Sam Scroggie will graduate from Northeastern University this spring with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and return to Apple to work full-time.
OAKLAND, Calif. — As a camera process engineer co-op at Apple, half of Sam Scroggie’s job was to oversee manufacturing of new cameras in development for products like iPhones and Vision Pro reality augmented headsets.
The other half was to figure out what was wrong when a camera failed on the line.
“One of the great things about working with Apple is you have all of these advanced tools in your arsenal you can use to understand why those cameras failed,” says Scroggie, who will graduate from Northeastern University this spring with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.
“I began to develop a sensitivity to this sort of stuff, which just speeds up the process,” he says. “That intuition helps with the failure analysis process, especially if you’ve seen it before.”
That sensitivity won’t go to waste, now that Scroggie’s co-op at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is over. Back in Boston this semester to complete his mechanical engineering degree, Scroggie will return full time to Cupertino after graduation to pick up where he left off.
“I will be going back to the same team, in the same capacity, doing the same job,” he says. But this time, he’ll be able to make manufacturing decisions he didn’t get to make during his co-op. “When I go back, I’ll have the opportunity to start from the very beginning of the process.”
Scroggie, who grew up in Hong Kong, was the point of contact for the camera process engineering department, which sets up manufacturing for Apple’s new and in-development cameras. Scroggie worked with the engineers from concept all the way to mass production, helping to make decisions about changes along the way.
If a systems engineer wanted to make a change to the architecture of a camera, for example, Scroggie would conduct experiments to investigate whether the change was possible for a camera program he was responsible for. If so, he recommended accepting and adjusting the manufacturing line. Some changes he would reject for budgetary or other reasons.
Making these decisions required consulting a team of engineers. Optical engineers work on lenses and semiconductor engineers work with the chips. Process engineers focus on process capability — a big determinant for what’s feasible. Scroggie represented manufacturing.
“Quite often I would be involved in those discussions, as to where we can make trade-offs between teams,” he says.
Scroggie’s first co-op was with a small Boston-based team of China-based Cornerstone Robotics, which designs surgical robotic systems. During meetings with teams in China, Scroggie was able to use his Mandarin and Cantonese skills.
“That really gave me a leg up,” he says. So did his understanding of Chinese culture, including knowing how to show respect for seniority while introducing new ideas of his own.
He sought the Apple co-op because he wanted to work with semiconductors, which form the foundation of Apple’s cameras. Under Scroggie’s supervision, semiconductor chips were transformed to become a camera module, like the ones found in iPhones, MacBooks and Vision Pro headsets.
If something went wrong in manufacturing, Scroggie worked with process engineers to figure out the problem. Sometimes the issue was quite simple.
“Micro-cracks could form under stress,” he says. “Or microscopic particles could be lodged in critical areas.”
Scroggie investigated process failures like these.
“I’m accountable for all of them. And then I have to implement corrective actions to rectify them.”
He became deeply engaged in the culture of Apple and got to work in the company’s ring-shaped headquarters, affectionately referred to as “the spaceship.” He founded the employee group Cantonese at Apple, which attracted 120 employees to meet and network.
So when he returns to Apple, he’ll have a familiar job and plenty of contacts already in place.
“Because of what I’ve learned, I can take on even bigger projects and take bigger risks,” he says. “I’ll hit the ground running.”