As part of Qubit by Qubit’s Early Quantum Career Immersion program, I was placed as a summer 2023 intern with Unitary Fund. This program was created to give students who are underrepresented in quantum computing opportunities to advance their careers, as well as to amplify their voices and support them. The first three weeks of this program were rigorous training in concepts in quantum computing and mechanics, and the next seven were a full-time internship with UF.

About me

I’m a third-year student at UT Austin studying computational biology and mathematics. I’m also pursuing a minor in computer science. I’m interested in biophysics and quantum chemistry, and I enjoy working out and reading in my free time. At UT, I’ve worked on research projects involving ecological data mining and QML for linear algebra.

My internship

The internship started on June 26th, 2023, after the training period with QxQ. The first big task I was assigned by my primary supervisors, Dan Strano and Vincent Russo, was to get the development environment set up locally on my computer. This required me to understand a lot of the basics of software development that I had never learned in my classes. For example, I started using virtual environments and managing packages. Around the same time, I was assigned to add research papers to Metriq. This helped me learn a lot of basic concepts in quantum computing, since I had to parse through the papers to determine their findings.

Within the first two weeks of the internship, I also had lots of great one-on-one chats with UF team members, including Misty, Nate, and Will. Everyone was so nice and welcoming to the community, and I’m really glad I got to get to know the people I was working with on a closer level. They gave me lots of great advice I’ve been using regularly in this internship and my other work.

On the week of July 6th, I was also assigned to convert content on the old site, which was in pure HTML, to markdown for the new website. While this work wasn’t as software intensive, I learned a lot about how to use GitHub. This includes figuring out how to use pull requests, branches, and Git on the command line. I believe this will be a valuable skill as I continue to work in tech.

After I made some headway on this assignment, Dan suggested to me that I do a Quantum Wednesday talk so that I could get more involved with the community. I was interested in Google Quantum AI’s paper, Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit. I spent about two weeks preparing for this talk by reading and rereading the paper many times, watching videos about it, and having my materials reviewed by Dan and Nathan. The talk itself was on July 26th, and although it was a huge challenge to present for about 30 minutes straight, I think it went well! This was the highlight of my internship since it pushed me so far out of my comfort zone.

After the talk, I worked on two major projects: continuing content conversion for the new website, and working on enhancing the Metriq client. The first task I took on was updating naming conventions across the client’s functions and making sure that these were consistent across Metriq. Some other open issues I worked on include creating a new function to get the number of paper submissions per platform and updating the README to showcase more of Metriq’s capabilities. I worked on these and this blog post until my last formal day with Unitary Fund, August 11th, 2023.

Closing notes

I’m extremely grateful to Unitary Fund and Qubit by Qubit for this amazing experience. I learned so much about software engineering and quantum computing. This is my first formal internship, so I’m glad it went smoothly. Shoutout to Dan, Vincent, and Nathan for being amazing mentors for the last seven weeks, and shoutout to the Unitary Fund community as a whole for being a warm, welcoming community. I plan to continue contributing to open-source projects in the future!

Stay up to date on my work by connecting with me on LinkedIn.