Diwata assembly was railroaded, says engineer

Yet another member of the team of engineers sent to Japan to build the Philippines' first satellite has spoken up on social media, crying foul over pressure to complete the project under "extremely difficult and back-breaking" conditions.

"We had to deliver it in just one year when ordinarily it should take three years to complete," said an obviously exasperated and frustrated Julian Oliveros in a Facebook status posted in the early hours of Wednesday morning, April 6.

He tendered his resignation from the Diwata team over the weekend. 

Intense pressure

Oliveros said that he and the rest of the team were under intense pressure to complete the satellite on top of their academic workload.

"When (millions of pesos worth) of people's money (is) invested in a project, it cannot simply be (a matter of academic research). We could not go home until we reached (space-grade) specs almost every night because the project had to be delivered," he said.

'Working, not studying'

Some observers had initially pointed out that long lab hours are a normal experience for graduate students.

But Oliveros asserted that the construction of the satellite was a separate matter entirely—one which, according to him, took precedence over, and almost completely overshadowed, his academic work.

Oliveros said that he was only able to focus on his studies in January of this year, having been preoccupied with building the Diwata satellite for the whole of the previous year.

"(The) January turnover of Diwata-1 was the day I was able to start my thesis, the day I started proposing a topic, the day I started reading papers. That was after one year of working (on the satellite), one year when we were supposed to be students!" he said.

"We were working, not studying," he added.

Outside of academic work

Oliveros also repudiated the DOST's assertion that the construction of the satellite was done in conjunction with the engineers' academic work, for which they signed a scholarship contract.

"I had to... beat project deadlines (and) come to the lab on Saturdays and Sundays to finish some work. All that for a one-year goal unrelated to (my) two-year MS degree program," he said.

"(These were) project deadlines and not (academic) MS program deadlines," he emphasized.

Other voices

Oliveros' complaint follows in the wake of his teammate Paolo Espiritu's now-viral Facebook post last April 1, in which the engineer also complained of vague contracts, long work hours, and "outrageous treatment". 

"This doesn't just stop with us Diwata engineers. This outrageous treatment is a grave insult (to) ALL Filipino scientists and engineers," Espiritu scored in his earlier post.

The DOST had no comment on Oliveros' statement as of Wendesday noon. — GMA News