You’ve heard this advice many times before, and it comes out in full force during graduation season:  Follow your passion.  Whether it is picking a major in college or starting on a career path after graduation, following your passion is said to lead to self-satisfaction and the chance for greatness.  Picking the major your parents advise, the one with “decent career prospects”, will lead to a soul-sucking job mired in middle management and eternal regret.  The choice seems obvious.  “Follow your passion” is inspiring advice.

But it is good advice?

The first problem is that many teenagers are passionate about things that don’t much matter:  video games, music, and texting (and sexting) their friends.  I don’t have a problem advising a kid to become a doctor if they are passionate about finding a cure for breast cancer.  But for every highschooler whose passion drives them towards filling an important societal need, there are many, many others who want to be pop stars.  And most (or maybe all) of those kids would be far better off following a different path than the passion-laden American Ideal route to fame and fortune.

Others have criticized the “follow your passion” or “do what you love” advice as elitist (Miya Tokumitsu, Slate, January, 2014) or as ignoring the important role of self-sacrifice and duty in building character (Gordon Marino, New York Times, May 18, 2014).  My criticism is more pragmatic:  for the most part, following your passion doesn’t work.

My own experiences are probably pretty typical of most post-college careers.  I didn’t follow a path dictated by my passion for the simple reason that I didn’t follow any path.  Most of what came my way was random, out of left field, and most of my choices were reactive, even when they looked and felt proactive.

I recently came across a paper I wrote in my senior year of college discussing my future plans.  At the time I wanted an academic career – graduate school followed by teaching and research.  I wrote in a mocking tone that the last thing I would ever think to do was get a government or corporate job or start my own business.  But life has a well-known way of getting in the way of aspirational plans.

A girl turned my interests away from studying to marriage, and finances ended the possibility of continued graduate school.  I took the first job I could find – with the federal government.  Eight years and one divorce later I was starting my own business.  Ten years after that I had sold the business and was a corporate VP.  A late, new start at forming a family and having children prompted an end to my corporate life and now I find myself full circle, teaching part time at a university and pursuing my own research ideas on my own terms.

And after every turn on that wild ride I found something worthy of my passion.

I can’t image being any place different from where I am now, and I can’t imagine getting here in any other way but the actual crooked path that lead me here.  But this reflects nothing more than a lack of imagination.  The fact is I could have gone in hundreds of other directions and turned out just as well, and had as much fun along the way.  The reason is simple:  rather than take the path that followed my passion, I became passionate about whatever path I happened to take.

Make no mistake, not every step on my life journey was a pleasant one.  In fact, some of my turns can only be described as wrong ones.  That is not failure, that is just life.  Like everyone else, I lived a life with constraints and made the best of them.  But there was no time along that path where I couldn’t find a reason to take pride in what I was doing or could accomplish: digging ditches to pay for college; studying hard for a class I wouldn’t have chosen but found myself taking anyway;  working in a decidedly unglamorous government bureaucracy; taking a second job to help make ends meet.  In every case, there was something to learn, something to care about, something to engage my intellect and heart.

The “follow your passion” advice makes a critical set of unstated assumptions: that we have one or very few passions, that we already know what they are (or can quickly go about discovering them), and that the only thing blocking our way to self-actualization is a lack of commitment to those passions.  For almost everyone, all three assumptions are wrong.

I have found that there is an almost infinite variety of things that can ignite my passion.  I am by nature curious, and every time I look closely at something I find it to be worthy of even closer examination.  Do you find accounting boring?  I promise you, it is only because you don’t know enough about accounting.  As a small business owner I had to learn enough accounting to survive, but when I moved to a large corporation I saw how seemingly mundane accounting choices rapidly distorted the ethical choices made daily by upper management.  Passion was there waiting to be discovered.

