Michelle: So it seems like you've had a very successful career and you've done a lot, but can you tell us a little bit about how your career got started?

Harshala: I completed my bachelor's back in India in electronics and telecommunication. And then I came to the United States in 2013 pursuing for a master's degree. I graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in New York in 2015. And RIT gave me the opportunity to learn more about the semiconductor industry. That's where I also got my first internship opportunity through a co-op, career fair. And since then, it's been like eight years, nine years. Since then, I've mostly been in the semiconductor technology R&D and also manufacturing, both in process integration and now currently as a quality and reliability engineer at Samsung. So yes, that's been my career.

Michelle: Did you ever plan to go into quality or did that just sort of happen or what was the process?

Harshala: It was a gradual transition to be honest, because when I worked as a process integration engineer for maybe like around six years for two different companies, I understood that quality is not really focused on only the quality department. It was more like a mindset, right? Because if you just look at the end product, a lot of things are taken into consideration, to your supplier quality, to the different vendors that you work with, to the different engineering teams that you work with. And based on my background, I felt like I could make a difference to the field of quality. And that's how my transition to quality happened a couple years back.

Michelle: So can you tell us what you like about the quality field?

Harshala: I definitely enjoy solving problems. I mean, nobody likes problems, but the whole aspect of resolving a problem for a customer to meet the customer specifications, even the aspects of preparing for the audits to make sure that we are conforming to the ISO, IATF, the FMEA part of it, like risk and resolutions for it, any change controls trying to figure out like if that is going to impact our quality in the near future. I think those are the challenging aspects of it. I think I enjoy working on that.

Michelle: I've heard other people say that too. They like kind of the improvement part or like the detective part sort of figuring out what went wrong.

Harshala: I think because like quality is like a, is a very big domain based on what you are working on, right? You have one part is like conforming to the rules, guidelines, that is quality. But then another part is like sometimes you need to meet, not sometimes, like you always are striving to meet your customer expectations and trying to go beyond, right? There's so much competition, like even if there's an issue, there's a failure, if you have a return material, how do you resolve it? How do you talk to the customer? How do you have a containment on it, all that is also a part of quality. So I think I enjoyed that part of it a little more over, obviously sticking to the rules and policies.

Michelle: Yeah, definitely more fun. And so for people who are kind of considering manufacturing or thinking about it, is there any advice you'd give them or things you would suggest they do?

Harshala: Definitely, I think If you're really interested, I would suggest reading about quality in your particular field because quality could be a lot like it could be in manufacturing, it could be in the health industry, it could be in food industry, right? So talking to the manufacturing quality, there are a lot of certifications available online. So I would suggest that may probably start reading through the material, see if you are able to connect with it. Which are like the unpaid ones, there are always like the paid certifications which are like the Six Sigma, Green Belt, Black Belt or ASQ has the certifications. So that you could audit for the company ISO, IATF. Those are all pretty, I would say like a step level two.

But as a phase one to really understand that if it's really indeed your game, I would suggest like read through the free courses available on the internet, which has a vast data and try to connect if you can really contribute to this field of quality, because a lot of people think that it is not challenging, but it is a challenging role to be in.