2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With a high demand to fill graduate level jobs in the semiconductor manufacturing industry there is a need to increase job readiness and ease the transition from academia to industry. Typical graduate academic education pedagogy does an excellent job of providing students with knowledge and scientific research skills, such as technical writing and communication. However, the typical graduate research experience does not fully prepare students for industry work experience. Currently, the primary method for students to obtain training for work experience is via internship, but this is not always possible due to location and time constraints, citizenship status, academic research requirements, and limited opportunities especially for international students. Majority of MS/PhD students do not obtain internships but instead focus on their research and completing their degree in less time. Therefore, these students still struggle with transitioning from an academic setting to an industry environment, because most have only ever experienced the academic environment.

To overcome this challenge, we developed a novel two course curriculum that aims to mimic an internship and startup company work experience. This is accomplished through “role-playing” courses where students act as internships in the 1st semester (onboarding) and then they transition to employees in the second semester. The instructors act as Project Managers/supervisors. The courses use problem-based learning in a nanofabrication cleanroom. The courses were designed to give students hands-on experience to provide them with the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) that were determined necessary by a semiconductor industrial panel.

To determine the effectiveness of the courses students were give a self-study survey (n=45 participants) in multiple categories including: 1) students who took the new courses (none of which had previous course or work experience in semiconductor manufacturing), 2) students with previous internship or semiconductor work experience (who did not take the new courses), and 3) students who have taken other semiconductor courses (taught using traditional academic methods) and had no work experience. The survey consisted of multiple questions in categories ranging from essential skills, general technical skills, microfabrication skills, software skills, statistical analysis, theoretical knowledge, and Management. Results of the survey indicate that students who had work experience scored higher than students who just took traditional semiconductor courses in 71% of the topics. In addition, the students participating in our “mock” work experience scored higher than the students with actual work experience in 63% of the categories and scored higher than students taking only courses in 69% of the categories. These results indicate that this new role-playing work experience curriculum is more efficient at providing key KSA’s than typical academic courses and is at least equal if not a little better than an actual internship over a range of topics. Internship experiences tend to focus on a particular area so students with internships did score significantly higher in specific topics, but our new course gave the students a broader range of KSA’s. The paper will compare results between the three categories of students for all the topics in more detail.