From breaking toys to top 6: Cebu electrician's curious road to REELE glory
CEBU CITY, Philippines: Before circuits and licensure exams entered his vocabulary, Niño Louie Verame was the kid next door with a screwdriver and no patience for a toy that wouldn't do what he wanted it to do.
Give him a wind-up boat, and he'd want it to reverse on command. Give him a car that only moved forward, and he'd take it apart looking for the dynamo, determined to make it behave like the ship in his head instead.
“Dili nagud ko nila palitan og duwaan kay ako mang gubaon. Curious jud ko nga pagkabata. Curios ko nga giunsa pag andar for example sakyanan nga de remote, dili ko malingaw sa iyang essense nga atras-abante, so ako siya gub-on unya i-assemble og lain,” he recalled.
(They don't buy me toys anymore because I keep breaking them. I was just really curious as a child. I was curious about how things worked; for example, a remote-controlled car, I didn't enjoy the simple novelty of making it move forward and backward, so I would tear it apart and reassemble it into something else.)
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It was, by his own admission, an expensive kind of curiosity. Toys in the Verame household rarely survived intact. He once dreamed, literally, of becoming an inventor, until he discovered, disappointingly, that there was no such degree program, no scholarship track for a profession that didn't officially exist on paper.
So the fascination went looking for a new outlet. It found one, at age 25, in a Top 6 finish in the Registered Electrical Engineer licensure examination, a result that surprised even the newly minted topnotcher himself.
A dangerous kind of fun
Verame's road to electrical engineering wasn't paved by burning ambition. It was closer to an accident, in one case, literally. As a boy, he brushed against a live ground wire and, instead of being scared off electricity for life, found the tingling sensation almost entertaining.
“Nakuryentihan ko ato, unya ang kuryente kay imbis nga masakitan ko, nalingaw ko. Sige na, nakong hikap-hikapon. Pero delikado bitaw to akong gibuhat. Wala sad ko kabalo ngano to,” he said.
(I got an electric shock back then, but instead of feeling pain, I actually enjoyed the sensation. I kept touching it over and over. But what I did was really dangerous, honestly. I don't even know why I did that.)
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The irony of a math-averse engineer
Ask Verame if mathematics was a childhood favorite, and he doesn't hesitate: no.
“Ironic bitaw kaayo,” he said. (It really is so ironic.)
He recalled being discouraged from the subject in high school, drawn instead to its real-world applications, how a formula behaved once it left the whiteboard, while its underlying logic and origins largely escaped him.
His curriculum, he admitted, also lagged what today's board examinees are taught, forcing him to work backward: mastering the application first, then circling back to the fundamentals everyone else had learned in order.
It's a gap he closed largely on his own terms, and, as it turned out, in his own time, since a full-time job stood between him and his review books for the better part of five years.
Photographer who became an engineer
While doing his schooling, Verame briefly tried call center work but found it wasn't for him. Photography and videography, hobbies he'd picked up along the way, with a growing eye for color and composition, turned out to be his unlikely bridge to a stable job.
He was discovered, he said, through local government connections and recommended for a position at the Minglanilla mayor's office as an in-house photographer for the municipality's public information efforts, a post he has held since late 2021.
The job was far from desk-bound. It meant documenting town events, accompanying local officials during disaster response operations, and reporting to evacuation centers during typhoons, all while preparing, in whatever hours remained, for a licensure exam he wasn't even sure he'd pursue seriously.
A flexible arrangement with the mayor's office, worked out over time, allowed him to step away for major review commitments while still covering the town's biggest events.
“My mindset was never to be a topnotcher,” he admits. “I just wanted to pass and become an engineer.”
Building his own study tool
Under the guidance of his review, Verame found that traditional review-center materials, thick packets meant to be memorized wholesale, didn't work for how his mind processed information.
Pattern memorization, he said, bred a false confidence: familiarity with a packet's layout rather than real mastery of the material.
So he built his own solution, a simple note-organizer application to track which topics he was weak in, refining it collaboratively with four fellow reviewees who tested it, reported bugs, and helped sharpen it in the final month before the exam.
Disbelief, then gratitude
When word came that he had placed sixth nationally, Verame's first instinct was skepticism. Told to check social media for the results, he initially refused, half-convinced his family was setting him up for a prank.
It took a phone call and a fair amount of persuasion before he accepted that the news was real.
“Naka-ingon ra jud ko'g, 'Grabe nga...' Naka-ingon jud ko'g, 'Salamat, salamat jud sa Ginoo nga gi-hatag,'” he recalled. (I could only say, “Wow, this is amazing...” I really just said, “Thank you, thank you so much to God for giving this.”)
Advice
Asked what he'd tell aspiring board takers, Verame doesn't reach for exam strategy.
“Kung unsa man ang inyong ginabuhat karon, ihatag jud ninyo ang inyong pinakamaayo. Kung naa pa gani labaw sa 100%, ihatag! Bahala'g murag wala pa'y naka-appreciate ana karon, bahala'g wala pa'y nakakita ana karon, pero magbunga ra man jud na. Maabot ra jud ang panahon nga naa'y oportunidad nga maabot para nimo,” he said.
(Whatever you are doing right now, whatever you are facing right now, give it your absolute best. If there is even anything beyond 100%, give it! Even if it seems like no one appreciates it right now, even if no one sees it right now, it will eventually bear fruit. The time will surely come when an opportunity comes your way.)