I came to the US in 1977 looking for a summer student position and found one at Philips' Briarcliff Manor Laboratories. That's in New York around the Hudson Valley. They wanted me to do some simulation work on MNOS devices, metal-nitride-oxide memory-type devices, and that activity developed from an initial three to four months, into the whole academic year, and then they encouraged me to go to graduate school. I wound up at Stanford the following year, eventually staying in the US. Before I came to the US, I was at Delft University for an engineering degree. It's a five-year program and I had chosen electrical engineering after finishing high school. But that was not such an easy choice. Like many students in the same kind of situation, you're good in math and then you're trying to do something with that. Physics was intriguing and attractive, but seemed a little too theoretical. I thought a lot about material science as well, but that seemed too empirical, so I picked something in between. I got interested in electronics a few years before finishing high school; I was browsing at a library, finding some literature on lasers. They were just fascinating to me. I wanted to find out more how they worked. But looking in those same shelves, there were also books about electronics and transistors, and so I picked a couple of those books as well. I couldn't understand most of them, but it got me interested in the field. So, I knew very little about electrical engineering and electronics, initially.
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