My part of the Handbook

QUALITIES THAT TYPIFY AN MPC STUDENT

Introduction:

What qualities make an MPC student different from a typical, everyday audience member? To answer this question we have to go through a series of steps and investigations about all the ethics and values that surround the Michael Polanyi College every day. In this chapter of the handbook you will learn the different characteristics of an audience member, a detailed description of the MPC is, who set the initial foundations, and most importantly, the qualities of an MPC student.

What is an audience member?

As we go through this chapter we will see the words “audience” and “member” a lot. Why is this? Because that is exactly what we want to avoid all along these three years of learning. So, what is an audience member exactly? We can refer to it as the person that goes through life being a sheep, not innovating, doing what everybody else does, what society does. In a more simple way, the person that goes every day to school or college, sits down and listens to the teacher talk for hours without any type of dialogue or conversation happening. To be more specific we can find a list below with some of the qualities of an audience member to help us in the chapter.
• Passive listener
• Copycat
• No meaningful presence
• No asking questions
• Distracted
• Not interested

What is the Michael Polanyi College?

Before getting into any detail with the qualities, we should know first in detail what the MPC is. Everything started with a group of student at Universidad Francisco Marroquin who were tired of being audience members. They all had a vision for collaborative learning, so they got together and organized themselves to be each other’s teacher and teach each other the curriculum of Rhetoric of the Austrian School of Economics along with hundreds of other amazing subjects. They work every day as a group learning new things and were the first ones to take a course without a teacher. Every September of each year we welcome new students to join the massive learning experience.

What is an MPC student?

If we were to mention all the qualities of an MPC student, this handbook would suddenly become huge, that’s why we narrow them to the main five.
1. Responsible
2. Cultured
3. Self-governed
4. Entrepreneur
5. Reader
All of the secondary qualities (as we like to call them) are all related to the main five, and we will discuss them in the next few paragraphs. Once we describe each main quality it will be much easier to identify the ideal student, or also known as and MPC student.

Responsibility

All of these qualities are applied to real life; they describe how the MOC student behaves on a daily basis, not only inside a college classroom. The first one to be discussed is responsibility. According to the MPCers, responsibility refers to owning up to your actions, promises or duties, in other words just being accountable for your own actions. As we were mentioning in the previous paragraph, there are secondary qualities relating to the main on. Some of these are.
1. Organization; to be responsible we definitely have to be organized with physical and mental things.
2. Smart choices; a smart choice is an option to be responsible
3. Punctuality; in order to be responsible you need to be punctual to all events.
4. Disciplined; something you need every day throughout life.

Cultured

It’s so much different to have a conversation with a cultured person than with one who isn’t. A cultured person is someone who knows the right process and has the sufficient knowledge to participate in a well-educated conversation and being able to express opinions based on credible arguments. Some of the secondary qualities that follow this one are:
1. Aware; being aware of other subjects facts to learn from
2. Fluid conversation: if we have knowledge on different subjects we are able to maintain a fluid conversation
3. Friendly; by making friends we learn about different cultures and customs

Self-governed

This is one of the most important qualities because it’s basically what the MPC revolves around. By being self-governed there are no authorities around us, we guide our own lives, so that means we guide our own education as well. Some qualities surrounding this idea are:
1. Aware; by being self-governed we have to be aware of ourselves and the environment surrounding us.
2. Independent; being able to achieve tasks without the help of others
3. Reasoned; being able to think deeply about problems and/or goals before working on them

Entrepreneur

One of the main concerns in life is to make money. An MPC student is someone who has the ideas to make that money and has the ability to make a plan for achieving that wealth. An entrepreneur definitely has to be:
1. Punctual; punctuality creates a reputation either good or bad
2. Friendly; in a lot of places you need connections, knowing people, especially in Guatemala
3. Problem solver; if we were going to run our own business we definitely need good problem solving skills

Reader

First of all, an MPC student will never be alone because we will always have a book in hand. Reading lets you travel anywhere you like, to any subject. A reader is definitely cultured, knows how to apply lectures to real life situations, and refers to quotes. A reader is someone who is:

1. Curious; wants to learn, has the passion of wanting more knowledge.
2. Organized; reading schedules make reading so much more enjoyable
3. Comprehensive; an MPC student will understand deeply the books read.

Final Statement

The ideal student will have these five qualities and they will be applied to real life situations as problem solving strategies. Here at the MPC we want to make a change in all of those audience members’ ethics and principles so they can become the responsible, cultured, self-governed, entrepreneurs and reader student, or in other words and MPCer.