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The Complete Guide to Becoming A Microsystems Engineer
Real pay, real day-to-day work, real paths in, and how to know if this is the right engineering career for you before you spend a dollar on tuition.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Microsystems Engineer Actually Do?
Your Job Title, Decoded
When you tell someone at a dinner party you are studying to become a Microsystems Engineer, you will likely get a polite nod and a subject change. That is because the title does not explain anything. You are not working on microchips that go in laptops — well, sometimes, but not usually. You are not fixing microscopes, and you are not doing basic chemistry in a beaker. You are designing and building tiny mechanical and electrical systems — things you can't see with the naked eye — that do real work in the world. Think of a blood pressure sensor small enough to live inside a human artery and report data wirelessly. Think of the micro-mirrors in a digital projector that flip thousands of times per second to show a movie. That is the scale you operate at, and it is wildly different from any other engineering discipline you have seen.
So let's get specific. A Microsystems Engineer designs, fabricates, and tests micro-electromechanical systems — almost always abbreviated as MEMS — as well as micro-opto-electromechanical systems (MOEMS) and various kinds of microsensors and micro-actuators. The "micro" in the name means the critical features you are working on are measured in micrometers — that is one-millionth of a meter. A human hair is around 70 to 100 micrometers thick. The structures you design are smaller than that, and your precision tolerance might be plus or minus half a