When evaluating what comes out of a university research group, often the research carried out by the group is given most attention. However, obviously, the most important product of a research group is not the research itself but it’s the people that are educated and trained: our students and postdocs.
This blog post is somewhat different from other posts. We will have a closer look at the students and postdocs who have been part of our university research group “Plasma & Materials Processing (PMP)” at the Eindhoven University of Technology. We will have look at where these alumni have gone and we will also consider feedback that we received from these alumni through a questionnaire we recently sent out.
“Do the things that give you energy”
Advice from former group members to current MSc and PhD students within PMP
But why are we doing this? First of all, we simply like to keep track of where our people are going. It tells us who is looking for students and postdocs coming out of our group and it helps us in defining and mapping our research lines and educational programs. It is also good to get the numbers straight. For example, in the recent years we got the impression that most of our people end up at the Dutch tech-giant ASML. From the number of people that they have been hiring over the past few years (the company grew from ~10.000 employees in 2013 to 16.000+ in 2017), one would also think that more than 50% of our people start working in the company that is world’s leading provider of lithography systems for the semiconductor industry and which is only 8 km away from the TU/e campus. But is this true? What are the actual numbers?
Another reason for looking into the details and writing this blog post is the reunion that we recently had for the Plasma & Materials Processing (PMP) group and its predecessor, the Equilibrium and Transport in Plasmas (ETP) group. On May 25, about 70 current and former members of the PMP/ETP group gathered for a late-afternoon/evening program which included some presentations, lab tours, and dinner and drinks. It was a great success with about half of the attendees being former group members (yet only a fraction of all the former group members could make it) and it is certainly something to repeat at a bigger scale in a few years. Personally, I found the presentations by some former PhD students especially interesting and exciting. They reflected on their work and experiences as a PhD student, about what they valued and how they look back at it now. They also talked about which surprises they encountered when taking up a real job, and how their career developed since leaving the group. These presentations also gave us the inspiration to send out a questionnaire to the former group members and the responses will be discussed below.
“Take advantage of the expertise and skills of people within PMP, take into account their advises and keep in mind they will be supportive whatever happens.”
Advice from former group members to current MSc and PhD students within PMP
Photo made at the ETP/PMP reunion in May 2018. Click photo for high-resolution.
Before digging into the numbers, it is probably good to have a closer look at our educational system in terms of degrees awarded and at the way the Department of Applied Physics (to which we belong) is run. In a nutshell: at the TU/e we have the Bachelor – Master system. The bachelor program is 3 years and the master program is 2 years. Most of our students do both the bachelor and master in Applied Physics and many of them do them both at the TU/e. The TU/e is basically an engineering school and after obtaining the MSc degree, the students have become an “engineer” (they can use the Dutch title “ingenieur”, which is abbreviated as “ir.”). It is important to realize that people who want to get a PhD degree in the Netherlands, need to have an MSc degree. One can only enroll as a PhD candidate when having finished an MSc studies, so only after (at least) 5 years of studies at a university. At the TU/e, PhD candidates are basically treated as employees – with all associated benefits – and not as students. This is also the reason why we rather talk about PhD candidates than PhD students although we are not very consistent in doing so. It also means that PhD candidates are not taking many classes, they can devote most of their time to doing their research. So basically they can spend 4 years in the lab! They only need to do some teaching, mostly assisting and advising bachelor students with their lab work. Obviously, when having a relevant PhD degree one can do a postdoc in our group as well. A postdoc position can basically be anything between 1 and 4 years. By the way, most of our bachelor and master students come from the Netherlands although the number of international master students at the TU/e has been increasing over the last years). Our PhD candidates and postdocs come from anywhere in the world.
Attempt to simply clarify the educational system in the Netherlands. Every program/position allows for external flow-in/flow-out although it is also possible to move from one to another position while staying at one university and even in one research group.
