NMT Recruitment Presentation

hello everyone my name is zachary gray and today i'm going to talk to you a little bit about an opportunity you have to take a course at penn state in nana fabrication and nanotechnology so the first thing we're going to do is i'm going to kind of introduce myself and explain uh my background a bit and why i'm the person giving you this presentation today and then we're going to talk a little bit about the actual science of nanotechnology what nanotechnology is and why it might be a really good field for you to get involved with so to begin um kind of my my story is you know i went to um i'm from pennsylvania and when i got out of high school i initially went to penn state berks and i went to penn state berks for computer science and i did this for about a year uh but after about a year i realized that i just wasn't very interested in what i was studying so i ended up leaving college i dropped out after a year and i realized at that point that i had to do something um so i wasn't in school so i had to get a job but unfortunately without you know much education post high school you know it's hard to find a really good job but i was able to get a job working to start just in retail so i just got a job working at walmart and i did this for a couple years it was it was fairly hard work um but after a few years working here i realized that um maybe i'd made a mistake dropping out of college and i i decided that i i wanted to try try college again you know maybe i'd matured a little bit and i just wanted to give it another shot but the thing was when i went to go back and attempted to go back to college i i couldn't afford to go back um we all know college isn't cheap um you know and unless you have scholarships it can be difficult to get back in get your foot back in the door um however while working at walmart i worked really hard and i was able to save up enough money to get back into community college so i actually got enrolled into reading area community college and when i started taking courses at rac i actually had no idea what i wanted to study i didn't even know if i was interested in psychology or sociology or some type of science so what i did was i started by just taking courses across the board i took courses in art and history and science statistics just to kind of maybe do some soul searching that i didn't do initially when i first got out of high school and in doing this after about a year rack i found a pamphlet and in this pamphlet it actually talked about a nanotechnology program that i could take as a student at rac and i looked at the curriculum for the program and there was lots of science and math type courses which i i kind of enjoyed those types of courses in high school but then i read on the last semester of this associate's degree program you actually would be able to take rac courses at penn state university park which is the main campus of penn state but you would pay the tuition of the community college not the tuition of penn state so this really excited me and i looked into it more and i ended up doing so i ended up taking this course and i got my associate's degree from red area community college in nmt or nano fabrication manufacturing technology and this is the exact program that i graduated in 2007 this exact program is what i'm going to talk to you about today is this program that i did firsthand as a student in 2007. so after i finished my associate's degree i went on and i worked at a solar health cell company and i utilized the skill set that i got in this associate's degree and this was a much more technical job than what i was doing at walmart i was actually now with this job i was going into a clean room lab environment as a process technician and i was actually um performing uh these processes to to create build solar cells so it's really really cool work and very technical but i really enjoyed it and it was excellent technical experience to add to my resume so i did this until 2010 and then i was able to save up more money working at this this company called solari the solar cell company and then i was able to fund myself through my bachelor's degree at penn state in material science and engineering and then after that i went back to work for a bit at penn state and then i went back to school i finished my graduate degree also in material science and engineering there's a lot of overlap in material science in general with all things nano so it's very interdisciplinary just like nanotechnology is and then for the last um i guess about five and a half years i've actually been living out in the other side of the country out in phoenix arizona working for a company called nanoscience instruments so nanoscience instruments is a really great company what they do is they are the us distributor of a variety of different instrumentation scientific instrumentation one of those is a product called the phenom scanning electron microscope so the scanning electron microscope is a product that i worked with in nanoscience but i learned about scanning electron microscopes in my associate's degree back in 2007 so that skill that i learned you know over 10 years ago helped me get through my job at nanoscience and then just recently um i moved back in 2022 to pennsylvania um to return to penn state and work for this uh work for the university once again so i kind of have a long history with with the university uh over the years but i'm i'm really excited to be back because as a student of this program i'm a huge proponent of it because i know what it can do for you for catalyzing your career so it's it's a very good opportunity and i'm excited that i can talk to you guys with first-hand experience going through this course that it's it's a very very good um skill set that you're going to get out of this so um i've been in this field since 2007 and you know i want to just kind of re-emphasize it it's the community college step in my life that's really totally changed everything um for the last 15 years so i got three degrees i got an associate's