faculty, as well as the wisdom of my econ ates and kuyas. It was economics, after all, that I had learned to love, and I didn’t have to look too far to know where I belonged.

I took up a master’s degree at UPSE and finished in 2013. It was a terminal degree, for even then a PhD wasn’t in my mind at all. I wanted to work as soon as possible, which I did.

Right before I turned 26, however, I realized I wasn’t getting any younger, and figured it was as good a time as any to take up a PhD. Being an economics PhD student in the Philippines can be extremely challenging. You can get decent consulting jobs even with just a master’s degree, and this (among other reasons) often derails many graduate students. Personal circumstances also prevented me from passing the PhD exam in my first take, so I had to wait a whole year to retake it, teaching in the meantime.

I would’ve studied abroad had I resolved to take up a PhD much earlier. But I managed to find a dissertation topic here that was thoroughly interesting to me, and received great mentorship from my UPSE professors.

Now, 6 years after I started my PhD journey, I hope to finish very soon.

How I came to write for Rappler and found Usapang Econ.

It so happens that it was my Usapang Econ friend Maien Vital who had planted in me the idea of writing for Rappler. In January 2013, I was triggered by the passage of the Kasambahay Law. I drafted a piece about it, which I simply emailed to Rappler, and to my surprise, they published it! Chay Hofileña, the editor who reviewed my piece, was rather impressed by how well I laymanized the issues at hand—a feat few economists were able to achieve, she said.

The rest is history.

It’s not all rainbows and butterflies, of course. My writing has expectedly exposed me to a fair share of online trolling and bashing, as well as rebuke from people in government who don’t exactly agree with things I say. But I just let facts and figures speak for themselves.

My journalist mentors and friends in Rappler have inspired me no end to speak truth to power. I also take heart from other economists, like Prof. Winnie Monsod and Prof. Ciel Habito, who similarly engage the public through their writings.

Above all I’m inspired by the people—students, teachers, concerned citizens, etc.—who reach out to tell me that they find my pieces understandable and easy to read.

As for Usapang Econ, we go a long way back.

In 2011 we were all working as analysts in research institutions based at the UP School of Econ, and we became rather close friends. Fast forward to 2018, Jeff, Maien, and I were deeply frustrated by the quality of economic discourse surrounding issues like inflation. We put started with blog posts (at one point writing even twice weekly!) but have since made a podcast and explainer videos.

Despite our own busy schedules and limited resources, we hope to sustain Usapang Econ for as long as we can. We’ve come a long way since we started, but our advocacy of promoting economic literacy among Filipinos is far from finished.