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As someone working full-time in Canada, wish I could roll back my life 10+ years and get into one of the semiconductor schools. Good luck to all who are admitte

• Bilal_io 4y ago
  Semi-relates: Why don't universities offer online undergraduate programs? It's frustrating. I enrolled myself back to finish my bachelor's degree and my school offers very few or no online options for the classes I need.
  • Victerius 4y ago
    Online programs may not be accredited by national credentialing bodies. Many STEM degrees require lab courses that can't be performed online. And non-STEM programs are based around the seminar (classroom discussion) model, where on-site attendance is always superior to a Zoom meeting. Forcing students to live on-premises also makes universities money through student housing and amenities. Universities have concerns that opening their programs to online instruction would lead to an exodus from the campus. You could have 70% of a 20,000 strong student body attend online, and all the expensive real estate of the campus would mostly be a waste of money.
  • hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
    I'm frustrated too. My university has gone back to in-people and it forces me to drop 2 out of the 4 courses I registered, plus one of the kept course forces me to take a couple of hours off every week.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    But this is an online program.
    • Bilal_io 4y ago
      I am happy that it is, but it's not my domain. I am trying to finish my degree in CS or a related field.
      • adamsmith143 4y ago
        Plenty of options out there. ASU, Arizona, Florida, etc all have online CS or SWE bachelor programs but there are many others as well. Good Luck!
      • lotsofpulp 4y ago
        https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/online-degrees/undergraduate/computer-science/ https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/online-degrees/undergraduate...
        • badRNG 4y ago
          Unless you are going for their post-bacc (which is a really good deal), doing their full online undergrad program would be an absolute nightmare. I'd go just about anywhere else.
    • metaphor 4y ago
      Graduate program has an online option; undergraduate program does not.
  • jltsiren 4y ago
    Because they don't have the people to teach online students. The academia is a community and a lifestyle. The people who choose that lifestyle generally don't want to spend too much time teaching outside the community. Teaching is a lot of work, a lot of bureaucracy, and a lot of hard deadlines, and it's not particularly rewarding if the students are just names on screen. Maybe if people paid higher taxes and higher tuition fees, universities could hire teachers to "just work here" and pay them competitive salaries.
  • Kerrick 4y ago
    Some do. I just started going back to school and I’m working on a B.S. In Software Development at Western Governors University. They’re accredited and online only. They also offer a B.S. in Computer Science.
    • Bilal_io 4y ago
      I heard about WGU and was a bit skeptical, not knowing how it's viewed by other universities if I wanted to continue my master's program elsewhere. I have a couple of questions if you don't mind. I assume you've done your research before you joined, what made you decide to go for it? what's your current experience there? And do you know other people that took their degree from WGU and joined another university for their master's?
      • alawrence 4y ago
        I can't speak to master's programs in CompSci but I finished my bachelors in business at WGU and was later admitted to the iMBA program at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
      • Kerrick 4y ago
        The biggest three factors that made me decide to go for it were: - Even in my first attempt at college, I was never too concerned with the name/reputation of the school. My first go around I picked a state school that gave me a full ride, rather than going for the more prestigious options. So once I checked that the accreditation of WGU was indeed legit, that was good enough for me. - Their admissions are based on your professional history, since they're set up to cater to working professionals, not high school graduates. (Heck, their mascot is the "night owl.") That means it didn't matter to them that my first attempt at college left me with a... bit of a "stained" transcript. That stopped me from getting into other online options, but my professional history spoke for me at WGU. - I'm a huge fan of their competency-based education model. It isn't for everyone since the classes are self-paced and asynchronous, but it matches my personal abilities to self teach and to "binge" content. Plus, as soon as you enroll in a course you can take a pre-assessment that will unlock the final if you do well. For some of the courses I've spent over a decade in the workforce learning the content, so I was able to do the pre-assessment and then the final in a single day. My current experience at WGU is short, but good. My term started June 1. I rocketed through a few of the classes that had test-based and code-based finals in the first week. Now I'm realizing just how out of practice I am with writing, because I'm in a pair of classes that have writing-based finals and I'm struggling more. I don't personally know people that took their degree from WGU to another university for a Masters, but WGU maintains a list [0] of universities which have accepted WGU undergraduates into their graduate and/or doctoral programs. [0] https://www.wgu.edu/alumni/career-support/education-and-professional-paths.html https://www.wgu.edu/alumni/career-support/education-and-prof...
  • driscoll42 4y ago
    There's one to my knowledge offered by the University of London: https://www.coursera.org/degrees/bachelor-of-science-computer-science-london https://www.coursera.org/degrees/bachelor-of-science-compute...
