It's all about apps!

MANILA, Philippines - While most youngsters spent their vacation on beaches and mountains or took on courses to learn a new sport or hone their craft, five lucky students from various universities opted to make their two-month break an educational and entertaining one via the internship program of Nokia.

The students who qualified to join the program were from Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU), University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P), University of the Philippines (UP) and University of Santo Tomas (UST). They were chosen to intern for Nokia for almost two months as Ovi specialists. 

The internship program, the first ever to be conducted by Nokia in the country, was designed to give participants a chance to experience working in a modern mobile technology company by assisting in the development of local applications, help generate mobile tools for Filipino bloggers and their websites, and use their imagination to organize and mount events for Pinoy app developers and content providers.

Nokia started the call for nominations from various reputable colleges last March by posting announcements in different school message boards, both online and offline. Hundreds of recommendations were submitted, but in the end, the list was trimmed down to five students who showed the most promise.

Maria Alyssa Pucyutan, a Business Administration student in UP Diliman, said she felt ecstatic and grateful upon knowing that she was chosen to be an intern at Nokia. 

(From left) Kim Perez, Alyssa Pucyutan and Macy Miranda pose with Nokia dual-SIM endorser Vic Sotto.

“I was told that only one or two students will be picked from each university, so I thought that my chances of getting in were slim,” she said. “I guess I was one of those brave enough to take up the challenge.”

Charles Tan, a Management Engineering student at Ateneo, on the other hand, instantly saw the bevy of opportunities that an internship in a multinational company like Nokia would bring to his future career. 

“I was interested right at the beginning because I believe this is a perfect stepping stone. It also presented a very good opportunity to be immersed in something that I would like to do in the future,” he shared.

The apprenticeship began last April 4 with the students getting familiarized with Nokia’s values, technology and innovations, among which is the App Wizard, a new tool that lets users create a professional mobile application powered by their content in just a few minutes.

The interns were tasked to generate some buzz for the App Wizard, among others, which meant directly engaging some bloggers and website managers to convince them to sign up for the tool. 

Information technology student Macy Miranda of UST found the task daunting at first. Nevertheless, she took on the challenge of developing a marketing program for Nokia aimed at the youth.

“In school, we studied programming languages, software development, hardware troubleshooting, networking and the like, so this was a new thing to me,” Miranda explained. “To come up and implement a marketing campaign for the Ovi, I had to read up on good marketing strategies and techniques from online journals and articles.”

Kim Perez, a Communications Technology Management student at Ateneo, was likewise challenged to take on the task, but she said the experience taught her to be more competitive and focused.

The interns, however, were not lacking in ideas when it comes to implementing a marketing campaign for their respective schools. For instance, Michael Pamintuan, an Integrated Marketing Communications major at UA&P, plans to mount a Nokia Campus Tour in his school to promote the Ovi and Nokia’s mobile apps. 

One of the highlights of the event is the life-sized Angry Birds game that he wants to erect in his campus. “Students can use a life-size slingshot and hit the pigs using birds made from ping pong balls,” he shared. Those in the campus can also use Nokia phones to take pictures and videos while they are having fun to emphasize Nokia’s user-friendly features.

Miranda, on the other hand, first conducted a survey among Thomasian students before coming up with a marketing campaign for her school. Then she plans to conduct activities in partnership with the central student council based on the results. 

To attract students to her events, she plans to sponsor one student council event and give away Nokia cellphones, provided that the students participate in Nokia-related games.

When their internship ended a few months ago, all of the participants said the experience taught them to go beyond their comfort zones and take on challenges. 

“Internship programs like this are valuable because they give one the opportunity to build not only one’s career but also one’s character. It exposed us to real-life situations that cannot be experienced within the walls of the campus, and challenged us to overcome them,” Perez said.