degree a bachelor's degree and a phd and of those three degrees when i actually took a step back and thought about it i realized that my my company when i worked with a solar cell company all of the stuff that i did for that job was obviously learned in my associate's degree because it was the only degree i had at the time but then i realized that when i returned to work at penn state and when i worked at nanoscience and now once again at penn state all of the skills that i learned in my associate's degree program that's really what i use in all of these jobs sure i have the more the other degrees but the skills themselves are all things that i got in the two-year degree so you can take this degree and really run with it and do whatever you'd like with this type of skill set you're going to get in this course so before we get you know into you know getting degrees and all this and you know what what the jobs are let's first take a step back and say what what is nanotechnology what is it in the first place so now the technology kind of the formal definition is it's the branch of nano or the branch of technology dealing with dimensions uh less than 100 nanometers in size so this can relate to even things like manipulating individual atoms and molecules so the window uh the formal window is defined as one to 100 nanometers that's like the nanotech window but i do want to emphasize that it's it's there's actually a larger window than just this so we're not just like saying oh well if something's 70 nanometers and it's nanotechnology but if something is 400 nanometers it's not nanotechnology it's not it's not defined quite like that so um in the course at penn state we work at this scale but we also work at a scale larger than this as well because the scale slightly larger than this is kind of the micro scale and semiconductor processing is very very very uh common to be done in this micron scale so we teach you in this size skill range at one to 100 animators but we also go larger than that as well so understanding scale though is a foundational element so i'm i'm saying talking to you guys about oh well one 100 nanometers we work at that scale but we work at a larger scale of one micron unless you've been in this field for a bit those those two quantities they don't really mean much they're just really small but after you've been in this industry the the difference between 100 nanometers and a thousand nanometers is very substantial and we're going to talk about that so to kind of get calibrated and understand these small scales one exercise that i think is is worth doing is um looking at your your thumb and we're going to basically take our thumb and we're going to imagine objects that are a thousand times smaller and larger than our thumb so let's start by getting uh by using larger objects in the thumb so if i were to ask you what is an everyday object a thousand times longer than your thumb and if you actually took a couple minutes to think about it so think about something that is one thousand thumbs long so the way you could do this is you could say okay well i know my thumb is about two inches long and if i convert that to millimeters so convert it you know to units that are easier to to scale up two inches of about 50 millimeters and 50 millimeters times a thousand is 50 meters and now we're thinking okay well i know i know how long the football field is so a football field roughly is about half of a 50 meters is about half of a football field therefore if we know 1 000 thumbs would stretch across half a football field it's pretty easy math to say well then 2 000 thumbs would stretch all the way across a football field and we can keep going with this i can say okay now tell me something that is 1 000 football or 1 000 half football fields long and you could say well 50 meters times a thousand is 50 kilometers and that would be maybe the distance that you drive on a highway in half an hour depending on how fast you're driving therefore if we go back to our initial thumb we have one thousand thumbs times one thousand thumbs is a million thumbs so basically in half an hour you drive the length of a million thumbs so what we're doing is we're just trying to convert units and think about things in different ways because as things get larger and larger it becomes harder to comprehend it so i can keep going with this i could say well if we we take that um you know we take this distance this half hour which is 50 kilometers we multiply that by a thousand so a half hour times a thousand actually turns out to be about the circumference of the earth so in theory if you think about it then you could actually since we said it's a half hour um is that and then we take a half hour times a thousand that means in theory in 500 hours you could drive around the circumference of the earth these are all just kind of mind things that we think about to understand these large scales and you can keep going and then you can get to distances from planets to the sun and then the nearest galaxy is actually about half a trillion times larger than that but the point here is actually on this slide because i show you that number that 21 quintillion kilometers if i were to take let's say i were to take three of those zeros away from that huge number that would mean absolutely nothing to me i wouldn't understand the difference between a 21 with 15 zeros and a 21 with 18 zeros my brain can't comprehend those large numbers i don't even understand what the difference is but there are people who do and those people are called astronomers and they're they're trained and paid to think at large scales so now what i'm here to talk to you about today is basically the same concept but in the opposite direction so if we were to instead zoom in on our thumb so now same thumb two inches long let's cut it into a thousand pieces what's something that's one one thousandth the size of your thumb so 15 millimeters divided by a thousand is actually about 50 micrometers which turns out to be roughly the diameter of your hair so therefore