Comment by starlord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by starlord | Hacker News Reader

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I am glad it is working out great for you. In fact this scenario is more or less what I have in mind when I think about going back to college for higher studies. Never could let go of the first love of life (yeah it wasn't a girl, it was Physics :| )

I graduated a little earlier when MIT OCW was the only online resource of good quality, and did try to learn enough about a lot of things. Suffered slightly lower grades, but came as a well equipped generalist to pursue almost anything... But real world mechanics have left much to be desired frankly from the nice picture painted all through school and college of how life would be. And while this option is really enticing for me, the other comment on how writing generic grant proposals can be an equally soul-sucking exercise does bring in an element of doubt...

But thanks for sharing this. If you don't mind sharing, what university are you at or you would recommend for Physics/quantum-computing-related programs?

I study at Universität Leipzig, in their international physics studies program. It's a fairly rigorous program and you are expected to learn a lot on your own outside of class, which is actually how I prefer it. I can definitely recommend it if you are the kind of person who can learn yourself. I see the classes as more of a guide of what to study and you expand on that yourself outside of class.

I'm getting another bachelors as I didn't feel that my finance degree taught me enough to jump into a physics masters (and I was right, there's a lot to be learned in undergrad math and physics). In undergrad you won't necessarily get into specialized stuff like quantum computing, but you will take the basic experimental and theoretical QM courses that can help prepare for something like that in a masters program. So I'm not sure I can recommend anything on that yet.

MIT has a few excellent courses on quantum physics. They have two versions of their 8.04 taught by two different professors and I highly recommend both. Then they have their advanced quantum physics 8.05 out there as well, which I also highly recommend. If you have the discipline to do the problem sets then you will learn quite a bit.

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