My advice to high school graduates facing an uncertain college experience?  Take the idea of a liberal education seriously and learn how to think.  Prepare yourself not for a career, but for career potential.  Accept that your future path is unknown.  My advice to the new batch of college graduates?  Following your passion is all well and good, it just usually doesn’t work out.  Instead, recognize that there is a near-infinite number of opportunities facing you at every moment, just waiting for you to care.  Start caring.  Be passionate about whatever path you happen to follow.  This doesn’t guarantee success and happiness, but it gives you the best shot.

Or, to use the words of Stephen Stills, “if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.”

In general, infrastructure issues are not interesting.  I’ve been having problems with my blogging software, Nucleus, as that package has become increasingly marginalized and out of date.  Eventually, the anti-spam capabilities stopped working and I had to turn off the ability to add comments in order to survive.  Thus began the long saga of converting to WordPress (a very tedious task converting all the old posts to the new platform).

That transition is finally complete.  Maybe complete is too strong a word, as I am sure that changes and tweaks will be required as I use this new platform.  But in any case, I hope that my blogging, and your reading and commenting of same, will now be much smoother.

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, but the drudgery of the task kept pushing back at me. But now it is done – 183 published papers on lithography (authored or coauthored by myself) are all available on my webpage and downloadable. Here is the link:

http://www.lithoguru.com/scientist/papers.html

I’ve been teaching a class at the University of Texas at Austin giving an overview of the processes for semiconductor manufacturing for many years. This fall I did something different – I am flipped my classroom. I recorded each of my lectures ahead of time and required my students to watch the lectures before they came to class. Class time was then devoted to discussion, problem solving, and the occasional philosophical digression. While improvements will be necessary for the next year, the experiment was, I think, a success.

One outcome of the flipped classroom is a complete set of lectures for my class, available on YouTube. I have combined those lectures with reading and homework assignments as well as practice exams and other material. The result: a self-paced online course, available to anyone. I hope it will be the first of many.

The course name is Chemical Processes for Micro- and Nanofabrication (chemical engineering department, with course designator CHE323). It is basically an overview of all the process steps used in semiconductor manufacturing, with some nanofabrication concepts thrown in at the end. Here is the link:

http://www.lithoguru.com/scientist/CHE323/

Enjoy.

Lithographers don’t get to see me in a suit.

When I first started working in the semiconductor industry, I started out wearing a tie to conferences (I didn’t own a suit back then), but quickly realized that not only were ties optional, you were better off not wearing them. Sales and marketing folks wore ties. To an engineer, wearing a tie made you suspect. I quickly ditched the ties.

Except in Japan. When I started traveling to Japan in the early 1990s, I bought some suits. Those are still my only suits (and they still fit … barely). But I stopped wearing them 10 years ago even to Japan. The trend towards casual has caught up to the conservative corporate culture of Japan.

So, most of my friends in the lithography world have never seen me in a suit. Well, here is what it looks like.

I gave a talk last week at an investment banker conference in Hong Kong. Suit required. Someday maybe the finance folks will catch up to where lithographers have been all along.

Yesterday I went to the College of Nanoscale Engineering of the University of Albany, State University of New York (which, for the sake of brevity and sanity, I will call CNSE). There I visited CNSE, SEMATECH, IBM, TEL, and a number of other organizations in the same building that required separate badges and sign-ins. All of these groups have at least one thing in common: entering requires one to go past giant, larger-than-life posters of President Obama.

It seems that last year the President paid a visit to CNSE and got a tour of the clean room. And since the one thing that CNSE does even better than nanoscale engineering is public relations, I guess the bragging with giant posters was inevitable. Still, I thought it was very cool to see people I know (hi, Warren!) pointing out lithography tools to the President. As I stared with wonder upon my arrival, slowly an odd sensation crept over me – something was wrong, out of place. Then I realized, the President was not in a bunny suit, or wearing any clean-room garb at all (not even safety glasses!). Neither was Governor Cuomo. And neither were the engineers in the pictures with them, though they certainly knew better.

