Silicon Dreams
Daniel Kammerer
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Dedicated to my mother and father, to whom I owe everything.
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Table of Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Chapter One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Chapter Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16 Chapter Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 44
Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
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Foreword
I deal with a lot of accents in my life. Much of this is due to my heritage, as my mother is a Chinese woman whose family resides almost exclusively in Taiwan, and my father is a New Yorker, whose family lives in North Carolina, and, strangely enough, New York. So whenever it’s decided that we’re going to go pay a visit to either side of the family, listening to a lot of accents is something I look forward to. The New York ‘drawl,’ while perfectly understandable, has always sounded interesting to me, and is a joy for these Californian ears to hear whenever I visit my father’s side of the family. And of course, everyone knows what a Chinese accent sounds like, especially so in our area where immigrants from both China and Taiwan are very common. It’s one I rarely even notice because of how used to it I am; a consequence of being raised by my mother and listening to her half-english half-chinese conversations with our family and Chinese friends. We underestimate how much of an effect an accent has on our perception of a person. First impressions are a significant part of how we treat someone, and how they speak is near the top of the list, perhaps
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just under their physical appearance. To further emphasize this point, picture in your head a somewhat stereotypical south Indian man, perhaps in his late thirties or early forties, with a clean haircut and the slightest bit of pudge. For whatever reason, you interact with this man. He shakes your hand, and introduces himself. This may have been an obvious ploy on my part, but I’m willing to bet you imagined him with somewhat of an accent. If he had no accent, you’d definitely take note of that, and think to yourself, “wow, his English is really good!” You might even open up to him more because of it. An accent is just one of a swathe of challenges a foreigner has to face when they decide to come to the US. Being able to learn English is hugely impressive to me, as it is an extremely complex language full of nuance and illogic. And yet, most foreigners we meet have at least an intermediate knowledge of it, more than enough to get by. I made most of these observations during occasional visits to my dad’s company, where more than half of the employees are of foreign origins. Think about that. More than half of the workers communicate with each other in a second language. Thus began my fascination and admiration for immigrant workers. It may be because I see in them the values that I lack or would like to improve on. This paper was a twofold effort to both learn a little more about the shrouded world of foreign born engineers, and for me to learn how they were able to succeed. 77
Introduction
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Engineering. What first comes to mind when you hear the
word? A hundred years ago, you would be referring strictly to machine specialists, perhaps familiar with the workings of one of the newer forms of transportation: the steam powered locomotive. Trains revolutionized the way business was conducted in America. Suddenly, businesses were able to sell their goods across the country, not just to those within a ten mile radius. Empires rose, and with them came famous trade kings like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, all because they were able to expand rapidly atop their billowing metallic steeds and trade with a nationwide base of customers. At its heart, then, an engineer is one who moves technology forward. An engineer today is something similar, and yet entirely different from his predecessor. When one is referred to as an engineer, frequently the career you’re referring to is electrical engineering, or, the area of engineering that covers the study and use of electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. Most electrical engineers today work with semiconductors, materi-
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als with the ability to change whether or not they can conduct electricity under certain conditions. Semiconductors are the foundation of all modern electronics, which means that there are a massive number of people working in this field. Who these people are, however, is something not everyone has a good sense of.
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Chapter One: Working With Aliens
It is, of course, impossible to know for sure how many electrical engineers there are in the world. A 2008 study estimated that there were about 1.5 million employed engineers in the US alone (Abt Associates, Inc. “Engineers in the United States”). With the rest of the world, especially Asia, developing so rapidly, the worldwide number is much bigger, and is always increasing. So, how many of those 1.5 million American engineers were born on good ol’ American soil? What’s your best guess? One in twenty? ten? The answer circa January 2011 is about 1.1 foreign to every 3.6 native. This number also increases every moment, as the number of US college math and science majors stagnates, and increases outside of our country (Cookson, “America’s Foreign-Born Scientists and Engineers). It’s also a number that’s different for each company. According to Yarema Hryciw, Director of IT at Micron Technology, the ratio of foreigners to natives at Micron is “65% foreign to 35% native” (Hryciw interview). So, one of every four engineers in America wasn’t born here, most likely didn’t go to elementary or high school here, probably knew nobody when they arrived, and definitely hadn’t
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learned English as their first language. Imagine leaving your home of twentytwo years and arriving in a land on the other side of the world, where culture and life itself are completely different. One of every four engineers made this journey, in search of a better existence for themselves and their family. The short question to ask would be, simply, ‘why?’ Why leave your friends and relatives in search of a job on the opposite side of the planet? According to device modeling engineer Santhosh Krishnan, coming to the US for a job or further schooling has been established as common practice for many Indian engineering students. “I came to the United States when I was twenty-two, right out of school. I didn’t have an opportunity to work back there in India, so I finished my undergrad in electronics and communications engineering and came here for my master’s. Pretty much all my life, what I wanted to do was to be an electrical engineer” (Krishnan interview). This brings us back to the question of ‘why.’ What exactly causes so many bright minds to choose to come to America in hopes of a job, and what makes these minds so attractive to potential employers? With the number of 12 12
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foreigners versus natives in this field as significant as it is, how have they been better prepared for high skill jobs compared to those born in the US? It can all be traced as far back as a young East Asian child’s first days in school.
