Predictable Materials
When Jake Jensen began working at Intel after he graduated with a PhD in chemistry from the University of Oregon in 2003, it hit home how well the materials science program and his adviser, Dave Johnson, had prepared him for his job.
“The program and internships are geared toward making graduate students into useful professionals,” says Jensen. “I came in and was capable in a way that my coworkers weren’t.”
Jensen is now a senior staff engineer at Intel and works on developing new manufacturing processes for micro-processors using anneal technologies. “There are about 400 different steps to manufacturing a chip that involve coating in metals, dipping in chemicals, electroplating these things,” Jensen says. “I come in whenever there’s a material that needs its properties changed.”
The work is an expansion of what Jensen did in Dave Johnson’s lab, where he worked on understanding how metal and silicon mix together. “I wanted to understand the science and help people predict and purposefully pursue what they are now doing by guess check,” Jensen says. “People have recipes that work, but they don’t understand why.”
Jensen also spent more than a year interning at Intel throughout his graduate school career, something he appreciates Dave Johnson for encouraging him to do. “It’s inconvenient for a professor to lose a graduate student for a considerable amount of time,” says Jensen. “He was only interested in helping me figure out what I wanted to do with a PhD in chemistry.”
The industry experience helped – Jensen learned that he liked industry’s faster pace and challenges. He also liked the results-oriented knowledge he got from completing projects.
“I can’t underestimate the effect this has had on my life,” Jensen says. “I got to stay in Oregon. I have a great job that pays well and uses my degree.”
