The word is out. Last week a group of American economists declared that the American economy has been in a recession since December 2007. The outlook for the broader economy has never looked as bleak as it now does (in my 28 years). Already many prominent engineering employers have enforced hiring freezes, Intel has predicted that it's revenues could be down by as much as 20%. Some prominent start-ups in the semiconductor business like Ambric have folded, because VCs aren't willing or able to fund these early-stage ventures. There are massive layoffs galore... AT&T fired 12,000 employees last week, and the Dauphin Obama said "it will get worse before it gets better".
What does this mean to you as an applicant?
So if the technology industry suffers a major downturn, chances are that experienced engineers will head back to school to either get an MS or an MBA or a PhD while the economy goes for an overhaul. The trouble is that when the economy is doing badly, it is harder to get a job after getting laid off. A secondary effect is that grad students who were about to finish their degrees, will likely postpone graduation until they can find a job.
This implies that admissions this year will be far more competitive than last year. If someone with credentials similar to yours got into a top 10 university last year, you may have trouble getting into the same university this year. So my suggestion would be to apply to a few universities as backup in case your safe bets are inundated with laid-off worker applications.
A job in India anyone?
If you are from India, and you have a job offer, you should consider taking up a job during the recession. My assumption here is that as India is a cost-saving measure for many companies, they may not fire as many employees in India as America. This is a guess, and I am liable to be as wrong as a trained economist. ; )
I don't know how long this will last. I hope we are out of the woods soon. If I lose my job and I can't find a new one for a couple of months, I would have to head back home to India too. Immigration in the US is related to employment, so I definitely need to keep enough money around to buy me a one-way plane ticket home. : ) It is best to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Question from Sidharth : Course Selection, MS vs PhD, Future scope for VLSI Design
I'll try to address the question Sidharth brought up in the comments for the last post. So first a quick note on course selection at American universities.
Mechanics of Course Selection
In grad schools in the US, you have almost an unlimited choice of courses to take. You could take courses in virtually any field within your department and outside. A lot of students try to learn how to play tennis, golf or ball-room dancing while in grad school, although these courses don't get you any closer to getting a degree. So a lot of students take one such course every semester. One constraint for course selection is that if you are working with a professor for your research, you may be required to take the course your professor is teaching that semester.
At UW's ECE Department students frequently took courses in Computer Science. For instance if you are trying to learn Computer Architecture, you might want to take courses in Operating Systems or Compilers in the CS Department. You are the boss. You decide how you want to complete your course requirements. You could ask professors for course advice too, but you make the final decision on course selection. So in Sidharth's case, you could take courses in VLSI Design and Networking as well.
Deciding what you want to do
Before I get to the question of future scope, an important question you need to answer is whether you want to do an MS or PhD. Honest advice if you want to do a PhD, do it right away. It gets much harder if you leave with an MS, to return for a PhD. If you want to head to a higher ranked university, apply in the second year of your Master's so that you can leave at the end of your MS.
A second question you should consider is are you interested in research or in a development job? Although semiconductor chip makers do very high-tech work, not all of it can be classified as research. (in fact most of it is not research). My definition of research is the pursuit of new knowledge, new truths. The intention is only to prototype and publish some new techniques or inventions, but not really to make a product out of them. Development engineering starts out at these ideas that came out of research and creating products out of them. While there is a lot of thought needed in development jobs and there are challenging tasks, there is also a lot of drudgery. If you are looking to become a researcher, you need a PhD in nearly every case because these days 33% of engineers have Master's degrees in the US. (Source EDN Survey 2008) Also the field you choose for your research has a big impact on your future. Entering nascent fields like nanotechnology, quantum electronics, bio computation, EUV lithography, natural language processing could ensure that you do get to do research eventually. VLSI Design as a broad field does include a lot of different areas, but they have been around for a couple of decades now. So it is a good field to be in if you plan to get a development engineering job.