Clean room garments are necessary to protect the pristine cleanliness of our wafers and equipment from the inherent dirtiness of our human bodies. But it gets worse. As expected, security for a Presidential visit is quite strict. A thorough sweep of the clean room was carried out by numerous secret service agents, including bomb sniffing dogs. That’s right, dogs roaming the clean room! The sticky mats at the entry ways between rooms were covered with dog hair. And it turns out that many process chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing smell just like bomb-making materials. The dogs went crazy. The agents were nervous. Some equipment had to be dismantled.

I suppose when the support for your lab relies almost entirely on government funding, the inconvenience of dirtying your clean room is a small price to pay for the publicity of a Presidential visit. It took about one month for defect levels in the clean room to get back to pre-visit levels. That’s a big interruption in work schedule. But at least they have some cool posters to show for it.

Here’s my chance for joining Murphy and the other immortals of science and engineering:

Mack’s Law: If you call your own idea a “law”, then it isn’t one.

I just read a nice article by Tom Rigoli entitled “Experiencing Silicon Valley”, which, as you might expect, was about his experiences in Silicon Valley. I especially enjoyed this little box embedded in the story:

Who Named Silicon Valley?
Don C. Hoefler (1923-1986) coined the term in a 1971 series of articles that was published in Electronic News, the only major weekly covering the emerging semiconductor industry. Don was the West Coast reporter for EN at the same time I was West Coast editor for the monthly EDN magazine. I regularly bumped into him at press conferences. In his brief San Francisco obituary, they credited him with naming “Silicon Valley,” noting that he later quipped when asked about it, “How was I to know that the term would be adopted industry wide and become generic worldwide?”

G’day! Greetings from Auckland, New Zealand. I’m here attending the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology (AMN-6). As the name implies it has been a week of graphene, buckyballs, and nanotubes, biologically inspired surfaces, quantum effects, and self-assembled everything. While there were some talks on “top-down” fabrication (like traditional lithography), most of the emphasis was on “bottoms up”: letting the physics of some process naturally create small structures. I saw the self-assembly of nanostructures using block copolymers of course, but also using the shear forces of spin coating, dewetting during evaporation, and deep reactive ion etching. One definitely gets one’s quota of strange ideas at a conference like this.

AMN always attracts Nobel Prize winners (I’m not the only one who likes to come to New Zealand), and this year Roald Hoffmann (Chemistry, 1981) gave a keynote speech and a public lecture. Both were excellent. The keynote looked at the use of the diamond anvil to put materials at pressures up to one million atmospheres (similar to the pressure at the center of the earth). At these pressures everything becomes a metal. His public lecture (at the Auckland Museum) was more philosophical, looking at the many tensions in chemistry. Some memorable quotes from that lecture:

“Beauty resides at the boundary between order and chaos.”
“Chemistry is less in the business of discovery and more in the business of creation.”
“My papers are written for the intelligent graduate student, and I have a lot of trouble getting them published as a result.”

Alas, many (most?) of the talks at this conference were aimed a little higher than the intelligent graduate student, and I couldn’t follow quite a few of them. I enjoyed hearing Mike Kelly (University of Cambridge) complain that many of the ideas promoted by nanotechnologists were inherently non-manufacturable. “Manufacturability is the key gateway to everything. It should be our main focus.” He was doubtful that any bottoms-up approach to fabrication could ever become manufacturable (the problem: defects). The few lithography talks (Richard Blaikie, Idriss Blakey, and a few others) were of course of interest to me, but the real value of a conference like this is to pull your head out of the details of your current problem domain and see a broad range of activities in nanoscience. For that, the conference has been a success.

The last evening of the conference gave us the banquet. It being Valentine’s day, the requested dress was described as “smart, with a hint of romance.” Unfortunately, I only packed “dumb, with no chance of romance.” But, since it was a nanotechnology conference, I wasn’t out of place.

When the last day of the conference rolled around on Friday, I decided to skip out. It is time to see the important landmarks of this beautiful country. Cheers!