2 months ago
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Posted On: September 18th 2026, 05:01 pm
Three things I wish I knew before pursuing a quantum computing PhD:
1. Quantum computing is such a huge field, that you either get on board being an engineer, plumber, software programmer, woodworker and theoretician all in one, or you dedicate yourself ONLY to perfecting the purity of sine wave generator outputs 😂know . I would have made sure to really understand this before working in a particular group.
2. You can do quantum PhDs as part of industry (and hosted by universities) where you get more money (very useful) or you get paid minimum wage by universities. If you know you are going to go into industry after graduation this can come in very useful to know sooner rather than later.
3. Quantum technology = computing, sensing, communication, whereas quantum computing is COMPUTING, so you must understand what hardware or qubit modality you want to pursue and their immediate bottlenecks before dedicating 4 years to it. For example, if you like quantum computing, a large part is improving fidelities of gate operations, so most of your time will be reducing error one order of magnitude at a time. Quantum sensing leverages quantum physics to measure super small fields (electric fields, magnetic fields) so most of your time would be spent reducing order of magnitudes in field sensing etc. choose your obsession wisely :)
Hope that gave a small insight into what I’d like to have known before beginning my PhD, I’ll be providing some more advice as well in future, so follow along if you’d like to stay tuned :)
#physics #quantum #science #womeninstem #fyp
1. Quantum computing is such a huge field, that you either get on board being an engineer, plumber, software programmer, woodworker and theoretician all in one, or you dedicate yourself ONLY to perfecting the purity of sine wave generator outputs 😂know . I would have made sure to really understand this before working in a particular group.
2. You can do quantum PhDs as part of industry (and hosted by universities) where you get more money (very useful) or you get paid minimum wage by universities. If you know you are going to go into industry after graduation this can come in very useful to know sooner rather than later.
3. Quantum technology = computing, sensing, communication, whereas quantum computing is COMPUTING, so you must understand what hardware or qubit modality you want to pursue and their immediate bottlenecks before dedicating 4 years to it. For example, if you like quantum computing, a large part is improving fidelities of gate operations, so most of your time will be reducing error one order of magnitude at a time. Quantum sensing leverages quantum physics to measure super small fields (electric fields, magnetic fields) so most of your time would be spent reducing order of magnitudes in field sensing etc. choose your obsession wisely :)
Hope that gave a small insight into what I’d like to have known before beginning my PhD, I’ll be providing some more advice as well in future, so follow along if you’d like to stay tuned :)
#physics #quantum #science #womeninstem #fyp
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