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • metaphor 4y ago
    > Why don't universities offer online undergraduate programs? There's a normative and substantial laboratory aspect to ABET-accredited[1] undergraduate engineering programs. From Criterion 7: >> Modern tools, equipment, computing resources, and laboratories appropriate to the program must be available, accessible, and systematically maintained and upgraded to enable students to attain the student outcomes and to support program needs. [1] https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-accrediting-engineering-programs-2022-2023/ https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    Online undergrad degrees, exist but are few and far between. A good many have substandard curriculum, others are "ok" granting you a legit degree from a recognized school, but probably lower quality education than in person. Most of the decent ones are expensive, and many still consider in/out of state tuition. There are a few good deals I've seen, highly dependent on being in-state. The only "useful" ones you'll find tend to be CS, a handful of EE degrees exist online (no clue how that works) along with some other fields. Occasionally you'll find some in the natural sciences, but they tend to be BA's and explicitly for pre-law, pre-med, etc. I've seen maybe one online math degree and tons of social science ones, as well as "we made this major up to target to poor working people who will give us money". At the end of the day, they exist, but are uncommon and probably not worth the price. I researched going back to school online for years, but if I do it, I will probably do it in person (at least for the important years).
• jjoonathan 4y ago
  Warning: nerd trap. Low wages, horrendous deadlines (tapeout), hard work. Perhaps this has changed, given that we're in a semiconductor boom cycle now, but I have my doubts. When SMIC started trying to poach TSMC talent, the response was not to make pay competitive (or even half decent), let alone in line with the massive geopolitically-relevant value being created. No, the response was a mask-off legislative crackdown to keep the nerds in line. In the US, there were only two big employers, and they were definitely paying what they could get away with. Anyone who is considering this career -- any career, but this one especially -- before you jump, please get the perspective of someone in industry who isn't trying to sell you a career.
  • gyc 4y ago
    My dad was a EE professor specializing in semiconductor fabrication and he warned me away from a career working at semiconductor labs. He has warned me about every single warning of this post.
  • rockostrich 4y ago
    I went into a master's program at SUNY CNSE back in 2014 for "nanoscale engineering" hoping to do some research in MEMS/NEMS. Turns out there were no research spots available with the groups working on that stuff so I ended up in a group working on EUV photoresists. I ended up not doing much actual "nanoscale research" and mostly just did some data science/engineering for the group since all the data processing code they had took 10+ hours to run for each experiment trial. I fixed that code to run in under 10 minutes and decided I should probably just start looking for jobs in software. Couldn't be happier. Every person I interacted with in the semiconductor space was either an academic who was stuck in a lab 12+ hours a day or some line manager for Intel/IBM/TSMC/etc. that was on-call 24/7 if something went wrong. Both of those sounded terrible to me regardless of the pay.
    • jjoonathan 4y ago
      If they paid me to be on-call as much as they payed my father (doctor) to be on-call, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Maybe I would have regretted it in 10 years -- he sure did -- but I'd have loved it for a while. Terrible pay and terrible hours and long school and hard work is just irredeemable.
• hardware2win 4y ago
  I switched from web dev to semico this year and the amount of things i dont understand is huge Majority of ppl here are after electrical eng. Cs seems to be easy in compare
  • badRNG 4y ago
    I currently work in embedded software which involves a lot of overlapping interaction with EE and hardware design folks. The consensus is that the hardest, most fascinating field is the one you currently have the least exposure to. The easiest, least exciting field is the one you have a degree in. In CS, you may have spent thousands or tens of thousands of hours across many years learning and growing, and still being limited in your understanding of the field as a whole. It's daunting to explore other related fields just to find out that they each have similar levels of complexity, filled with professionals who've sunk similar levels of effort, time, and years of their life into their work (who are often equally struck by the complexity of your field.)
    • netr0ute 4y ago
      The grass is always greener on the other side
      • actinium226 4y ago
        But sometimes that's because it's fake. Other times it has more to do with the particular brand of, ahem, fertilizer, they use. Sometimes it really is greener and your side is shit and it's time to make a change.
    • hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
      Just curious, for a software engineer that only works with managed languages such as Java and Python, what kind of embedded job is easy to squeeze into? Thanks~~
      • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
• bsder 4y ago
  Don't. Really. You wind up captive to a small number of employers in places that have few other employers. You have to be physically present--no online only. You will have weird hours because you have to slot into the fab plant openings. Your pay will be a small fraction of even a mediocre software developer. I can go on and on. There isn't a shortage of semiconductor personnel. We all fled. Companies could pay people enough to come back. Like so many other fields, companies would rather do anything other than raise salaries. Stay far away.
• madengr 4y ago
  If process engineers are so rare, why don’t they pay them like they are rare? My wife got the hell out and into data science. Much more respect and pay.
• bramathon 4y ago
  I studied semiconductor engineering in Canada about 10 years ago (graduated in 2011). Career propsects were poor, a few jobs available in California. A career in software would have been far better in terms of pay and opportunities.