The farthest Laurence Arguelles had ever gone was Baguio City, on a field trip of his class at the Bataan Peninsula State University (BSPU). This year he went way beyond the horizon and landed stateside, specifically Silicon Valley, which just happens to be the dream destination of science and technology buffs like him.
Arguelles and classmate Mark Anthony Colentava, both electronics and communications engineering (ECE) graduates, toured the headquarters of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Younoodle, Cisco. All the while they wondered how it would be like to work there.
The prospects may not exactly be far-fetched.
The trip was arranged by Smart Communications Inc. as the bonus jackpot in the SWEEP Awards—an annual engineering competition for students, which marked its 10th anniversary this year.
The BPSU team led by Arguelles and Colentava won the grand prize for CoinSaver, an innovative way to save, which they developed as part of their thesis.
Innovation capital of the world
CoinSaver is like a kiosk where users drop coins to save for a product or service. It is linked to a mobile phone and, once the desired amount is reached, the user receives a text message with a voucher, which can be exchanged for the product or service.
The prize consisted of P500,000 cash, a grant in the same amount for their school and, for the first time, a tour of Silicon Valley.
“We wanted the winners to immerse themselves in the innovation capital of the world, to learn and be inspired,” said Ramon R. Isberto, Smart public affairs head. “We need to develop home-grown solutions to the issues we face, and we are hoping that these future innovators will bring back ideas that can be further developed to improve life for Filipinos.”
SWEEP, or Smart Wireless Engineering Education Program, is the first industry-academe partnership designed to enhance engineering and IT education.
The weeklong trip also included visits to Stanford University, Stanford Design School, the University of California Berkeley campus, Computer History Museum, Intel Museum and the HP Garage, also known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
Arguelles and Colentava got to participate in the 2014 Startup Conference, one of the largest entrepreneurship assemblies. They also paid a courtesy call at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco and the Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC)-Silicon Valley—a non-profit organization focused on entrepreneurship that provides the Philippine government inputs on policy and project viability.
The students were accompanied by BPSU representatives and officers from Smart and IdeaSpace Foundation Inc.
“It was an awesome experience ,” exclaimed Colentava. “I could hardly sleep the night before the trip.… I’ve always wanted to go to Silicon Valley, especially Googleplex.”
‘This is not a dream’
For Arguelles, it all seemed like a blur, “from the US visa application to packing for the trip.”
It was not until he was on the plane that it hit him: “This is not a dream.”
While the two tried to take in as much as they could during that once-in-a-lifetime experience, it wasn’t serious stuff all the time. Their memorable moments were mostly fun, which is the general mood in many of their stops.
At Twitter, employees told them that what they enjoyed the most was working with their colleagues. Asked where they get their ideas, the guide said the workers regularly assembled for “hackathons,” or coding marathons, during which they get to do “exciting stuff” and compete with one another.
The work atmosphere embodies the people-driven business model of the company.
At Cisco, the SWEEP winners got a kick out of the teleconferencing facilities.
At the Facebook corporate campus, most areas were off-limits to visitors, but the cafeteria was open to all. It had several restaurants serving a variety of cuisine—and everything was free.
One commercial restaurant caught the Filipino visitors’ attention. The tour guide told them that Mark Zuckerberg loved that restaurant so much, he brought a branch right inside the campus. Like the other outlets, it serves food for free.
Free food, haircut, laundry
At Google’s corporate headquarters, called Googleplex, they noticed a man talking to another man who was swimming in the pool. “Are they on break?” the two Filipinos asked the tour guide.
“No,” the guide replied, “they’re at work, brainstorming.”
And where was his office, the two inquired.
“Building 47, but basically we can work anywhere, in the pool, the park, under the tree, on a bike,” the guide said.
As for other benefits enjoyed by Google employees, he mentioned “free food, haircut, massage, doctor on site, laundry, and a lot more.”
Having seen “The Internship,” a comedy about two uncharacteristic Google interns, which was partly filmed there, the visitors had fun looking for the different areas they had seen in the movie.
As though they hadn’t sampled enough of the wacky Google culture, they found themselves romping around the Android Park. They felt like children as they ogled the larger-than-life statues of the different versions of Android (mobile operating systems) with dessert-themed code names, like Donut, Cupcake, Éclair, Gingerbread Man and Honeycomb.
Garage turns into historical landmark
But for the two ECE graduates, what stole the show was the HP Garage. This was where two students like themselves, heeding their Stanford professor’s advice, started their own electronics company, Hewlett-Packard—Silicon Valley’s first startup. It is now a museum and a historical landmark.
“The garage looked so ordinary, and yet the people who worked there were so passionate about what they were doing, they changed the world,” said Colentava. “At Silicon Valley, people solve problems, which are considered opportunities.… They embrace innovation as a way of life. Should we decide to pursue the startup route, this is how we want to do it—by developing products and services that provide solutions.”
The tour showed them what people can achieve for the good of others just by thinking out of the box, said Arguelles. Now he and Colentava are more determined to bring CoinSaver to the market.
“The Silicon Valley trip sought to encourage student innovators to take their projects beyond academe,” said Earl Valencia, IdeaSpace president and Smart head for corporate development. “What the SWEEP winners saw was the drive of the technical teams to create real solutions that could add value to the lives of millions of people.”
Arguelles agreed that they learned so much and were eager to share it with other aspiring innovators, starting with their own BPSU community.
For now, they are about to take a significant step toward a career—the ECE board exam, for which they are currently reviewing.