Grant aids technology internship program.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

A University of Oregon program that helps prepare graduate students for jobs with the state's top technology companies will expand to other state universities with the help of a $3.2 million federal grant.

The internship program is part of an innovative direction in graduate science education that is putting more emphasis on job preparation. Chemistry professor David Johnson of the UO's Materials Science Institute said the idea is to provide a solid academic foundation while also preparing students for life outside the university.

Johnson said the program recognizes that most graduate students in chemistry and physics won't go on to become full-time academics.

"We teach undergraduates how to be very good at following directions, but most people when they hire people with degrees actually want people who can solve problems," he said. "And there's a big difference between those two."

The National Science Foundation grant will fund more graduate students and allow them to spend six to nine months working at companies such as Intel, Hynix, Hewlett-Packard, Invitrogen, LSI Logic Corp. and others. Master's and doctoral students can apply for the program, which is part of the NSF's Integrative Graduate Education Research and Traineeship program (IGERT).

Also, the five-year grant will allow doctoral students at Oregon State University and Portland State University to take part and work with faculty advisors at any of the three schools, regardless of where they are enrolled. Johnson said that should allow Oregon to keep more of its top students by making it easier for them to link up with an advisor in their field.

For students who hope to go on to academic careers, the program also allows graduate students to spend time at a small university, working as the teacher of record in science classrooms.

"We've got this program that's really designed to prepare students to be successful in what their likely careers are going to be," Johnson said. "The whole idea is to get them to learn to solve problems."

The funding will allow the program to expand by 50 percent, from the 25 to 30 students now to 40 to 45.

The internship program is part of the UO's effort to establish a kind of high-tech extension service that works with the state's leading technology corporations to provide research equipment and support as well as trained workers. It's also part of the state's joint effort through the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) to make Oregon a leader in nanoscience research and product develop- ment.

Johnson called the new emphasis on job skills part of a fundamental shift in science education at the UO. Some universities and academics have questioned that kind of change, but Johnson makes no apologies.

"This is really taking people and teaching them how to apply basic knowledge in a much broader sense," he said. "If the claim is that we're getting people better prepared to be successful in later life and you want to call that a job training program, then I think more places should have job training programs."

About two dozen Oregon companies participate in the internship program, allowing students to work in jobs involving semiconductor processing, organic synthesis and polymers and coatings. Students often end up with job offers as a result of the experience, something that Johnson said encourages them to graduate sooner than they might have otherwise.

"Oregon is home to the ninth-largest technology economy in the U.S., much of it rooted in materials sciences, semiconductors and nanotech, nano-instrumentation," said David Chen, a partner with OVP Venture Partners and chairman of ONAMI's board of directors. "The IGERT collaboration brings together companies, researchers and academics to innovate in a multi-university model that will help Oregon compete on a global scale."