if you were to take one thousand of your hairs and lay them next to each other they would be about the length of your thumb which is kind of cool so it turns out the human eye actually kind of gives up around here as well so the human eye can't see things smaller than about 30 micrometers therefore the human eye its ability to resolve things gives up it dimensions about a thousand times smaller than our thumb so it's just kind of cool trivia to think about so now if we were to take this dimension if i were to say okay well now tell me something that's one thousand times smaller than the diameter of your hair now we're at the nano scale and that's the scale that we work at in this course 50 nanometers was the minimum feature size on transistors over a decade ago so this seems really small but it's actually humongous in the nanoworld 50 nanometers um and essentially this is the type and the size scale that we're looking at and building in these courses at penn state this is the nano scale and we can keep going with this once again so we can go to the angstrom scale which would be 50 picometers and we can go down um to the length of things in the nucleus like protons and then keep going and going to gun and then the planck blank this 3 000 quintillion times smaller than that which is the smallest possible length of any actual significance but again just like before the point here is that the smaller things become the harder it is to differentiate differences at that scale and that's one thing that people trained in this area are calibrated to think about you know if you were to tell me one object is 30 nanometers and another object is a micron those quantities to the average person they're both just really small and they don't really mean any difference but in in this field when you get trained that there's a huge difference between something 30 nanometers and something a micron in size and one micron is 1000 nanometers for the record so this is kind of another way um the way i just kind of explain nano and thinking at different scales it's more of a ratio type way but some people think better uh in terms of you know this is a different way of thinking about other ways of comprehending a nanometer nanometers to a meter as a marble is to the the earth a nanometer is the amount a man's beard will grow in the time it takes him to raise the razor to his face uh it's how much your fingernail grows in every second i i personally think that was crazy um you know just in the amount of time that i've been speaking so far today you know maybe 20 minutes and you convert 20 minutes um you know into you know if you were to convert that you could say wow man my fingernail has grown over a thousand nanometers just in the time i've talked to you today and what we're doing in this course this nano manufacturing course at penn state is we're training you to to look at things and build things smaller than how much our fingernails have grown in the amount of time i've been talking today so it's just very hard to even fathom how small the scale is and what's important technically though and why this scale is unique is because at distances below 100 nanometers the quantum effects start to occur and in this realm physical mechanical and electrical properties will change compared to a macroscopic system so to kind of kind of go into a little more detail on that we're all very familiar with the periodic table of elements i'm sure we've seen this before in a chemistry class somewhere along the line and you may not even realize how familiar with it you are until you think about it so if i were to say if i were to ask you what what element between carbon and gold which of these elements is more electrically conductive you'd be like oh what's gold gold's a metal uh carbon is is not so we're actually we have a good ballpark feel for for what the properties of the elements are in the skill of our everyday life however it turns out um when when these elements are at the nanoscale so when we make these elements so small that they're at the nanoscale that one to 100 nanometer size range we were talking about all those properties are they can be different um so the elemental properties which include uh the melting point the fluorescence the electrical conductivity the magnetic permeability and the chemical reactivity all of these things can be different at the nanoscale so the way i like to think about it is like take the periodic table that we're already all very familiar with and imagine that it's like a new dimension to the periodic table so these elements can have totally new properties that we've yet to untap a lot of these as well so there's a lot of room for growth still in this field because at the nanoscale there's all kinds of unique properties that we can take advantage of so one example of that is let's take a look at gold so we all know gold gold basically looks like this it looks gold that's the color of both gold looks like jewelry we're all very familiar with this color but at the nanoscale the gold is a totally different color it's not gold anymore and actually the size of the gold particle will dictate its color when it's suspended in a solution and that's not how things work in everyday life right at our ordinary size scale the size of something has nothing to do with the color of that object but if the nanoscale does and yeah this is kind of quirky and weird but but who cares right what's the point of this so they're actually using this in biomedicine um for different reasons and they're using this effect to detect different things um in a person so it's really kind of neat um the pregnancy uh test that they use some of them actually utilize this as well where there will be a color change from the red solution to the purple solution if the person is pregnant so they actually utilize this effect for useful applications so just a little more on the particles basically you can see that at the nanoscale the size of an object will dictate its color the chemistry of the object also dictates its color that's