Our Department of Applied Physics (link: https://www.tue.nl/en/university/departments/applied-physics/research/research-groups/) is organized in terms of research groups which are not centered around a principal investigator (PIs) or the like. Instead they are centered around a research field or a discipline. Currently our department has 14 research groups with the Plasma & Materials Processing (PMP) group being one of them. Every group typically has a couple of faculty members who serve as PIs and who manage the group. These PIs can hold an assistant, associate or full professorship. They share labs, infrastructure and support (e.g. technicians). Research projects are run together and students are advised jointly. The group is typically led by a full professor who has the “chair” of the group. For our research group, initially this “chair” was Daan Schram (until 2005), subsequently it was Richard van de Sanden (until 2010) and since then it has been Erwin Kessels, the lead author of this blog post. The name of the PMP group used to be Equilibrium and Transport in Plasmas (ETP) before it changed its name to Plasma & Materials Processing in 2007. The main reason for this change was that the research became much more focused on the treatment and synthesis of materials (especially thin films) over the years. Nowadays, plasma physics is still a key expertise of the group but this does not mean that all research is involving plasmas. Currently the focus of the group is mainly on atomic scale processing and, e.g., our research on atomic layer deposition (ALD) encompasses both plasma-enhanced and thermal ALD processes.
“Work hard and at the same time try to integrate into the group and learn from others, not only physics and theory, but also the soft factors. Group dynamics and PMP spirit is not only fun, but it brings you personally forward, even in your scientific work.”
Advice from former group members to current MSc and PhD students within PMP
But now to the numbers! We’ll look at the people that have been in our group since 2005 (2005-2018) as it is not so easy to track down all the people that were in the group before this period. See the table below for some interesting figures.
| Total number | Female | Non-Dutch | Now abroad | Now in PV | Now in ALD | Now at ASML | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MSc students | 87 | 7 (8.0%) | 6 (6.9%) | 7 (8.0%) | 4 | 13 | 21 (24.1%) |
| PhD candidates | 52 | 6 (11.5%) | 20 (38.5%) | 16 (30.8%) | 5 | 10 | 10 (19.2%) |
| Postdocs | 37 | 9 (24.3%) | 32 (86.5%) | 16 (43.2%) | 5 | 3 | 6 (16.2%) |
This table only shows the people that have graduated as an MSc or PhD student or have left the PMP group as a postdoc. Clearly, on the average 6-7 students obtain their MSc degree in the group every year whereas the average number of PhD candidates graduating every year is 4. The number of postdocs only shows postdocs that join us from outside the group and does not include those PhD candidates that hang on in the group for a couple of months more after obtaining their degree (which happens quite regularly). Regrettably, the percentage of females is quite low although it is not too bad when compared to some other technical studies or when compared to other groups in our department. Happily we have two female faculty members within the group (both associated professors) and also the head of our technical team is a woman. She leads a team of 4 technicians.
“Learn as much as you can – Try to interact with people working on other projects, it can bring you interesting ideas.”
Advice from former group members to current MSc and PhD students within PMP
The numbers also demonstrate that the group is very international. We had 6 non-Dutch MSc students (although these mainly came from the nearby country Belgium) but the percentage of PhD candidates coming from outside the Netherlands is almost 40%. For the postdocs, this percentage is even close to 90%. In the past years, we have had the following nationalities in our group: Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Iran, Korea, Limburg, Mexico, Romania, Russia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States. Some of the foreigners decided to apply for Dutch citizenship after having lived in the Netherland for a couple of years. This brings us at another point: quite many of the foreigners stay in the Netherlands after obtaining their PhD degree or after finishing their postdoc. This can be concluded from the fact that the percentage of non-Dutch people in the group has been higher than the number that went abroad (again) after leaving the group. And the latter number also includes several Dutch group members that have moved abroad to continue their career.
Most of the people that leave the group pursue their professional career in an area that is relatively close to the research area of the group. Although it has to be said that a few people make interesting career moves and start working for a bank, insurance company, consultancy company or the like. The number of people that continue working in the field of photovoltaics is quite low (it has been quite somewhat higher in the past) but the number of people staying active in the field of atomic layer deposition is fairly high.
