> I started my PhD in Quantum Computing. Even though I basically didn’t have any previous knowledge about it
How does this happen?
How does this happen?
Schools offer this kind of acceptance path for students who aren’t very strongly tied to a particular idea. The author, despite having no experience or knowledge in QC was very tied to the idea, which how would the faculty know that before admitting them? Usually when you are so devoted to a research idea you’ve worked on it to some degree before deciding to devote 10% of your life toward pursuing it. I’ve never seen a student quit in 6 months because they couldn’t make progress on an idea they had only just started to consider.
This is fairly normal: you get some funding to do a project and you have to hire someone with experience, though in this case the PIs were experts in the domain of application. That's reasonably common for cross-discipline projects, but in this case you really have to trust that your hires know what they're doing and you need to be able to assess their work without deep knowledge of the techniques used.
PhDs can be absurdly specific and many are complex enough that you can't really study them until grad school. Many universities don't teach quantum computing, but as a physicist it's probably assumed you have enough of a background to understand the material.
Maybe a research group wants to investigate a connection to another discipline.
Maybe the research group comes across a talented student and sees the potential for a research grant (how this works depends on the country).
Maybe the student has the means to self-fund and so the university happily collects a pay-cheque.
I fell into the first category - I did my PhD in a quantum information group despite my background being in mathematical logic. I was accepted because I knew a lot about different formal logic systems, and they wanted to study connections between those and the formalism they were using for quantum information.
Would be cool if colleges were required to estimate number of job openings relevant to each PHD program vs current cohort sizes. Or some central body could
So everyone is falling over each other to train up some new nerds. They are opening huge pots of money any professor who can make a plausible case for quantum computing with X. Here X is generally some form of pure research that the professor made a contribution to in the past. You'll inevitably have some growing pains when you try to repurpose hundreds of physicists like this.
It seems sort of silly, but when a government decides it wants get a jump on a new industry, before it's commercially viable, I don't see a better option.