Why every student shares a common Level One.

Ask a student on day one which specialisation they want, and you will usually get a confident answer. Ask them why, and the answer is almost always someone else's.

A cousin who works in Physical Design says PD is where the jobs are. An uncle heard Verification pays better. A senior from college said Analog is too hard. A friend's brother at a product company said DFT is a dead end.

None of these people are lying. All of them are describing a narrow slice of the industry from one vantage point, at one moment in time — and the student, who has no way to evaluate any of it, treats it as fact.

The first reason: you cannot choose what you have not seen

Here is the question nobody asks aloud. How is a student supposed to choose a specialisation before knowing what any of them actually involve?

Physical Design, on paper, is a list of stages — floorplanning, placement, CTS, routing, signoff. That description tells you nothing about what the work feels like, what kind of thinking it demands, or whether you would enjoy spending a decade doing it. The same is true of Verification, of Analog, of every track.

So the student does the only thing available to them. They ask around. And the advice they get is shaped entirely by whoever happens to be in their family or their hostel — which is to say, it is essentially random, and it is almost always biased.

We have watched this play out enough times to stop treating it as the student's fault. It is a structural problem, and the structure is what we changed.

So we don't ask on day one

Every student enters Level One without declaring a specialisation. Not "we recommend you wait" — the choice simply isn't offered yet, because there is nothing to base it on.

Level One runs as a single common batch. Everyone learns the same material, at the same time, in the same room.

The second reason: most of Level One is essential regardless

This is the part that surprises people, and it is the stronger argument of the two.

A student headed for Verification will occasionally ask why they are studying CMOS. It looks, from where they are standing, like a Physical Design topic. It isn't their domain. Why spend weeks on it?

Take that exact example. There is a field called AMS verification — verifying analog and mixed-signal blocks. It is one of the more valuable places a verification engineer can end up. And you cannot do it without understanding CMOS.

Now: a student who skipped CMOS at 22 because it "wasn't their domain" hits that opportunity at 32. What are they going to do — go back and study CMOS from scratch, ten years into a career, while competing against people who learned it properly the first time?

That is not a hypothetical. It is one of the most common reasons capable engineers stall at a level they should have moved past.

So some Level One modules will feel, in the moment, like they belong to somebody else's specialisation. Sit with that discomfort. In the longer arc of a career they are not a detour — they are the difference between an engineer who can move and one who is stuck.

Then — and only then — we split

By the end of Level One, the student has something they did not have on day one: direct exposure. They have worked through the fundamentals underneath every track. They have seen which problems they gravitate toward and which ones they avoid. They have a real basis for a decision.

That is when the batch splits by specialisation. The choice is now theirs and it is informed — not inherited from a relative with one data point.

What we see when students choose late

People change their minds. Consistently, and in a particular direction.

A student arrives certain about one track and leaves Level One heading somewhere else — because they discovered an interest they didn't know they had, or because something they had been warned was "too hard" turned out to be the thing they were best at.

That second case is the one worth dwelling on. A student is told Analog is brutal, so they write it off before starting. Then they work through the Level One material and find they follow it more naturally than most of the room. If we had asked them to choose on day one, that ability would have gone permanently undiscovered.

And if they still can't decide?

Some students reach the end of Level One genuinely torn. That's fine — it usually means they're capable of more than one track.

This is where mentoring does real work. We sit with them and look at four things:

The recommendation is grounded in evidence gathered over months of watching them work — not in a five-minute conversation with someone who has never seen them solve a problem.

Common Level One is not a scheduling convenience. It is the mechanism that makes an informed choice possible at all.

Ask a student to specialise on day one and you are asking them to bet a decade of their career on secondhand opinion. Give them a common foundation first, and the decision becomes theirs — made with evidence, and made at the point where it can actually be made well.

Level Zero makes sure everyone starts equal. Level One makes sure everyone chooses well.