On a weekday morning in Stanford’s Allen Building, Connor Short pulls on shoe covers, a hood, and a white “bunny suit,” and steps into one of the most advanced academic semiconductor cleanrooms in the country. Short, a second-year electrical engineering student at Foothill College, is one of about 20 community college students each year who work as paid interns in the nano@stanford internship program.

Since 2018, the year-round program has brought students from local community colleges into the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility, a class 100 cleanroom that supports more than 600 researchers a year in fields ranging from electronics and optics to biology and medicine. Interns have come from a dozen Northern California schools, including De Anza, Mission, Chabot, West Valley, Skyline, San Mateo, Ohlone, Folsom Lake, and Diablo Valley.

Under staff mentorship, interns learn the core skills of supporting a semiconductor fabrication facility – process control, equipment maintenance, deposition, etching, lithography, and metrology – in 20-week sessions scheduled around their classes.

“These are not just internships in the traditional sense,” said Mary Tang, managing director of nano@stanford. “They’re actually doing work that needs to be done in the facility. It’s training on the job, but it’s fundamentally a job.”

Community colleges are an overlooked pipeline for semiconductor talent, the program’s leaders say, a gap that has taken on new urgency as the United States works to rebuild its domestic chip industry. But most community college students don’t have access to the advanced equipment the industry runs on. Nano@stanford’s internship program is designed to close that gap.

“Before working here, I had no idea what working in a lab would be like,” said Short. “But I’ve enjoyed every moment that I spend here. There is not a moment that goes by that something interesting is not happening.”

Interns’ primary responsibility is restocking the lab. Once the lab is ready for researchers, interns run tool monitors – test wafers that confirm cleanroom equipment is performing as expected – and work on independent projects. Short’s project involves tweaking the timing of chemical pulses in a machine that builds ultra-thin silicon coatings one atomic layer at a time, seeking a way to deposit the same film using less material. “If I can achieve that same growth per cycle with less precursor, then we’re saving money for the lab, we’re saving resources, and we’re getting the same result,” he said.

Of 43 interns trained since 2018, five now work in the semiconductor industry, and two have full-time staff positions at Stanford. Many have transferred to four-year universities and are completing their degrees, and a few have gone on to graduate programs at Stanford, Columbia, and MIT.

Rachelle Nineveh Salmani, a process operations associate at Stanford Nano Shared Facilities, entered the intern program in 2021 while studying public health at West Valley–Mission Community College. The experience completely shifted her career path, she said. “I never thought of engineering as an option, but this internship 100% changed my mind.” She now trains researchers on more than a dozen pieces of specialized lab equipment and oversees the nano@stanford internship program.

“I think the value that industry sees in our interns is the skill sets they gain so early on, without even completing their bachelor’s,” she said. “A lot of our interns can pretty much go straight into a technician job because industry really needs people that have these hands-on experiences.”

For Short, who transfers to a four-year university this fall, the internship has already reshaped his plans.

“Having the opportunity to work here has definitely piqued my interest in nanoscience and the semiconductor industry as a whole,” he said. He hopes to take semiconductor physics courses after he transfers, “and maybe find my way back here after I graduate.”