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Early life, both in school and with family, has a considerable effect on a child’s career choice and path. In India especially, your career could be very dependent on what your parents did, especially during the 70s and 80s when, according to Santhosh, “there used to be only two careers that kids would be interested in. You could grow up to become an engineer, or take up medicine and be a doctor. Nowadays, of course, the economy has really opened up and there are a lot more choices, but back then, those were the two well respected fields” (Krishnan interview). An Indian child with a knack and interest for engineering typically had parents who also did well with math and science. Both Mr. Krishnan and engineer Mohammed Khan had parents who leaned more towards mathematics. Santhosh explained how he felt that
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Chapter Two: Life on the Other Side
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being an engineer was more or less in his blood: “I come from a family of engineers. My grandfather was a radio engineer who worked in a battle tank, and my father was an electrical engineering teacher who taught military students at a military college. It all kind of came naturally to me, I always gravitated towards math, physics, and that sort of thing” (Krishnan). Mohammed’s father was “a technical person, though not an engineer. He was more of a mechanical guy, whereas I was more into science” (Khan interview). Though of course having parents who were also involved in the electronics industry didn’t hurt, there are just as many who took it up without any familial influence. Demi Ho, a layout designer, states that her parents had little to do with her decision to join the industry, and in fact little to do with her
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decision to leave Vietnam at all. “They didn’t want to let me go. They thought that girls should stay with the parents and help out, not get an education. I fought with my parents a lot to be able to go. They had seven children, and had already sent four overseas; they didn’t want to let anymore go” (Ho interview). Schools were also a massive influence when today’s foreign born engineers were growing up. When the economies of many Asian countries first began their explosive development, schools put a large focus on the classes that would be most helpful in teaching students what they needed to join the highest-paying fields at the time: medicine and engineering. Math and science were stressed over all else, and to some extent, still are.
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Competition, needless to say, was fierce. Both of my Indian interviewees were near or at the top of their class, but not without a tremendous amount of effort. “Even though I was good at the state level, once you get to the national level, the university level, I found that I was seriously lacking in certain subject areas. That was a real wakeup call. You have to keep perspective; you may think that you’re good, and in your school, maybe you are. But how do you stand in your district? Your state? My uncle really took the wind out of me; he thought I was too proud. He drilled it into me, that “you’re not as good as you think you are. Having a bigger perspective in mind was critical to success” (Krishnan interview). Santhosh, even though he found he was a top performer at his school, discovered while taking the nation-wide exams that he would need to 21 21
work much harder in order to get into a top university. Stiff competition wasn’t the only obstacle in the way of success. The foreign engineers of today often grew up in the deepest poverty, and truly went from rags to riches. For Mohammed Khan, affording day to day possessions was a challenge, let alone pricey textbooks. “I remember that when I was in school, we were never able to buy shoes. That was all way above our reach. When I was in 8th or 9th grade, my school said ‘no, you need to buy shoes.’ So, I took three or four days off, and me and my father earned enough money to buy shoes. This is the kind of background we had, there was a lot of poverty, the lowest of poverty” (Khan interview). Money for Mohammed was tight all the way up until he got a steady job as an engineer in the US. “Education was like, you don’t even 22 22
get the book, right? You can’t afford books on engineering, so you’d borrow it from someone, read it, and make notes on everything. If you got one book, you’d try to go cover to cover three or four times, doing all the problems, everything. That is how we used to work” (Khan interview). Try to remember the last time you read a math textbook cover to cover, working every single problem, let alone three or four times. Some foreign born engineers didn’t even have the small fortune of a strict science class with limited equipment. Layout designer Demi Ho was born in Vietnam, and grew up in North Vietnam during the war with America. Getting an education in that setting was next to impossible. “In Vietnam at that time, unless you had Vietcong in your family, you couldn’t go to university. So that was my dream; to have a future, an education” (Ho interview).
