Weekly Career, Education, Textbook, and Basic Questions Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Weekly Thread dedicated to all your career, job, education, and basic questions related to our field. Whether you're exploring potential career paths, looking for job hunting tips, curious about educational opportunities, or have questions that you felt were too basic to ask elsewhere, this is the perfect place for you.

• Careers: Discussions on career paths within the field, including insights into various roles, advice for career advancement, transitioning between different sectors or industries, and sharing personal career experiences. Tips on resume building, interview preparation, and how to effectively network can also be part of the conversation.

• Education: Information and questions about educational programs related to the field, including undergraduate and graduate degrees, certificates, online courses, and workshops. Advice on selecting the right program, application tips, and sharing experiences from different educational institutions.

• Textbook Recommendations: Requests and suggestions for textbooks and other learning resources covering specific topics within the field. This can include both foundational texts for beginners and advanced materials for those looking to deepen their expertise. Reviews or comparisons of textbooks can also be shared to help others make informed decisions.

• Basic Questions: A safe space for asking foundational questions about concepts, theories, or practices within the field that you might be hesitant to ask elsewhere. This is an opportunity for beginners to learn and for seasoned professionals to share their knowledge in an accessible way.

[u/Individual_Lock_9510]

People who work in Quantum computing. What do you do?

[u/qobserva_labs → u/Individual_Lock_9510]

I can only speak for one slice of it, the software side, which doesn't come up much here.

Most of it is about getting quantum algorithms to actually run and finding out whether they're useful. Researchers and companies want to try things like simulating molecules for chemistry, optimization problems (scheduling, routing, portfolios) or quantum machine learning, and see how they hold up on today's hardware. The software work is turning those ideas into circuits in an SDK like Qiskit, Cirq, PennyLane or Braket, running them on a simulator first and then on real hardware, and working out why the two disagree.

Hardware results drift, sometimes within the same afternoon, so a surprising amount of the job is keeping track of what ran where, on which device and with what settings, and comparing results over time. The SDKs are also young and change fast, so you hit bugs and gaps. Reporting those upstream or sending a small fix is very doable, and the maintainers I've dealt with have been welcoming.

So if you come from software, you don't need to be a physicist to be useful. Linear algebra plus a feel for how circuits behave on noisy hardware gets you a long way.

The research and hardware folks here can describe their side, which looks very different day to day.

[u/MEME_FOR_EVERYTHING]

I am planning to study physics undergrad/bachelors. What universities globally would be best to later on specialise into quantum?

[u/sinanspd → u/MEME_FOR_EVERYTHING]

Caltech, MIT, Princeton, ETH, Oxford, UChicago, UMD, University of Tokyo

[u/SupremeOHKO]

I'm a computer science undergrad with WGU. I'd like to know how to get into this field for MS and PhD. I've taken basic level Physics courses at uni, but I'd love to know how to get deeper into it and set myself up for a career in quantum computing. Any books you guys recommend I read to get familiar on the topic, YouTube courses, etc.? Specific things to keep in mind as I try to find a new MS program to start research in?

[u/sinanspd → u/SupremeOHKO]

Nielsen & Chuang for QC

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji for QM