Far fewer Wesleyan students aspire to be engineers than doctors or lawyers. Breaking out of the academic world and into industry without formal training can seem a daunting task. In a lecture given last Wednesday, Dr. Lydia Young P ’07 described exactly how a degree in basic science from a liberal arts school relates to a career in engineering.
The lecture, which was sponsored by Women In Science, covered what it is like to be female in a predominantly male profession. Young said that while there has not been a significant change in the number of female engineers in the last 25 years, she believes the high-tech sector is primarily merit-based.
“If you’re good at what you do and show that you’re good at [it], life is cool,” Young said. “You still have to earn your stripes [as] a guy or as a woman.”
A member of the pioneer generation of female engineers, Young found that there were not enough women ahead of her in her field to serve as mentors. As a very experienced engineer, she now acts as a mentor and teacher to the younger members of her team, both male and female.
While students have the option of completing an engineering degree as part of the three-two program in cooperation with one of three other universities, Young’s lecture presented an alternate route into the industry. Young said that science students at Wesleyan should not consider the door to the high-tech industry closed and she said she hopes that some will choose to apply their skills in that area.
“My opinion?” Young said. “Yeah, there’s science in engineering.
At the beginning of her lecture, Young asked the audience if anyone had ever held any job in industry, including sweeping floors. Every undergraduate in attendance, along with most faculty members, answered no.
Young, who completed her bachelor of arts in physics at Mount Holyoke, said she doesn’t think this needs to be the case. She has held numerous jobs in the high-tech industry, and is currently Vice President of Technology and Chief Technical Officer at Photondynamics, a California-based company that designs inspection equipment for flat panel displays.
So what does engineering entail?
”[You design a machine that] must perform repeatably and reliably at speed and within cost,“ Young said. ”Very simple.“
Young’s previous position, prior to a very recent job change, was as Director of Engineering for KLA-Tencor, a company that produces machines to create and inspect microchips. These machines, with price tags in the tens of millions of dollars, take 200 silicon wafers and turn them into chips worth more than fifty times that amount.
”I’ve never designed a chip, but I’ve designed the machines that build [them],“ Young said.
Engineers who know how to apply basic sciences are crucial at the interface between machines and the wafer, according to Young. When dealing with structures and defects in the nanometer-size range, a background in physics or chemistry is particularly useful. For example, it is vital that equipment used for chip inspection not interact with the chip to cause further damage.
Young said that science students often do well as systems engineers, who must make sure that all aspects of the project work together. This breadth of knowledge also means that engineers with science backgrounds make good project managers, allowing them to guide staff working on more specific problems.
”People trained as scientists tend to look at the whole problem,“ Young said, ”rather than trying to design a single widget.“
Young said that the critical attributes for an engineer are analytical thinking, curiosity, tenacity, and scientific breadth. Also required are strong oral and written skills. After that, she said, the rest is hands-on design experience.
Young, who has a Ph.D. in nuclear science and engineering from Cornell, said that graduate education was not always immediately necessary.
”Having a title and a degree puts you into a strata right away,“ Young said. ”Especially in Asia and Europe.“
In the United States, however, it is the experience gained on the first engineering job that counts, she said. One student asked how to find a position in a job market where potential employers often require three to five years of work experience.
”If you go in and say ‘my thesis is such and such,’ you won’t get a job,“ Young said.
Instead, Young suggested that students approach companies by advertising the critical attributes listed above, emphasizing the versatility and breadth of their science background. Young, who described herself as an experimentalist, said she used this approach even after receiving her doctorate degree and was able to secure a job.
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