But coming back to the title of this blog post: what about ASML? From the table it is clear that the percentage of group members moving to ASML is way less than 50%. However, with almost 25% of the students that have obtained their MSc degree in our group, the fraction of people ending up at ASML is high. Also 1 out of 5 PhD candidates go to ASML while the percentage is lower for the postdocs. As alluded to earlier, a significant fraction of foreign postdocs leaves the country again when leaving the group.
What are the other major tech-organizations where our people end up? These include organizations such as TNO, Differ, ARC NL, and imec and companies such as ThermoFisher (previously FEI Company), Philips, ASM, and Océ. Furthermore, individuals have ended up at the companies Tempress, Morphotonics, LAM Research, Oxford Instruments, Teledyne Dalsa, Ultimaker, Fuji Film, Oxford PV, Tata Steel, DAF Trucks, Shell, SolayTec, Bosch, and Prodrive Technologies. Several graduates also became a teacher, e.g., at a pre-university school whereas also a significant number of graduates ended up in academia, e.g. at the TU/e but also at Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), at the Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology, and at the University of New South-Wales (Australia)
“Working in industry is even more chaotic then doing a PhD.”
Advice from former group members to current MSc and PhD students within PMP
Finally, to conclude this blog post, we would like to share some feedback with you as obtained from former group members in a brief questionnaire that we sent out. We asked them the following 3 questions:
- Regarding your career, what was the most important aspect you learned during your time at ETP/PMP?
- What was the biggest “surprise” when you started your new job(s) after working in ETP/PMP?
- Looking back at your career, what advice would you give to MSc or PhD students starting to work in PMP?
From the enthusiasm in the responses it was clear that many former students and postdocs had a good time and really enjoyed being part of the PMP group. In the answers, several different “most valuable skills” surfaced but replies in the tenor of “learning how to manage a big project and being tenacious” was mentioned most often (~40%). This was followed by developing your skills in “critical thinking” and improving your “writing & presentation” skills. Of course, the domain specific knowledge gained during the project was also mentioned which is especially relevant for those that decided to continue to work in the same area.
“The level of professionalism within the group, companies could learn from it.”
Advice from former group members to current MSc and PhD students within PMP
Something like the “high level of expectation at PMP and high level of expertise at PMP” was mentioned most often as the biggest surprise when transitioning into their first job after PMP. Several former group members indicated or implied that working in industry is “even more chaotic” than doing a PhD and that the “writing & presentation” skills (unfortunately) receive less attention in industry. Also several alumni had a reassuring “surprise” for those that are working towards a PhD and want to go to industry: “there are also many opportunities for interesting research and exciting challenges in industry”.
Turning towards advice for students that are considering doing a PhD, the large majority of responses was encouraging, which is in line with the enthusiasm mentioned earlier. Apart from encouraging students to enroll in a PhD program, about half of the respondents stressed the importance of working together with other researchers during your PhD project. This is seen as an important skill and yields better results than working by yourself. Other advice was to take (or create) the opportunity to visit other labs or work in a company for a while to get a broader perspective and use the freedom during your PhD or postdoc to broaden your skill set and learn new skills. Or in other words, do not only focus on your own research. Last but definitely not least, a good planning was seen as essential for a successful PhD project. As a general remark, our former students indicated that a good team spirit – as experienced in the PMP group – is very important asset for a group such as PMP.
“Join and/or create settings where you do as much as possible work in teams, the success of your career will depend on how effective you are in collaborating.”
Advice from former group members to current MSc and PhD students within PMP
To conclude, our former students and postdocs look back positively on their time within our group and within academia in general. They encourage students that are considering a PhD to go for it, at least if you are very motivated. Although this survey was not rigorous in the scientific sense (it probably suffers from a certain degree of selection bias for example) the general trends discussed above should be valid. Moreover, it is good to see that nearly all former students and postdocs think their time at PMP was time well spent. Phew!
A special word of thanks goes out to Vincent Vandalon who co-authored this post and also for organizing the ETP/PMP reunion together with Aafke Bronneberg.
2017
2015
2013
2011
2006
1 Comment