Intel Internship (Summer 2007)

My internship at Intel was a great learning experience. I stayed in my family’s apartment during the weekdays and then drove back down to our house in Monterey on the weekends. My group had four other people in it. I worked in the Lithography/Etch department, but we did not have much to do with that. We were environmental processing engineers, so we dealt with things coming out of the fab (another way of putting it would be “waste” :-). I worked on three projects while I was there. The first was working on a bioreactor pilot to process wastes from the fab. I tested new feed solvents for denitrification for that. Unfortunately I was not able to continue this project because there were some complications with upper management. I also developed a model for ultra pure water in the fab using Visual Basic for Applications. Additionally, I completed fab emissions testing using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. I even got to visit the Intel facility in Hillsboro, Oregon twice. I felt special going on business trips and being an intern :-). I flew in Intel's jet (don't get excited, it is just a regular airplane...but they do have electrical outlets to charge your computer) which was pretty cool. We stayed there for a few days to do some work on the bioreactor pilot. Oregon is beautiful and extremely green. The Intel facility there is much larger than Santa Clara's because they actually make chips there.

I was very fortunate to work in a great group. I had lots of fun with my team members. They even took me out to lunch a few times! I also attended SEMICON west 2007, where companies that have anything do whatsoever with making semiconductors come and present their wares. There were cool robots that handled wafers. Nikon even had microscopes to analyze wafers. There were so many companies that had niche products just for semiconductor manufacturing. My group was very supportive of me and they always made sure I had something to do. Some of my other friends were not so lucky in that respect.

By the way, Intel pays their interns a lot of money for the summer, especially considering it is an internship. If your college is far away, they even give you relocation money to help pay for costs. Interns also get a share in the bonuses! It’s a really good deal.

My favorite part of the summer was hanging out with interns and other young employees. I mostly hung out with a group of about four other employees and their boyfriends/girlfriends. We went ice-skating one night (why I’ve been ice-skating in the middle of the summer in California but not in Boston in the winter I can’t tell you). I also got one of my intern friends hooked on the show, Firefly. There was an intern picnic that was also fun. I played football with the guys. I’m not the best at catching and throwing but I can do some pretty good defense…at least in touch football. We even visited the aquarium in Monterey one weekend, which I have seen dozens of times, but it’s still fun to visit every once in a while. My experience this summer would not have been the same without these awesome people! I am so glad the interns at Intel were more active than at Agilent. I had no problems getting together with people at all, unlike last summer. There were events going on almost every night!

If you want to see a hilarious video about Intel (you can even see the building I worked in!) click on the link below. Conan O Brien visited Intel and made fun of it. (And yes, there really is a plaque in the ground to tell you where to take a picture :-).

http://www.clipstr.com/videos/ConanVisitsIntel/

I really enjoyed working at Intel. Since Intel is a large company, it has its own problems, but working there for the summer was great. They were more organized than Agilent and the interns did many more activities. I also liked the combination of chemical engineering and electronics. I know now that I want to go more into an electronics area with my cheme degree. I highly recommend Intel for summer internships. It is possible that you might get a bad group and not accomplish much during the summer (this happened to one of my friends), but if you have a great group it's a good experience.

After my three-month internship was over, my family and I went to Maui for vacation. I had a nice, relaxing time before heading back to MIT.