This was written by Dr. Jose Rizal when he was around 17 to 20 years old when he was studying in University of Santo Tomas and it narrates his early life, about his family and memories of being away from his family to study in Manila. It said that the first pen name used in his writing was P. Jacinto and other pen names were Laong Laan and Dimas Alang. He has nine sisters and one brother. They have a good life before that’s why they afford to study in a good school and they have a fine way of living.
Rizal’s father wanted him to study in the Dominican-owned Colegio San Juan de Letran but changed his mind and decided to send him instead to Ateneo Municipal, formerly the Escuela Pia which was a school for poor boy and was established by the city government and when the Jesuits returned to Manila in 1859, they were given the management of the school.
It was said that the system of education given by the Jesuits was more advanced than that of other colleges in that time and it was in Ateneo where he first used the surname “Rizal” because at that time, his real surname “Mercado” had come under the suspicion of Spanish authorities.
He began at the bottom of the school, but within a month he was “Emperor of Rome”. The Ateneo had divided the students into two “empires”, Roman and Carthaginian, to fight for academic supremacy. It was this war that soon brought young Rizal triumph and prizes. At the end of the first quarter he received the grade “excellent”. In the five years Rizal studied in Ateneo, he showed his intelligence and diligence in his academics and extra-curriculars as Jesuits called him “a child excellent in religious sentiments, customs and application, with progress worthy of his signal talent.
After graduating with honors from Ateneo, Rizal went to University of Santo Tomas to pursue higher studies. His father and brother wanted him to pursue higher learning but Dona Teodora opposed the idea when she knew of what happended to the three martyr priests Gomez, Burgos and Zamora. After finishing first year of a course in Philosophy and Letters, he transferred to the medical course.
