Engineer Interview Report

On November 18, I interviewed with Brian Lai who is the applications engineer in Nassda Corporation. The meeting was held in a restaurant at 6 p.m., right after he finished his work on the day. The meeting was so exciting and informative. We spent more than one hour in the restaurant and for the dinner. The purpose of my interview was to seek information about electrical engineering and obtain more information on how to achieve my career goal.

At the beginning of the interview, I asked him about his background and his education. He came from Hong Kong when he was 15 years old. In 1998, he received his bachelor degree at University of California in Berkeley. He told me that he had an internship with Sun Microsystems before he graduated. He also told me that he learned a lot of things from there. After that, I asked him what the most important thing was that he learned in the university. First, he pointed out that the circuit design concept and programming language are the most important things since his job applied these knowledge a lot. As an applications engineer, he always helps customers to test their products and reports the customers about their testing results. When he examines an electric product, he needs to fully understand the circuit structure of the product. If he doesnÐ'ÐŽÐ'Їt have circuit design concept, it is impossible to understand the circuit structure and the function of the product. He also need to design and write an interface program (a program for a computer to control a specific electronic hardware) when he exam a product. To write an interface program, he needs to use a lot of programming knowledge which he learned in school. Second, he told me that the communication skill is also another important issue we need to learn in the university. Besides writing program and solving circuit problem, he needs to communicate with his boss and persuade his customers. He needs to write memos and reports every week. In order to explain the situation and procedure of his works, he needs to write clear reports. Most of the time, he needs to write a detail report to explain the procedures, materials and costs to the customer after he and his coworkers have examined the product. Before he starts perform testing on customerÐ'ÐŽÐ'Їs products, he needs to get permits from both his boss and his customer. In order to persuade his boss, he must write a beautiful and proper proposal. After his boss accepts his proposal, he needs to write an attractive and simple presentation in order to persuade his customers for accepting his testing procedure and cost. As a result, technical writing is one of the important factors in order to be successful in our fields. Then I asked him how we could fill the gap between schoolwork and real work. Although there is a huge difference between schoolwork and real work, the procedure is the same. First, they need to understand the problem. Second, they do research on the specific problem. Third, they analyze the problem and find the solutions. Finally, they perform the testing and retesting.

Then I asked him how important oral and written communication skills are. He responded that oral and written communication skills are the key issue of being successful in engineering. Although the main job of the engineers is to design and solve practical problems, they need to have excellent oral and written communication skills. In the engineering world, they usually work as teams. Working in teams, they need to explain and write the procedure of their works everyday. In the lab, they need to write notes and reports everyday. If they could not write in proper English, they could not explain and redo the procedure again. Besides having written skills, they also need outstanding oral communications