maybe not as interesting because that's just how it is in everyday life right gold and silver are different materials and different colors that's not that abnormal to say the nanoscale the same applies but this last one i think is really weird at the nanoscale the actual shape of an object will cause color changes so very interesting like the spheres and plates just based on the geometry will dictate a different color so the problem though is our eyes we can only see so small and we can't see things that are smaller than about thirty thousand nanometers in size nanotechnology remember is one to one hundred nanometers in size so you can't just squint and do nano technology that's not how it works so we need high powered scientific instrumentation to observe what we're doing and this is something like a scanning electron microscope or an atomic force microscope and i'm going to list a lot of different techniques shortly here that you guys will get trained on uh in the course that we teach at penn state so what do we need to do in order to see things smaller than we can see with the naked eye and that's where characterization comes into play so this slide here might look kind of boring um just a bunch of words and many of these things you may not have heard of before but this slide is actually extremely important because this slide becomes your technical resume after you take this 12-week capstone semester at penn state and again this is actually not i wouldn't even list this in the education part of your resume so you know we go to college to build our resume we list where we went to school we list our gpa what our major was and that's it and then you also have your experience section on your resume where you list your relevant technical experience so the all these bullet points here this actually would be listed under the experience part of your resume not the education part because this is stuff that companies need people who have some experience with this type of instrumentation because it's very sophisticated it's not something that you would just get in a standard college class and that's why this course is taken at penn state because penn state has this technical or this very high-tech scientific instrumentation to train you on so to kind of give you a feel so fabrication is just a fancy word for how do we make things at this nano scale and in characterization in a similar fashion it's just a fancy word for how do we see things at this scale so just to give you guys kind of a flavor for for what these things are let's talk about a couple of them so i want to start i want to talk a little bit about lithography so lithography is essentially how we transfer patterns at a very small scale so lithography believe it or not every single one of you watching this has a device on you a cell phone or some type of electronic device that has been through the lithography process plenty of times while it was being created so even though you may not have heard of lithography you have all been influenced by it significantly in your lives so lithography is how we make the chips that are in your phone and let's talk about what it is so i like to think about things by doing macroscopic analogies to things we can comprehend in everyday life so let's first start there so the macroscopic analogy to lithography is just a stencil so a stencil all we would do is we would use the stencil to transfer a pattern so as an example if i wanted to paint an arrow on this road so that a car getting to that you know that turn new to term i would use a stencil so there in pink is my stencil i paint over the stencil i remove the stencil and we transfer the arrow now imagine doing that same process but on the head of a pin or smaller and that's what lithography is so photolithography and this is a process and i'll go through what it is but again this is something that you would actually do in the class at penn state and you don't just learn about it on a chalkboard or you know on a computer you literally go into a clean room and do this process and that is what makes uh your your technical skills very valuable because this is not something an ordinary student will get access to doing this process so photolithography pattern transfer to a photosensitive material by selective uv light exposure so all we're going to do is we're going to take some type of what we call substrate and coat it with a photosensitive material and then we're going to use our stencil in this case it's actually a piece of quartz with some chromium and then we're going to shine ultraviolet light through that mask and basically the light will cause chemical bonds in the photosensitive material to break and then therefore they wash away when we put them into a developer bath kind of similar if anyone's ever done conventional just development in photography very similar in the mechanism you just put it in that developer and then it washes away and that's the process that we're using to transfer patterns at this micro scale and nano scale so this is called photolithography we also can do another process and there's just a hair for giving you a size scale perspective so you can see that's the diameter of the hair 50 microns you can see the scale bar there and we're creating patterns that are a fraction of that using this photolithography process now we can actually replace ultraviolet light with an electron beam because the electron beam can actually make things with a shorter wavelength so it actually can make things even smaller than what we can make with uv light and that's called electron beam lithography so here is an example of nanoscale pattern transfer so here you can see this kind of hexagonal array of these little nano dots and they're ordered and if you look at the scale bar of this image it's uh it's basically um 0.015 millimeters by 0.015 millimeters so that whole image you couldn't even see with your naked eye and if i were to ask you how many could we fit under the head of a pin if i were to give you four choices you could you could probably do