Heap-bound, stacktraced, yet never garbage collected.
DONAT was founded to get MAWD students through the ICT curriculum. Nine years later that is still the job.
The club came together across 2016 and 2017 at STI College Ortigas-Cainta. Students on the MAWD track were stuck on subjects nobody had time to re-teach, so the students who had already cleared those subjects sat down with the ones who had not. That was the whole club at first: peer mentorship, arranged between students.
It grew because the mentorship worked. Recruitment filled assemblies through 2017, and by 2018 members were entering inter-school competitions, running hackathons and putting on the club's own expo.
Then it stopped. The pandemic closed the campus and took the events with it, and the club moved onto chat and calls with a smaller group of people holding it together. The timeline below has no 2021 in it, because there is nothing honest to put there.
Rebuilding started in 2022 and has been incremental since: partnerships, workshops running again, project portfolios, and eventually this portal — written by members and used by officers at every event. Nine years in, the club keeps its own records instead of relying on whatever the last batch remembered to hand over.
Two sentences the club is held to, both taken from its constitution.
DONAT is aiming to be the organisation at STI College Ortigas-Cainta where technical leadership is ordinary and collaboration is the default — where the developers, designers and researchers it turns out have already built and shipped something together before they graduate.
As the ICT academic organisation of STI College Ortigas-Cainta, DONAT runs on a learn-and-share model across programming, hardware, graphic design and research: what you are taught this term, you teach next term. That is what carries the club from one batch to the next.
Pick a year. 2021 is missing on purpose: the club was dormant that year and the timeline says so rather than inventing an entry for it.
DONAT was born at STI College Ortigas-Cainta to guide MAWD students, bridging ambition across generations.
