Semiconductor apprenticeship provides access to a growing industry
A decade ago, Merry Ramirez was trying to make her way in Mexico. She was separated from her family and her old life in California, and struggling to find her place. Today, she is back home in Silicon Valley, working on the ground floor of one of the most critical industries of the modern world—semiconductor manufacturing.
“We’re making microchips—the chips that you use in your cell phones and computers and stuff like that,” she says. “Everything that makes the whole digital world work, basically.”
Ramirez assembles chips at Infinera Corporation, a San Jose-based company that supplies parts for high-speed telecommunications, and has—along with other manufacturers in the industry—partnered with Foothill College in nearby Los Altos to offer the semiconductor apprenticeship program which Ramirez just completed.
“This is the first semiconductor apprenticeship of its kind in the state of California,” said Foothill apprenticeship program dean Chris Allen in an introductory news release from the college. Allen went on to explain that the partnerships with the area’s manufacturers enabled the school to “cultivate talent for the most needed careers of today.”
It’s been a year since the program’s inception, and Ramirez and her classmates graduated from the first cohort in December. The road leading up to her pursuit of this promising new career was a much longer one.
“It was quite a bit of a journey to get to where I’m at,” she said.
When she was a young teenager, Ramirez was uprooted from the Palo Alto area where she was born and raised and forced to move out of the country with her family.
“When I was around 14 or 15 years old, my parents had some issues with immigration. They weren’t born citizens [of the U.S.]—me and my brother are—and we had to move back to Mexico,” she explains. “I had to adapt to a whole different country for about a decade or so. I did high school there, I did a little bit of university there for chemical engineering.”
“It’s a really good program and I think it’s very necessary right now. There’s such a focus on tech, and usually it’s on the programming and computer science of it all. I think there should be more focus on the practical, physical things that need to be done.”
Merry Ramirez, Foothill College Semiconductor Apprentice
Eventually, her mother and brother moved back to the U.S., but Ramirez had to stay in Mexico to help raise her baby sister who was born there. A couple years later, after five semesters in college, she was able to come back to Silicon Valley, but her education had to be put on hold.
“I got here and it was very, very difficult. It was just me and my brother then. I had to be the breadwinner. I was focused on that for a very long time.”
Despite initially moving her away from her college field of study, the jobs Ramirez took along the way would eventually lead her back to the scientific world. She worked for a few years in the cafeteria at Meta—the tech giant that owns Facebook and Instagram—followed by a fortuitous stint as a barista in a coffee shop inside the long-standing med-tech company Varian Medical Systems.
“I was talking to a lot of the employees there, a lot of the engineers and physicists. I’d chat with them,” she says. Ramirez expressed her interest in going back to school and her background in chemical engineering, and one employee suggested she look into apprenticeships. That started her search, which led to the Foothill College program.
“I took a chance,” she said. “It’s been a really great, interesting journey, and very fulfilling. I quite like it. It’s a really good program and I think it’s very necessary right now. There’s such a focus on tech, and usually it’s on the programming and computer science of it all. I think there should be more focus on the practical, physical things that need to be done.”
Foothill College’s apprenticeship programs are part of the increased emphasis by California Community College’s to give students on-the-job training in high-demand industries alongside instruction in the classroom. Apprenticeship Pathways is one of the core demonstration projects of Vision 2030, CCC’s initiative to increase equity in success, access and support throughout the system.
Ramirez’s apprenticeship at Infinera led to a permanent job with the company, and she said she wants to keep learning in order to move up in the industry.
“I’m hoping to continue my education. I want to end up in an engineering role.”
For more information on Foothill College’s Internship Program, visit foothill.edu/internships. Find out more about the CCC’s Apprenticeship Pathways project at the Vision 2030 website: cccco.edu/About-Us/Vision-2030.
Written by Jason Cassidy
| Regions | Classes & Topics |
|---|---|
| Bay Area California | Apprenticeships |