an educated guess that was probably a lot and sure enough it is you can fit over a million of these little organized nano dots on the to the head of a pin that's fascinating to me that we can pattern not only um this small but but over this large of an area so let's zoom out a little bit on this so here is an image that was collected on this and you can see here that this image of these little nano dots was was very very small but you can also see there are some defects here it's not perfect there were some errors but overall you get the idea we're patterning at a very small scale if i were to take uh one of my hairs and i would overlay my hair on this image this is how big my hair is so look how many little nano dots we can fit across the diameter of your hair over a thousand we could do the same thing smallest thing you can see we can fit hundreds and even a red blood cell so we're talking about things way smaller than you can see you would actually be able to fit uh close to 30 of these little dots in that in that diameter so we're patterning things at a very small scale that's the point but as as sophisticated as we are and the tricks that we can play in the lab believe it or not there's actually someone even better than us um at nano fabrication so i like to kind of do this one hangman style um and have people try to guess who this is so if you take a look at this i don't know if anyone has a guess on who this might be but if i give you a hint and tell you it's actually someone that every single person uh has heard of you've all heard of this this person before i shouldn't even say person is entity um so you know when i go out and i talk to students about this opportunity in person i like to kind of wait and see if anyone can guess it and a lot of times people will actually get it right away um which is really impressive but sometimes people don't so i have to give them a little help i give them an e then i give them a little more time maybe someone has guessed it by now who is the best nano engineer in the world today and if you still haven't guessed it give you an r and now someone usually figures it out it turns out that is actually mother nature so mother nature fascinating is actually really good at naturally creating nano scale features so some examples uh in nature you know you may have seen this rainbow like luster on the wings of a bee or the shell of a beetle and that rainbow like luster is a result of nanoscale spacings that are on the order of the wavelength of visible light which causes these unique kind of diffraction effects to lead to this color change but more importantly there are other applications such as this is a special tree as a pacific u tree and this tree has a sap in its bark and the sap actually has a very complex shaped molecule that can actually be used with helping tumors from growing because the molecule kind of has like a claw shape and that claw shape can actually latch onto things prevent things from reproducing and tumor growth and very kind of fascinating that that tree set molecule is very complex we we as humans have a difficult time going into the lab and reproducing that that same shape molecule that this tree sap naturally has uh geckos so what you know why can the gecko climb up the wall but but we can't you know that doesn't seem fair why is that so it's ultimately a result again something related to nano and turns out that the gecko has these these little hairs on it's on its feet that you can't see um and they're they're they're actually a little larger than our hair so nothing special about that but those hairs actually subdivide into thousands of little nano hairs and those hairs are what would allow the gecko to climb because they have a lot of surface area increased van der waals forces between its feet and the wall allow it to support its weight against gravity so a bird how does a bird know you know when it's winter time and the bird needs to to migrate how does a bird know like what north and south is right what's to prevent birds from just guessing wrong and instead of flying south they fly north and then they freeze to death how does the bird know that so birds actually have magnetic nanoparticles in their brains that give them a sense of direction to allow them to navigate and then this is something called the lotus effect you've probably seen this before it's a super hydrophobic surface and what we do as engineers is we look at something that's naturally occurring like the lotus leaf we put it into one of those microscopes one of those electron microscopes and we look at the structure and then we take it and we mimic it uh in our products things like you know super hydrophobic coatings for cars um or something like they're they're quote their clothes now available with this coating applied where so if you're if you're like me and you like to drink coffee but then you spill coffee all over your shirt instead of a coffee staining your shirt it'll just roll right off your shirt so there are applications where we're utilizing these effects so characterization is how we see all this stuff because we can't see it with with our naked eye right so how small can we see remember that the number uh about 30 000 nanometers is the smallest thing we can see how small do we need to see well we need to be able to see uh you know ideally we'd be able to see things below 100 nanometers so building at the nanoscale is a lot different than building at the macro scale or the scope of everyday life we can't really see what we're building we actually have to use characterization equipment while we're building it so we have to use machines while we're building machines to see the machines so it's quite interesting how it works and as a result of all this as the size of an object goes down the cost to build it actually goes up and that's why you know when you go and you buy a laptop or when you go and you buy the new phone that the higher processing speed you know the better phone is more expensive because it has smaller things inside of it because those