but do you know if the plant down here mainly does processing/building of products or if it's a technique site? If it were a technique site, it'd be more than building products, but coming up with concepts and concepts sound a lot better than building products.
The Colorado Springs campus is predominantly a flash memory fabrication facility, but there are several design groups there. The largest design group down there does networking chips, IIRC.
What courses do you need exactly to be an EE? Currently in high school I'm taking Computer Engineering, Computer Programming, Functions and Relations (math), Pysics, Chemistry.
That looks like the right class mix. About the only thing that I would think would be missing is something like "pre-calculus", but maybe functions and relations fills that role. Once you are in university studying it, the university will tell you what to take, but usually the core classes for the first few years are physics, mathematics, computer programming, and, of course, engineering classes, and then in later years you get to specialize based on what you want to do.
While i'm sure his case isn't typical of all Apple employess, I thought it might be interesting to share one graduates story of how life at a big tech company turned out.
My next door neighbor works for Apple remotely from Fort Collins. He is extremely happy working there - and he has a nice working arrangement living here and yet writing code for a group in Cupertino. A friend's wife works in the Cupertino office and she is also very pleased with working at Apple.
As far as working in high tech in general as being long, grueling hours... well, I will admit that, based on my experiences, it is a bit like that. Compared to friends who are in marketing or banking or some retail environment, I know that most high tech workers work longer hours. That said, high tech work usually pays pretty well too. But still, you will want to have a bit of a passion for it, or else putting in longer hours to work on something that isn't interesting to you is likely to lead to an early career change.
I personally love chip design - and I really like working for Intel doing it. Every day is a new challenge with what I call the "disaster du jour" usually greeting me early in the morning. Things go wrong and things go right and we all work together and at the end of the day we create something that is new and neat. I take a bit of satisfaction in sitting down in front of a computer built with a microprocessor inside of which I designed, simulated and routed most of the clocking system. Or sitting down in front of a SEM/LVP and looking at the die and just seeing how insanely complex it is and thinking "I helped make this". I have always enjoyed working with computers and tinkering with electronics - definitely chip design has been the right career choice for me. And the hours aren't that bad... to be honest, I like working. I need a break from it, of course, but at night I often find myself logging in to check on the results of the last simulation to see if I got it right or need to make changes. In the end, this adds up to more than 40 hours per week nearly always, but who cares if I'm having fun how many hours I'm working? Is work really work, if you enjoy it?
Patrick Mahoney
Senior Design Engineer
Intel Corp.
Fort Collins, CO
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