커리어리포터 Kukers
[Meeting with Graduate School Alumni] Muhammad Faizan Shaikh (Sumsung Electronics)
2026.03.13 Views 9
Meet Muhammad Faizan Shaikh (Sumsung Electronics)
- Kukers: Please briefly introduce yourself, including your major, year of graduation, and current field of work or activity.
- Muhammad: My name is Muhammad Faizan Shaikh, and I came to Korea from Pakistan. I did my bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering in my home country. Upon receiving the Korean Government Scholarship (GKS) in 2018, I received admission in Korea University for my Master’s degree. After I finished my Master‘s in Electrical engineering in 2021, I decided to stay with my advisor, Prof. Sang Bin Lee and pursue my doctoral degree. I finished my PhD in 2025, and now work at Samsung Electronics as a research engineer.
- Kukers: Please briefly describe your current job or research.
- Muhammad: At Samsung, I’m part of the Digital Appliances division, and my current team deals with design, development and quality control of compressor motors. As my major during Masters and PhD was fault monitoring of electrical machines and drives, so I was assigned to this team. It has been just 6 months since I started working after my graduation, so I’m still getting used to the corporate work life.
Samsung Electronics’ Digital Appliances division is one of the leading manufacturers of digital appliances in the world, so I hope to learn a lot and to apply my knowledge to help my team excel.
- Kukers: What motivated you to pursue graduate studies, and why did you choose your particular field of study?
- Muhammad: After finishing my undergraduate degree in Pakistan, I worked for around 2 and a half years. During my work as operations engineer at a power plant, I realized that I need to pursue higher studies because I didn’t just want to work as any other engineer on established engineering practices, but rather be able to develop these practices myself. Therefore, I started searching for opportunities to pursue higher education.
My choice of Major, Electrical engineering, was done because of my love for engineering and physics. After working in the industry before I started my graduate studies, my interest in it only grew, and it is still here, because the technology keeps evolving each year. It may seem boring, but it doesn’t just involve bulky electrical machines and complex equations. In the fault monitoring field specifically, we combine our engineering acumen with signal processing and new data learning methods to not just detect faults, but predict them. Seeing the methods I worked on applied in real life is extremely satisfying.
Overcoming the Language Barrier in Graduate School
- Kukers: What was the most memorable project or experience during your graduate studies? If applicable, please share what you learned from that experience.
- Muhammad: My most memorable project during my grad studies at KU, is actually the one that utterly failed to provide us with “good” results. Here, the term “good” is used because in research there is no strict distinction between good and bad results. Anyhow, without going into too much detail, my Professor and I came up with an exciting idea that we thought could be used for our research. I ran experiments and simulations on it for weeks, and even though the theory still seems sound to me, the results we got were not what we hoped they would be. Fortunately for me (and my thesis), other ideas worked and I was able to publish quite a few research papers, but that experience of failure taught me more about what research means. Research is not just about getting good results that can be turned into publications, it is equally about your failed experiments and ideas, as they help us in developing better ideas and keep us thinking.
- Kukers: What was the most challenging moment during your graduate studies, and why?
- Muhammad: Believe it or not, the most challenging thing for me was Korean language . Even though I picked up Korean relatively quickly, speaking it fluently and understanding academic Korean was not easy. Even now, it is challenging. While at first glance, this might not resonate with a lot of the Korean students, but I think they face this challenge equally as the foreign students, because most of the educational and research content throughout the world is in English. So if you feel like the language barrier is dragging you down, don‘t let it do so! Learning languages can be frustrating, but once you get over the challenge, it is extremely fun to rediscover others’ cultures in their own languages. 화이팅!
- Kukers: Among the academic or career-development programs you participated in during graduate school, was there any program that you found particularly helpful?
- Muhammad: The job/career fairs held by the graduate school regularly were quite fun to attend, and also extremely helpful. It is not easy to tear oneself away from research work and look for jobs before graduating. Actually it becomes much busier during the last semesters because of thesis presentation and submission, so it was extremely convenient that we could just go to these fairs at the university, and talk to potential employers. It helped me understand which firm I needed to join, and whose goals aligned with my research, without spending hours poring over websites and searching for jobs.
- Kukers: Which skills or experiences from graduate school have been particularly helpful in your current career?
- Muhammad: Graduate school is quite different from undergraduate school. It is like a hybrid between university life as a student, and job life as an employee. As such, it grooms and prepares us for our careers in a much more direct way. One doesn’t just have to study, they have the opportunity to work on research projects with companies/industries and how to manage such projects. Some may also get the chance to even teach students pursuing their undergraduate degrees, which really helps us see the perspectives of our teachers and professors.
For myself, my job at Samsung is related to my graduate studies and research, and while it may not be a perfect match (it rarely is, so don’t worry if your research doesn’t align perfectly with your future plans or available opportunities), it has definitely helped me land this position, and a lot of the work I am doing is related to my core competencies acquired during graduate studies. This includes experiments I did at my lab, and the simulations I did using various software provided by the university.
- Kukers: In your current field or industry, what core competencies do you think are most important?
- Muhammad: Being up-to-date with the current technological trends (specially AI applications related to your domain), understanding the cost impact of research you want to pursue, being open to do other tasks as part of the corporate work culture (as in tasks not just strictly specific to your particular research), and for international students, the ability to communicate in Korean. If you want to work in Korean industry, you need Korean proficiency.
The Mindset Graduate Students Need in a Rapidly Changing Technological Era
- Kukers: What advice would you like to share with students who are interested in your field or industry?
- Muhammad: My advice would be to definitely come and experience the industry, even if one wants to continue on in academia after finishing their studies. This is because as researchers, we need to understand via first hand experience what the industry actually needs from us. Applied sciences research (which includes almost all engineering disciplines) cannot be done properly without understanding the current trends and needs of the industry at large. As Samsung is one of the leading manufacturers in not only appliances, but also electronic chips, mobile devices and even medicine (Biologics division), students who are engaged in research related to these industries should definitely come and experience the life here.
The university does a good job of providing support to its students, what they can do is arrange visits to various companies and let the students experience a day there. I think such programs can be arranged as the university has good relationship with industries here.
Lastly, in my personal experiences, planning for your future is of course necessary, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be open to unexpected opportunities. In this day and age, the technology is evolving so fast that making absolute long term plans and putting all your eggs in one basket is not preferable. You should be fluid and open to learning and understanding new knowledge and incorporating it.
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