smaller things are more expensive to build in the first place because the technology was more sophisticated and that's not how it works in everyday life right like if i were to say okay we have mansion number one and then we have mansion number two that's twice as big which one costs more you'd like well it's mentioned number two it's bigger so that's at the nanoscale it's the opposite it's actually the smaller something is the more expensive it is to build it because the technology too loaded is more complex that's kind of uh an anomaly with what we're used to so with characterization there are two different types um there is basically macro scale characterization that's a tape measure you can measure something it's maybe 10 bucks not very expensive but the resolution of a tape measure is very very poor we're never going to use a tape measure to measure nanometers we need a more sophisticated instrument so on the right is a picture of a scanning electron microscope scanning electron microscope a little bit more expensive but now we can see things sub 10 nanometers so this is a list of characterization techniques on the left are things we're familiar with in everyday life and on the right is what we use at the nanoscale so just to give you a couple examples this is an optical microscope you guys may have used one of these before um you know i know when i was in high school i used one of these in biology class you take a glass slide you put in the microscope that's all this is optical microscopes are great but the problem is they're not quite strong or powerful enough to see things at this nano scale so as a result the max mag is only about a thousand x the wavelength of visible light is actually 400 to 700 nanometers or so and that alone uh really limits us to being able to see things smaller than that so we need a more powerful microscope one example is the scanning electron microscope and i can't emphasize enough how valuable this tool in particular is to be able to put on your technical resume because there are countless companies out there companies we have all heard of that have these things and they need people that have this skill set coming in the door because this is a unique niche to understand so a scanning electron microscope what it does is it uses an electron beam and it resters the beam across the surface of whatever it is you're trying to look at and different signals come off the surface and depending on what signal we detect we can measure different types of information uh the magnifications now though because instead of using photons which is what we would use with the optical microscope now we're not using photons at all we're using electrons and electrons have a much smaller wavelength therefore we can see things much much smaller so magnifications of a scanning electron microscope can exceed 1 million x so here's an image that was obtained with that scanning electron microscope i just showed you and i'm going to give you four choices here and i'm going to ask you guys to kind of take an educated cast what do you what do you think this is um so you have four choices is it is it a piece of paper is it a dvd is it a butterfly wing or is it a blade of grass and a lot of people will correctly guess that this is actually a butterfly wing because i earlier we were talking about the nanoscale and nature and small spacings so it turns out that these nanoscale spacings here on the butterfly's wing kind of serve as like a diffraction grating to give the butterfly the color that it has so here you can see we're looking at a very very small portion of the wing of the blue morpho butterfly so here's another one this one's a little trickier so i'm going to show you guys an image of something and this just doesn't really look like much of anything it's just kind of a gray nothingness with a couple little dots on it and some you know some scratches um so no one should know what this is just yet so what i'm going to do though is i'm going to zoom out a little bit show you more of it at the same time so now take a look at this what does anyone have a guess what do you think this thing is so if you look at this that still doesn't really look like like anything too interesting but some people um i probably wouldn't get this myself but i i know what this is because i took a picture but some people um already can kind of guess what this is which to me is really impressive some people say hey that kind of looks like like a nose yeah yeah that's what it is so if we zoom out a little more now at this point um a lot of people will guess we'll be able to guess what it is um and some people say oh it's a it's a nickel or it's a quarter i'm like well you're close it's almost it is a coin and it turns out that this is actually a dime so this is what a dime looks like uh when imaged with one of those high powered scanning electron microscope so that's an image of a dime look how much higher the resolution is uh of the dime when taken with a scanning electron microscope than with a it's just a standard camera so it's substantially better resolution and this is just a dime it doesn't really matter but just to prove a point if we need to see things at a very very small scale these higher powered microscopes are going to enable us to see smaller features that we couldn't see with the traditional light microscope so how can i get these types of images myself well that's what we teach you one of the many things we teach you in the capstone semester taken at penn state so classes typically are offered every summer and they usually start in the middle of the month of may uh it's 18 credits in 12 weeks it has been referred to as nano boot camp it's it's very very intensive there's a lot of work but it is not a math heavy course there is some basic algebra but it's not a calculus based course so it's kind of a it's a 200 level course it's basically 18 200 level credits classes are offered monday through friday and if the classes have a lab and a lecture component so in the lab part of the class you would go