Dayton Engineer

By Carrie Drobnik, Industrial Engineering Technology Student

This summer I worked as a process engineering intern for Intel on their Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona. 

I first learned about internship opportunities when I talked to the Intel representatives who were in the KL lobby in the early fall. I connected with them and met up again at the career fair a few weeks later to continue to talk about internship positions. It was helpful to talk to them ahead of the career fair to gain a better insight as to what they were looking for in an intern.

I am studying industrial engineering technology at UD. Once I got to Arizona and met my team, I realized they were almost entirely chemical engineers. I was nervous about starting the position, but quickly realized that being an industrial engineer meant I brought a new perspective to my team. 

My department had the role of flattening wafers that will eventually be turned into semiconductors. The project I worked on looked at a flagging issue on one of the polishers of our toolset, resulting in a stop of production. Throughout my time at Intel I worked on adjusting the SPC limits of this tool and generating new formulas to reduce unnecessary flagging. I had to do a lot of data pulling and analyzing, as well as going into the fabrication lab to gain insight as to what was physically happening in the tool. 

All of my IET professors stress the importance of talking to frontline workers, since they know the processes better than anyone else. If I were to solely remain at my desk data mining everyday, I never would have seen what other complications were faced on the fabrication lab floor. In addition to my main project, I also got to shadow a lot of technicians and participate in a few preventive tool maintenance projects over the course of the summer.

Since Intel is growing their Ohio plant, a large portion of the interns were from the general Ohio/Midwest area. Getting to make friends in Arizona that I knew I could easily stay connected to once going back to school was comforting. I didn't expect to meet so many UD students either, but loved seeing familiar Flyer faces around the Intel campus.

Intel is an enormous company, which allows for great networking possibilities and opportunities to meet many different people. This internship helped to expand my communication skills and gain confidence as an early engineer. I would highly recommend interning at Intel and experiencing an excellent community of employees, as well and working with groundbreaking technologies firsthand.