The return of the holiday greetings for new year!

Last Christmas, we allowed you to text any UPLB student. The messages you submitted were delivered a few minutes past 12 midnight of December 25.

Thank you for participating in the SOAD Holiday Greetings! Services such as this may seem out of hand to some but rest assured that things we do at SOAD undergo careful planning and development. Throughout the year, we have been testing our SMS facilities to further enhance our online services.

What have we found so far? We learned that the system we developed worked as expected. We are now able to send individual text messages at a prescribed date and time. The greetings we received from December 21 to 24 were all scheduled to be delivered at 11:59 PM of December 24. We also learned that the use of Account PINs is inconvenient especially because SystemOne is unavailable as we speak.

To continue our research in improving the OSAM System, we are again opening Holiday Greetings from December 28 to January 1.

There will be a few changes though. Since SystemOne is unavailable at this time, users can just text NEWYEAR to 091‑SOWAD‑500 (091‑76923‑500). Account PIN will be sent through SMS which must be entered in the form. Students who can login to OrgsUP may also retrieve their Account PINs from OrgsUP. They will be able to submit one message every eight hours for free. For more greeting codes, users can follow the prompt when allocation is consumed.

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Text Lines for Student Orgs

At SOAD, we know how much communication matters. That's why students can reach us by visiting the office, calling our office landline, texting through SOAD Mobile, emailing, and the fastest way to get our attention, posting through Magtanong.

Our desire to efficiently and effectively use communication and information technology to provide industry-level service led us to experimenting with the use of mobile phones as a mode of communication.

As the year ends, we are curious about what organizations have to say regarding org text lines. Of course, these text lines are not manual. We are approaching 2014 now and a lot of stuff in OSA are now computerized. So, think of it this way, someone can text a message to a certain number and the organization will be able to access the text messages in OrgsUP.

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We wish you a cheerful and lively Christmas!

The Student Organizations and Activities Division, Office of Student Affairs, and the Balsam Fir wish you a cheerful and lively Christmas!

Thank you for being happy that SOAD did not send you a card because we are alive and well! -Balsam Fir

On behalf of all the Balsam Fir that are well and alive today, we thank you for accepting our paperless Christmas greeting!

We wanted to send you greeting cards but when we saw these trees, words couldn't express our feelings as we see the joy in their leaves and branches. So, we hope that there are no hard feelings as we're not cutting them for cards!

Kidding aside, we think that helping our environment is the second best Christmas gift. The best Christmas gift was already given about 2,000 years ago.

We are happy to report that through your participation in this endeavor, we do not just help preserve our natural resources but we also have significantly reduced the paper usage at OSA which now results to less paper waste.

Thank you for being part of the second best Christmas gift! 

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List of UPLB UPCAT 2014 Passers By Degree

The UP Office of Admissions released the UPCAT results a few hours ago, two months earlier than in the previous years. The UPLB Office of Student Affairs congratulates all the UPLB UPCAT passers!

If you are an UPCAT passer, here's an interview with Jiggy Manicad about UPLB:

For the complete list of the UPCAT passers, visit http://upcat.up.edu.ph/results or the mirror sites at http://upcat.pregi.net/ and http://upcat.stickbread.net/.
Based on the UPCAT results, here are the top 10 degrees with most number of passers. NOTE: There is no competition here - the number of passers is based on the degree's quota.

#	Degree	Passers	Population Percentage
	DEGREE PROGRAM WITH AVAILABLE SLOT	553	21.81%
1	BS COMPUTER SCIENCE	184	7.26%
2	BS BIOLOGY	179	7.06%
3	BS DEVELOPMENT COMMUNICATION	135	5.33%
4	BS FOOD TECHNOLOGY	106	4.18%
5.5	BS CIVIL ENGINEERING (5 YRS)	101	3.98%
5.5	BS NUTRITION	101	3.98%
7	BS CHEMICAL ENGINEERING (5 YRS)	97	3.83%
8	BA COMMUNICATION ARTS	92	3.63%
9.5	BS ECONOMICS	90	3.55%
9.5	BS ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING (5 YRS)	90	3.55%

The total number of UPLB passers in the UPCAT results page is 2,535. The following is the complete list of all the UPLB UPCAT passers.

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Greet UPLB students this holiday season

On the 25th, SOAD will deliver your holiday message to any UPLB student for free! Messages will be collected starting on the 21st until the 24th. Messages will be delivered via SMS on December 25.

Guidelines

1. Greetings must be less than or equal to 100 characters.
2. No foul, sexual, threatening, or abusive messages.
3. Messages must be in English/Filipino.
4. Sender and recipient must both have an OSAM account. Sender must login to the domain www.soadosa.org and get the account PIN.
5. Only one message can be submitted by each student every 24 hours.
6. Sender must know identifiable and conclusive information about the recipient such as name, degree, college, or mobile number.
7. Recipient will not know the sender unless the sender discloses it in the name field.
8. All messages are subject to review and all rights are reserved by SOAD not to deliver messages deemed inappropriate.

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