MSN-011 · 2026 · leadership, community, semiconductor, ntu
Founded NTU's first dedicated semiconductor student club from scratch — faculty approval, industry partnerships, site visits, and lab access. Grew to 400 members.
I went to a career advisor at some point wanting help breaking into the semiconductor industry. The advice I got was to practise LeetCode and apply for software engineering. That was the moment I realised there was genuinely no pathway here — not just a thin one, but none at all. If you wanted to go into fab, physical design, EDA, process engineering, anything that wasn't writing web apps, you were on your own.
The thing about semiconductor careers is that you need a baseline of domain knowledge before you can even figure out what role you're aiming for. Finance students at NTU have societies, internship pipelines, alumni who come back and talk. Software has the same. Semicon had nothing, which meant students either stumbled into it by luck or defaulted to wherever the existing paths led. I'd done enough stumbling myself to know it wasn't for lack of interest.
I started by finding people. No formal process, no announcement — just conversations, mostly through my existing network, with students who were also trying to figure out this space. Getting a founding team together that way is slow, but it filters for people who actually care rather than people who want something to put on a CV. Once there was a small core of us, I went looking for a faculty advisor, which meant convincing a professor to sponsor something that didn't exist yet. That pitch had to be in terms the institution responds to — graduate outcomes, industry relevance — not just "students want this."
I wasn't sure the demand was there at the scale needed to make it real. The career centre's response had suggested the institution didn't think so either. What I had was a series of direct conversations with students who wanted exactly what I was describing, and I treated that as enough. It was.
From there it was a lot of stakeholder management — keeping members engaged before the first event, keeping industry partners interested before we had a member base to show them, keeping faculty onside while we were still figuring out what the club actually looked like in practice. None of that is technically hard, but it requires a kind of consistency and communication clarity I hadn't had to develop before.
Site visits to industry facilities, technical talks run in collaboration with companies, and access to NTU's on-campus labs. The visits are the core of it — getting students into a fab or a packaging line or a design centre makes the career landscape legible in a way that no amount of reading does. The talks we run with industry partners are deliberately role-specific rather than generic networking, because the point is to help people understand what the jobs actually involve.
AMD site visit — members on the ground at AMD's Singapore facility
GlobalFoundries — fab floor tour with club members
NTU Nanofabrication Centre visit — on-campus lab access for members
Industry talk at AI Singapore — part of the club's collaboration programme with industry partners
400 members. Events running each semester. It exists, which is the thing it didn't do before.