into a clean room and you would do some of these things that i showed you on the other slide some of that skill set you would actually get the hands-on experience because that is absolutely valuable uh for the resume and then to support what you do in the lab you would have the lecture and we may also potentially do a remote version of this course um but you know i think the hands-on version is is really the most valuable experience you can get so the big picture if there's one thing that i i really hope i can get across to you guys as students is that taking this 12-week class is going to give you a phd level skill set at the associates and bachelor degree level and that's very valuable because that makes you uniquely employable in a lot of very high-tech industries a lot of these employers they they're looking for students that have this skill set but they don't need or want to pay a phd salary so you're very uniquely employable by saying you've used a scanning electron microscope an atomic force microscope you know photolithography but you don't have a phd because usually it's only the phds that know this stuff so it's really a niche niche way you can kind of tell your resume so the single biggest thing that i would say is the the benefit from obtaining this like the single biggest i guess technical skill is the fact that you get experience working in a clean room so clean room is a very special environment um so you may have seen something like this before you're sitting in a room a beam of light you know comes through the window and you see all this dust floating around now this room is actually filthy and now because you can see that dust with the naked eye what that means is we know the smallest thing we can see with the naked eye is 30 000 nanometers so there's no way you're going to be able to build stuff that's one to 100 nanometers if there's 30 000 plus nanometer pieces of dust all over the place it's it's like building a house and it's raining boulders it just doesn't work you can't do that so what we would need is a clean room and this is a special type of environment this is what one looks like so this is a clean room and what happens here is that there's airflow so you can see if you look carefully at the the floor in the ceiling uh there are filters and air is continuously circulated throughout the room to push out any particles before they can you know land on your device that you're building this is what it would look like if one of your hairs fell on some some circuitry so this could be you know whatever this could be something a chip in your phone or whatever you would not want this to be your phone it wouldn't work because that hair is going to short a bunch of stuff out just no good so we can't do nanotechnology in a conventional classroom this is another reason why this course is not offered or taken at a community college so when i went to iraq for example i didn't take these 18 credits at rack i took them at penn state because penn state has these facilities and this equipment to make this skill set uh possible to get so that's hair on microelectronics some final comments here again you get exposure to tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment unique job skills resume building and networking so we've had well over 100 employers closer to 200 different employers throughout the country that have hired graduates of this program this program has been around since the late 90s it's been around for a very long time so if you put on your resume that you went through the nmt program at penn state more than likely you won't even need to explain what that is it's a well-known program it's well established and there are there are multiple ways you can do it so you don't you don't have to do like what i did i took this as my major my major my associate's degree was nanotechnology maybe you're already you know on track to get a bachelor's degree in chemistry but if you take this course you can kind of add this on you could say hey i have a bachelor's degree in chemistry with a minor in nanotechnology and that's going to greatly enhance your your resume or you can do a certificate so we actually do a lot of work with with certificates so you could come in and just take these 18 credits with no no degree program and you could get a certificate in this in this as well and that certificate alone has a lot of value in the industry and the industry knows what that certificate entails so something that always comes up as a question so i just added it as a slide instead of you know waiting for someone to ask is well how much does this cost so here you can see um some cost estimates these are estimates but it should be a good ballpark so you guys know your homeschool's tuition much better than i do but for example if you were in a community college maybe maybe the cost of 18 credits is about three thousand dollars and you would have to do the math i don't know the exact you know cost of your credits but let's say it's three grand there is a program surcharge so this is what we call lab charge uh this is basically the charge for penn state's facilities to keep the lab up it's for consumables it's for your clean room downs it goes in and pays for a lot of different things and then if you add those two things together that would be your expected cost to take this course so in this example it's about 5 500 now compare that to the cost of uh 18 credits at penn state that's closer to thousand dollars so you're going to save you know close to four grand um through this through this basically partnership so the way the partnership works is you basically take courses at penn state but you don't have to pay the penn state tuition this is something i said in the very beginning you pay the tuition of your home school which is an awesome deal um the living arrangement is another thing that comes up a lot as well where do i live so first off you would most likely need to live in central pennsylvania state college pa for the 12 weeks that you take the course unless you want to commute