Philippines: Smart officially implements SWEEP Faculty Immersion Program

MANILA — The groundbreaking SMART Wireless Engineering Education Program (SWEEP) formally implemented its faculty immersion series recently, providing special lectures, fieldwork, and hands-on activities to 24 key engineering faculty members from partner schools all over the country.

Under the two-week, deeply integrated immersion program, the selected participants had the opportunity to work in SMART as “on-the-job” trainees, personally experiencing how the leading telecommunications company has worked to deliver a truly cutting-edge and robust network service in the country.

This unique immersion program is the newest addition to SWEEP designed to enrich its teacher-training component. A pioneering industry-academe partnership, SWEEP commenced in 2003 and has since churned out different activities, from Innovation awards, OJT program for students, to technology seminars, which are all parallel in objective—that is, to raise the bar for technology and engineering education in the country, specifically in the field of Electronics and Communications Engineering (ECE). SMART now boasts of over 40 SWEEP partner schools to date.

According to Rolando G. Peña, SMART Network Services Division Head, “We are doing the [faculty immersion program] because we value our partnership with the schools and we are sincere in our desire to impart a continuing education program.”

Peña further declared that with the immersion program, teachers will gain a more realistic understanding of the goings-on in the telecom industry. They will also be equipped with knowledge and skills, which they can pass on not only to their students but to co-faculty as well.

October of last year saw the launch of the pilot run of the immersion program in Luzon, earning rave reviews from its 20 participating teachers who underwent content/technology discussion and training with Smart engineering groups like Planning & Engineering, Transport Planning and Engineering, Field Operations and Base Stations Systems Optimization.

The fitting follow-up and official run was conducted early this June, and this time, activities were decentralized and focused on fieldwork operations. Participants were thus deployed in the areas where their schools and universities are located so as to familiarize with the network elements in their local areas.

Three ECE faculty members were selected from Cebu City, namely; Rogelio Lansa of University of Cebu-Banilad Campus; Thamar Tan of University of San Carlos; and Junito Bustamante of UC-Main Campus. Under the close guidance and direction of SMART field engineers and specialists, they engaged in activities that afforded them an insightful idea of the technology and infrastructure that allow the company’s services to operate seamlessly.

The Cebu participants spent the entire first week at the Switching Center, deemed the brains of the network..They were acquainted with tasks that employed switching and core equipment, as well as call set-ups (from postpaid, to prepaid, to roaming), among others.

SMART engineers also made sure they had the chance to execute routinary test call procedures and how to isolate problems encountered; carry out on an actual Switch Work Order and Inter-Switch Trunks expansion; plus do actual port monitoring, dedlog retrieval/processing, CD-R purging, etc.

The second week brought them to the various Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) in Cebu, which facilitate the wireless communication between user equipments and the network. They soaked up on discussions on preventive maintenance routine on BTS equipment, transmission equipment and support facilities.

The teachers were also introduced to transport network technologies, witnessed actual BER (Bit Error Rate) link test in telecom transmission, had a hand at fiber optic trouble-shooting, and experienced several critical duties of BTS-assigned engineers.

According to Tan, who has been teaching at USC for about a decade, the faculty immersion program has certainly been a learning experience, what with the exposure to the latest in wireless technologies in the mobile business.

As for Lansa, who has been teaching for almost 20 years, he said the immersion program has enabled them to “link theory and the actual experience.”

Bustamante, whose teaching career spans nearly two decades as well, said their students have as much to gain as them with the immersion, as whatever they have gleaned from the experience will figure significantly in the teaching of major subjects related to wireless communications.

As teachers who aim to empower their students with premium ECE education, they all look forward to SMART’s continuous support and assistance, under SWEEP, in helping their students ready themselves as the future workforce of the telecommunications industry.

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