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Demi came to the US only because she was able, on her seventh attempt, to escape North Vietnam. “I was in the boat, with nineteen other people. The boat was disguised as a fishing boat, they had a license. They showed it to the police. At the bottom of the boat, there were nineteen other people escaping. We were successful, and they took us to a small Indonesian island� (Ho interview). Even after escaping Vietnam itself, it took her nearly another year to be able to enter the US after extensive delegations and interviews through the American embassy. Besides being able to show sheer bravery against the harshest odds, foreigners working in America excelled in their schooling. What American kids were accomplishing in one to two years, poor foreign students finished in weeks. Suddenly, the ratio of foreign to American engineers makes a lot more 24 24
sense. There was no other option; in order to learn the material and succeed, foreign students had to work harder than their well-to-do American counterparts, instilling in them a peerless work ethic that would eventually help them reach their dream: an engineering job in America.
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Chapter Three:
So What’s Wrong with Us?
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So, it’s clear that much of the time foreigners have been better and more rigorously educated than their US counterparts. The specific causes behind this may seem complex, but are actually fairly logical. The fact of the matter is that many schools in America are underperforming. The US, as of September 2012, ranks 14th in higher education attainment, with 42% of 25-34 year olds having at least a four year degree. 42% doesn’t sound bad by any stretch, but thirteen other countries are that much farther ahead (“Education at a Glance 2012”). The September 2012 report reveals another devastating statistic. The US has the sixth worst high school graduation rate, with 23% of students never even getting their diploma. Many think that culture and parentage have to do with the successes of Asian students in math, and to an extent, they would be right. (Jackson, “Why Other
Countries Do Better in Math”). However, it has become apparent in the last decade or so that a significant reason behind why Asian students have typically superior Math and Science scores lies in the schools themselves. Asian students, especially those from Japan and Singapore, have much better math classes and teachers than those in America. Lessons are “lively, thoughtful and engaging, characterized by problem solving, analysis, and discussion of multiple solution methods. Teachers know their subject, as well as how to communicate it to children in interesting ways” (Jackson, “Why Other Countries Do Better in Math”). If this sounds familiar to you, fantastic! It means that your school, knowingly or not, is emulating modern Asian strategies for teaching mathematics. More specifically, Asian math teaching usually revolves around making the kids have an innate understanding
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of why the math works, whereas in America, kids are just taught formulas and told to apply them without much rhyme or reason. Asian teachers also have a better understanding of their students. In Japanese and Singaporean schools, instructors are made to teach every grade level at some point, resulting in all of them having a better understanding of what to teach kids to better prepare them for the next grade. At the high school level, teachers put a massive focus on collaboration to improve each others’ performance. Teacher training in Asia is ongoing and evolving, rather than just taking two years to get your certification. Every teacher is required to teach an ‘observed’ lesson, where colleagues sit in and are afterwards able to make suggestions and comments. They form groups to study lessons and teach them at an open with many onlookers. At the end of the years, they create a report to summarize their research, and plan their course of action for next year. (Janzen, “Using the Japanese Lesson Study in Mathematics”). These compilations are made easily available at bookstores, and are often purchased by both new and veteran teachers, so that they
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can implement the findings of others into their own classes. This is miles better than teacher involvement in the US. That’s not to say there are no good teachers; it means that both lower and well qualified teachers are missing a giant opportunity to improve. California’s schools are an excellent example of the degrading American education system. Professor of Education at Stanford, Linda Darling-Hammond, summarizes that “25% of teachers in California high schools have no teaching certification at all, and there are no guarantees that the other 75% are any better off.” (Darling-Hammond 123) The inherent problem lies in a broken system where the schools most in need of the best teachers are instead getting the worst. Think about it from a teacher’s perspective. Once you’ve got your cert, where are you going to first look for work? A poorly funded school in a low-income area? Of course not. You’ll start looking for a job at a place that can pay the most. So, the schools that can pay the most suck up the best performing teachers, and the lower performers gradually have to look for jobs at worse and worse schools, where 29 29