or maybe you live nearby but most people need to live there so for example i lived in reading pennsylvania which is about two and a half hours away from state college so i couldn't just commute every day i had to find an apartment and live in that apartment in state college while i was in the course um so depending on and it's up to you you you can find your own living or uh we can help you with that so that's up to you so if you would like us to help you we can we can get you into on campus housing or we can do on-campus town homes or you can find a subway sublets are generally cheaper um but you would need to find that you know that's something you could find on your own and then food as well as on your own um we don't do the meal plans generally in general food is something you can do on your own there's different options there's different ways you can do this so this is just to give you guys a ballpark it's like well you know that's it you know it's not a trivial amount of money this this is you know this is something that you would have to pay to take this course however um what you're really paying for is you're you're investing this in yourself this is an investment in yourself as a person and the question would then be and you know if you're anyone if you invest you want to know what is my return on investment what am i going to get out of this investment so if you take the class what is your expected return on investment as a result of taking this this 18 credit 12 week capstone semester that depends on what you want to do so if you decide that you want to go into the field of work with this type of skill set the question that comes up all the time how much money am i going to make well that's a very important question and the answer to so i'll give you and there's no exact answer to this but i can certainly give you some nice ballpark numbers um so depending on your degree type it'll dictate your salary a bit but you can see here with an associate's degree in general you're looking in this 50 to 70k range and it can be less than 50 and it can be more than 70 but this is a pretty pretty good range pretty accurate range of what you can expect um bachelor's degree it's going to go up a bit you're looking at anywhere from 60 to 85 or so and then once you get the the graduate degree generally you'll be you'll be over 75 in the door and again these all these are all rough estimates but these are these should be pretty pretty accurate now i put a little asterisk next to associates and bachelor's degree because at again and i've kind of mentioned this already but at the associates and bachelor's degree level the skill set you get is an incredibly high demand especially right now more so than ever before perhaps because there is a shortage of people that are trained in this area so the take-home message is if you get this skill set it will be very very easy to find a job because people want the skills that you have at your education level so if you're going to college to get a job this is an excellent program and an excellent way to invest in 12 weeks of your of your life now instead maybe some people like well you know this is cool but i don't plan on going to work right away i got a lot of schooling i still want to do that's fine too so there are a couple different things you can do if you go to school um i mentioned on the last slide you can do a minor major certificate depending on how it fits in with with your other curriculum now this one's interesting um by taking this class especially if you go on to get a bachelor's degree or phd the hands-on experience that you get in this 12-week program at penn state is actually something that you will see again in a more textbook format so as an example when i was doing my phd i had to take some 500 level classes and a lot of the things like evaporation and sputtering and electron microscopy all the things that i had my hands on at the two year level i was now learning about in the textbook and everyone else in the class had never even heard of these things and i'm sitting there like not i've done this stuff i know this stuff so it enhances your learning experience when you continue to go in for school when you learn about the physics of this stuff maybe now you're doing the calculus behind it at the phd level or the bachelor's level whereas in the associate's degree level or the two-year level you're actually physically doing it so i thought personally that was extremely valuable having went through this and then going on to school and hearing about it again it enhances the learning and then the final thing is you're primed with a skill set to enter a graduate program so when i you know one of the reasons that i was able to get into the phd program that i did was because i had worked in a clean room before and my advisor needed somebody that already knew how to do lithography and that already had run an scm and these are all things that you would basically get trained on so if you have maybe a goal of some day going on and going to graduate school this is a very valuable and it makes you more attractive to the advisors because they want someone with the skills so that's it i really appreciate everyone's attention and i would be more than happy to answer any questions you guys may have about this um i've listed my email there sue barger also works with me at penn state sue is an excellent resource and she would be able to help you with a lot of the logistic type questions she'll be able to give you much more accurate information on the pricing and housing i gave you ballpark she'll be able to give you the exact numbers um feel free to reach out to either of us i've also listed our website there if you just want more information in general and don't want to directly contact so there that's another good resource and that's everything for today i i hope to see you guys uh at penn state uh one of these summers and i look forward to meeting you if you decide to do it thank you

2022-04-05 07:34

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