Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1510765
NOVEMBER 2023 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 25 But companies do the same thing with their onboarding processes. ere is a cognitive load associated with moving into the space and shiing your expectations and learning how to learn. You are mirroring the corporate environment to the best of your abilities. How sought after are your graduates? For a long time, I had one semiconductor com- pany that just kept hiring all my graduates— every last one of them. All our engineers have training across both mechanical and electrical, among some other things. I could not produce an electrically concentrated graduate without them just being snapped up. Does that continue today? We still see hiring, but there are hiring man- agers who will never hire from us. ey have decided that they need an electrical or mechanical engineer, and they will not look at anybody else—never mind the breadth of engineering that's required to be successful in electronics. So, when hiring managers come in and say they're only interested in this one thing, and only interested in hiring from the biggest schools, we're done. I don't want to work with you anyway; you're probably not an interesting place to work. Do potential employers help influence the curriculum? Absolutely. We do it in multi- ple ways. Every accredited pro- gram must have an advisory board; not all advisory boards are well lis- tened to or well heard. We work hard to embrace the same continu- ous improvement cycle that we want our student engineers to embrace as they improve both their personal and project performance. In other words, we're engineering our engi- neering program. We actively seek out the voices that provide us strong feed- back—both positive and negative. If you only hear good things, people aren't looking at you close enough. I get excited when I hear, "Have you thought about this improvement?" When I hear "capstone" I usually think of one project encompassing the breadth and depth of what the student learned. Capstone projects set you up for success. Imag- ine what it would look like if you had multiple capstones throughout your course of study. But the idea is that the day my senior engineers start their project, before anything's even hap- pened, they're already three weeks behind and $5,000 over budget. ey understand that they need to immediately reach out to the client. ey may not have seen all the details from their predecessors, but now they work to find what matters to them. What's fun is that we see more success in our projects than I think most programs see. It's because of that culture. Are you working to expand this approach to technical education into other locations? Yes, absolutely. We've doubled our footprint recently. Previously, we were at Normandale Community College; we're now also partner- ing with Saint Paul College. We have also spun