Development of a Novel Graduate Pedagogy to Enhance Job Readiness in Semiconductor Education Based on Role-Playing Internship Experience

There is a high demand for jobs in the semiconductor manufacturing sector due to the Chips Act.With this high demand there is a need to increase job readiness for graduate students specializing in this area.Semiconductor industry members feel that current graduate students are not well prepared to transition from academia to industry and often need several years of experience before they add value to the company.Current graduate academic education pedagogy prepares students for research and academia positions but often falls short of preparing students for industrial careers in manufacturing.Students can get the needed experience through internships, but this is not always possible due to location, research time constraints, citizenships, and academic time commitments.To try and overcome this challenge we are developing a novel two course program, where the first course aims to mimic a semiconductor/microsystem industry internship, and the second semester aims to mimic a microsystems startup company.This will be accomplished through "role-playing" courses where students act as interns in the 1 st semester (onboarding) and then they transition to employees in the second semester, and instructors act as Managers/bosses.The courses use problembased learning (PBL) in a nanofabrication cleanroom environment as the test vehicle.The courses are designed to give students hands-on experience to provide them with the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) that are needed in industry.The KSA's were determined and ranked from an industrial panel survey consisting of process engineers to upper management and from multinational companies to start up companies.This allowed the "instructors" to determine which KSA's to focus on in the course.