I studied Electronic Systems Engineering at Lancaster University in the UK, and graduated with a Masters in 2011. Now I'm working for a tech company in Taiwan,

I studied Electronic Systems Engineering at Lancaster University in the UK, and graduated with a Masters in 2011. Now I'm working for a tech company in Taiwan, who do the next process step: dicing the wafers into individuals dies, and packaging the dies into chips. There's a trolley downstairs with over 1 petabyte - stacked high with trays of 16GB memory cards from the testing machine. Unfortunately I only managed to get a job writing monitoring software, equipment control drivers, and business planning software, so I don't get to handle the wafers myself. In my opinion, you'll need to learn Chinese if you want to work for the lithography companies, or work for the German/Japanese/Swiss companies making the machines that take in the FOUPs. If you want to simply be a technician, most of the migrant workers who operate the machines here come from the Philippines and get paid very little while working very long hours with no path to promotion (all the line managers are Taiwanese). On the bright side though, the technicians speak better English, so it's easier to talk to them directly! I enjoyed the circuit design/FPGA programming courses in university, but the projects to design ASICs usually take several years, so I couldn't get work experience thorough summer jobs (which is how I ended up in software).