An international internship in Smart Tampere

Smart Tampere program has employed international trainees, most recently Marion Chevalier from France.

An internship is a great opportunity to get to know the smart city development of Tampere and share the best practices from different cities. By offering trainee opportunities, Smart Tampere also wants to attract international talent to Tampere.

International talent attraction and especially retention are hot topics nationally and also in Tampere currently. International Tampere Hub, a new type of service model, will be developed to support employers in international recruitments and to facilitate the international talents to find opportunities in Tampere. In addition to visualizing the services, it is also important to communicate the excellent example cases, like Ms Chevaliers internship, says Nuppu Suvanto, Project Manager of International Tampere Hub, from City of Tampere.

Chevalier did her internship in Smart Tampere program in Business Tampere from March to July.

I wanted to come to Tampere because it stood out from other cities with the diversity and solid structuring of its Smart Tampere program. Besides, it also seemed that Tampere was very successful and committed into building a triple-helix cooperation, trying to involve all the stakeholders in the process of shaping the city, tells Marion Chevalier.

The internship was part of Chevalier’s studies, Master of Science “Engineers for Smart Cities”, at the Mediterranean Institute for Risk, Environment and Sustainable Development (IMREDD) in Nice (France).The studies had already build her a solid knowledge on many different and complex challenges that cities are meeting when trying to become smarter, which created an excellent ground for the internship.

Marion delivered very valuable contribution to Smart Tampere by conducting studies in various areas. Those gave us excellent input to steer better our development activities. Marion was able to navigate through the complex assignments very successfully with high quality, says Merja Maijala, Program Manager at Smart Tampere Ecosystem Program, responsible for guiding Chevalier’s internship, from Business Tampere.

Chevalier started her internship with communication tasks, such as helping with the reform of smarttampere.fi website, in order to familiarize herself with the Smart Tampere program. The later, more in-depth assignments were covering for example safety and security, smart health and digital innovation hubs.

I enjoyed especially working on the Safety and Security topic and learned a lot on the issue. The work taught me that these concepts are very broad and complex. It is definitely not about technology only, it is a fully holistic and integrated approach, says Chevalier.

In addition, you could really feel that people working on the Smart Tampere Program are extremely concerned and passionate about their mission. There is a real desire to bring a positive added value to Tampere and its citizens. I found it very inspiring and this seems to be a great lesson: doing something meaningful is essential!