The scope for semiconductors : VLSI Design
We all hear about how computing has changed our world and how this is just the beginning. There are a lot of interesting problems that still need to be solved. Networking all the devices in your home, creating faster computers, 3D stereo vision displays, personal robots, the list is long and the only limit is your imagination. A lot of prominent experts are sounding cautionary notes about the future of silicon CMOS technology though. There have been a lot of reports in EE Times about challenges to continued integration and there are some indications that creating transistors at 32nm feature sizes and beyond might be very expensive. This might prevent a lot of companies from creating chips if the costs become prohibitive. I am no expert in how this will all work out but there are varying predictions for the future of semiconductor scaling for 5 year or 10 years. Shekhar Borkar of Intel claims that there will be a lot of problems, higher degree of variability, higher failure rates, higher transient error rates and how we might have to add a lot of redundancy to the logic on chips to correct the errors. Short answer is that until some big breakthroughs are made the future doesn't look without risk. We could be optimistic and assume that some smart scientists will be able to solve the question of lithography and create an EUV technology that works, find ways to minimize error rates, but things definitely won't be as easy as the last 20 odd years in the chip business.
Mechanics of Course Selection
In grad schools in the US, you have almost an unlimited choice of courses to take. You could take courses in virtually any field within your department and outside. A lot of students try to learn how to play tennis, golf or ball-room dancing while in grad school, although these courses don't get you any closer to getting a degree. So a lot of students take one such course every semester. One constraint for course selection is that if you are working with a professor for your research, you may be required to take the course your professor is teaching that semester.
At UW's ECE Department students frequently took courses in Computer Science. For instance if you are trying to learn Computer Architecture, you might want to take courses in Operating Systems or Compilers in the CS Department. You are the boss. You decide how you want to complete your course requirements. You could ask professors for course advice too, but you make the final decision on course selection. So in Sidharth's case, you could take courses in VLSI Design and Networking as well.
Deciding what you want to do
Before I get to the question of future scope, an important question you need to answer is whether you want to do an MS or PhD. Honest advice if you want to do a PhD, do it right away. It gets much harder if you leave with an MS, to return for a PhD. If you want to head to a higher ranked university, apply in the second year of your Master's so that you can leave at the end of your MS.
A second question you should consider is are you interested in research or in a development job? Although semiconductor chip makers do very high-tech work, not all of it can be classified as research. (in fact most of it is not research). My definition of research is the pursuit of new knowledge, new truths. The intention is only to prototype and publish some new techniques or inventions, but not really to make a product out of them. Development engineering starts out at these ideas that came out of research and creating products out of them. While there is a lot of thought needed in development jobs and there are challenging tasks, there is also a lot of drudgery. If you are looking to become a researcher, you need a PhD in nearly every case because these days 33% of engineers have Master's degrees in the US. (Source EDN Survey 2008) Also the field you choose for your research has a big impact on your future. Entering nascent fields like nanotechnology, quantum electronics, bio computation, EUV lithography, natural language processing could ensure that you do get to do research eventually. VLSI Design as a broad field does include a lot of different areas, but they have been around for a couple of decades now. So it is a good field to be in if you plan to get a development engineering job.
The scope for semiconductors : VLSI Design
We all hear about how computing has changed our world and how this is just the beginning. There are a lot of interesting problems that still need to be solved. Networking all the devices in your home, creating faster computers, 3D stereo vision displays, personal robots, the list is long and the only limit is your imagination. A lot of prominent experts are sounding cautionary notes about the future of silicon CMOS technology though. There have been a lot of reports in EE Times about challenges to continued integration and there are some indications that creating transistors at 32nm feature sizes and beyond might be very expensive. This might prevent a lot of companies from creating chips if the costs become prohibitive. I am no expert in how this will all work out but there are varying predictions for the future of semiconductor scaling for 5 year or 10 years. Shekhar Borkar of Intel claims that there will be a lot of problems, higher degree of variability, higher failure rates, higher transient error rates and how we might have to add a lot of redundancy to the logic on chips to correct the errors. Short answer is that until some big breakthroughs are made the future doesn't look without risk. We could be optimistic and assume that some smart scientists will be able to solve the question of lithography and create an EUV technology that works, find ways to minimize error rates, but things definitely won't be as easy as the last 20 odd years in the chip business.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
A Survey
I see a few repeat visitors to this blog. I know not a lot, but if you like what you have read so far on this blog, I need your help. What would you like to read about on this space? If I know someone cares about the content here, I'd be more motivated to continue writing. So do chime in with suggestions for the next topic to tackle. Thanks.
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