MIT graduate, Kim Vo said she joined the semiconductor industry for three reasons.

“First, it’s extremely cool technology; it’s cutting edge. The second is all the products we create: they touch everyone,” she recently said in a talk at MIT. “And the third reason is because just like at MIT, I get to work with some of the world’s smartest people.”

Vo led a keynote presentation at the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative networking event, co-sponsored by MIT.nano and hosted at MIT. The presentation was called “Design the Solution,” and it brought together female MIT engineering students with career professionals who filled them in on what it takes to be successful in this field.

“Events like this are unique in their importance and their mission,” said MIT Professor Asu Ozdaglar, head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and deputy dean of academics at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. “It gathers talents and wisdoms of women leaders who have risen to the top ranks of the semiconductor industry. Their experiences provide inspirations and insights that are bound to propel the next generation of women leaders, scientists, and engineers.”

Vo earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in materials science and engineering at MIT. She opened the event with an overview of current projects at AMD and her story about how she has been successful. She said to achieve such success, you must continually learn, partner with everyone, find sponsors, and have fun.

There was a panel discussion at the event featuring Elif Doğruer, senior product marketing specialist at Infineon Technologies; Eve Borden, lithography process senior section manager at GlobalFoundries; Amrita Anbarasu, SoC design engineer at Intel; Kari Crane, DRAM design engineer at Micron Technology; and moderator Namrata Sharma, global partner leader, semiconductors at Amazon Web Services.

“The biggest difference I've noticed when transitioning from a student to an engineer in the semiconductor industry is that you really have to keep up with the knowledge curve,” Anbarasu said. “Make sure you apply all that you learned in school. And also, realizing that you're part of a product development that's actually going out in the ecosystem and creating an impact. That's pretty cool.”