WISH Mentorship Programme Experience

Since I am pursuing electronics engineering, one of our seniors told us about a great opportunity for women who are interested in the hardware industry. This was a great opportunity for us.

What is WISH?

In the 2nd year, I got to know about an initiative by Texas Instruments for women in the semiconductor industry.

We received a registration link through the institute and the selection was done on the basis of two rounds:-

APTITUDE ROUND:- All the registered candidates were required to appear for an online test. It was a basic test consisting of physics and mathematics. The one-hour test had around 30 questions which were of basic physics and mathematics of class 11th-12th grade.

INTERVIEW ROUND:- All the candidates who qualified for the aptitude test were called for an online interview. The interview lasted for about 45 minutes and I was asked about my project and certain questions from my Digital and Analog courses.

Almost everyone made it through the interview round and received this mail:-

EXPERIENCE OF 2 MONTH MENTORSHIP PROGRAMME:-

We were shared a time-table for the 4 weeks.

• First Week:- It focused on getting us introduced to the major circuits like RC circuits and also introduced us to the software which we will use for circuit making and problem solving.
• Second Week:- It was focused on analog circuits and topics like bode-plots.
• Third Week:- It was focused on digital circuits.
• Fourth Week:- Since it was an offline week, i will elaborate this later

So during this program our classes were scheduled 5 days a week from 10 a.m to 5 p.m with numerous breaks in between, the online classes conducted were quite interactive and we would make circuits. Daily we were given a sheet with numerous questions and we had to submit them in a survey by the end of the classes. The schedule was quite hectic but we would learn a lot.

Apart from the sheets and quizzes we were given a technical paper which we were supposed to present in front of everyone during the last week of the program in bangalore. Since we were quite new to this , we were allotted two mentors, one for digital and one for analog. We had discussion sessions with them on the alternate days.

OFFLINE WEEK(in Bangalore):

For the last week , we were required to travel to Bangalore, the whole travel and stay in 5-star was taken care of.

Working offline with everyone was more fun than online, we were given tour of all the labs, the Texas Instruments Campus, We worked on hardware circuits in groups and were also given goodies. Our offline sessions were schedules with our mentors for the paper presentation preparation.

In addition to this, we had sessions with the TI leaders at the end of the day for an hour where the current TI leaders would share their experiences and some words of wisdom. It would be an interesting and interactive session as we could cross-question.

The week ended by presentations from all groups. They chose 3 winners from the presentation and ended with a note of thanks.

All over the experience was quite good, all those who performed well were given internship offers from Texas Instruments in digital/analog roles.

PERKS OF THE PROGRAM:

1. You learn about semiconductors and circuits through the classes.
2. One-to-one interactions with mentors who are currently working there helps you a lot.
3. You learn to use software which they use and get hands on experience in hardware circuits.
4. You get to explore the work-culture and campus of TI.

and of course you get to visit bangalore for free 😉