the kids are already predisposed to be doing poorly. Of course there are exceptions to this, it’s perfectly possible for a talented teacher to have bad luck and only find a job at a school which they’re ‘overqualified’ for. However, in the world of statewide education systems, what matters most are the statistical averages, and the statistical averages show that bad teachers get stuck at bad schools, resulting in badly performing kids that don’t get an opportunity to rise up and succeed. It’s easy to see why foreign born employees can be such an attractive option to American employers; not only are the engineering majors on average more competent than their American counterparts, but those who are able to come to the US are the cream of the crop. Santhosh, who went to an American university, laments the difference in work ethic he saw while in class. “Several of the other kids that went to college with me at the time pretty much got in on a scholarship, and didn’t bother to put in the hard work. As a result, their performance suffered. It bears in mind that when you get into engineering you need to make sure you stick with it for all of the four years. If you drop out, well, there’s no advantage to that” (Krishnan interview). 30 30
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Conclusion Every foreign born engineer has a story behind them. Each person’s tale is marvelously different. Take Santhosh Krishnan, who obtained newfound humility after being warned by his uncle never to get too big of a head, eventually proved himself at a state university, and succeeded in making himself an attractive pick for graduate studies at American colleges. Mohammed Khan, who after working for twelve years in an American army base in Saudi Arabia decided to gamble everything on coming to the US for a degree. Demi Ho, who escaped the confines of communist Vietnam, and who after only two years of intensive training was able to eventually become a senior layout designer. Despite the differences in their past, they all shared a few attributes. They all put their nose to the grindstone and worked through years of rigorous, exhaustive Engineering coursework. They all chose to risk everything and come to an unknown nation with no one and nothing. And, perhaps most significantly, they all had an innate drive to succeed. So we’ve seen that foreign born employees can be successful because of their more rigorous schooling. However, does this really mean that they’re outright superior to their American comrades? Well, not entirely. When asked if he thought there was any difference in work ethic between natives and foreigners, IT Director Yarema Hryciw had a very interesting answer in store. “Not here. It depends on the industry, and the folks that end up there. Whether they’re foreign or not doesn’t matter as much in the end. There are so many different things that have to do with that; organizational dynamics, workmanship, that sort of thing” (Hryciw interview). 32 32
So do Americans need to be worried about being outshone? No. If anything, it means that each side has a lot to learn from the other. A culture of rigid conformity in Asia can stunt the growth of creativity, whereas here in the US, classes are often not strict enough, but there are a litany of options to encourage development of artistic and creative talents. A balance between the two is hard to achieve, but not at all out of reach. Already, schools like Mountain View High and Los Altos High integrate Singaporean and Japanese teaching strategies into their own systems. Teachers within departments regularly meet with each other to discuss how their classes are progressing, and make joint decisions on how best to serve their students. In addition, they offer options for students who are more creatively inclined through the Freestyle Academy, where students are able to learn more about tech-industry job that tap the creative side of one’s brain. Change has already begun. As Santhosh stated, not long ago, children essentially had to choose between engineering and medicine if they wanted to live without poverty. However, “Nowadays of course the economy has opened up and there are a lot more career choices, but back then those were the two respected fields” (Krishnan interview). This is a beacon of hope in a polarized world. As more and more countries network, and the global economy grows, one’s country of origin will hopefully matter less and less, allowing people to pursue their true passion. 33 33
Works Cited Krishnan, Santhosh. Personal interview. 20 Feb. 2013. Khan, Mohammed. Personal interview. 20 Feb. 2013. Ho, Demi. Personal interview. 24 Feb. 2013. Hryciw, Yarema. Personal interview. 24 Feb. 2013. “What Is Electrical Engineering?” The Definition of Electrical Engineering. Colleges and Degrees, n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.electricalengineeringonline.net/ee-defined>. Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. New York: Teachers College, 2010. Print. Jackson, Bill. “Why Other Countries Do Better in Math.” Why Other Countries Do Better in Math. 20 Dec. 2010. The Daily Riff. 13 Mar. 2013 <http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/why-other-countries-do-better- in-math-520.php>. Kuczynski-Brown, Alex. “Education At A Glance 2012: OECD Report Finds U.S. Lags Behind Other Countries In Higher Education Attainment Rate.” The Huffington Post. 11 Sept. 2012. TheHuffingtonPost.com. 16 Mar. 2013 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/oecd-education-at-a- glanc_n_1874190.html>.” Using the Japanese Lesson Study in Mathematics, Teaching Today, Glencoe Online.” McGraw Hill. 26 Mar. 2013 <http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/subject/japanese_lesson_study.phtml>.
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