@Ari Noori Outside of Google, this is the first time I’ve seen a higher degree not listed in the preferred qualifications for a QE role. Do you think Master’s are excluded for this as well?

That's really interesting. And it makes a lot of sense that IBM would run this way. Thanks for sharing.

@Jonah Samson coming from a materials background, I would go with the more physics-based route. Electromagnetic coursework (microwaves, antennas, waveguides etc.) doesn't open more doors than digital coursework necessarily (depending on your career goals,) but I think it would lend itself to expanding your perspective relatively wider—an option that is available to you early in your academic career. If I understand you correctly from your intro post, you like to be thorough. Electromagnetics lay the foundation for not just quantum chip design but also its satellite disciplines; the entire quantum computer runs on charge and light, as it stands. Just from my experience, much of my work in quantum chip design involved grasping the classical, not quantum, electrodynamics. The bottleneck for my workflow was validating designs in Ansys HFSS. Such programs will give what they promise—an answer. Whether it's right or not is up to interpretation by the user. Higher levels of abstraction like VLSI and amplifier design can pipeline you to specific skills, those which Ari highlighted can be valuable from an employer's perspective. I think as long as the time you spend at school involves labs, simulations, projects... something tangible you can walk away with, then it's up to your interests. If you choose to reside more in the physics realm, I think there's more room for awe and imagination, an indispensable resource for early stage technologies. Just to give you one example from my grad school advisors: https://www.electrooptics.com/article/dual-sided-chip-combines-photonicelectronic-functions-simultaneously Their wheelhouse is materials and device engineering. Their day-to-day is dreaming up devices, atom by atom, and then going into the cleanroom to make them. You can see what's possible when you're this low-level. I do agree with Ari that you should cast a wide net to find out what it is that you want. To my point, I've attached syllabi for recent photonics and microwave courses that I never took but know the professors. I think you'll find their backgrounds interesting: the photonics professor is researching the trapped ion platform, and the microwave professor is researching quantum sensing. You can take a look at how they teach these courses to get a better idea of concepts that are important nowadays in our domain.

That’s how I started too. The wide neck is like a weed out freshman class. If you can handle that then electric is much smoother. Practice intervals on the fretboard and you’ll open so many doors, really. All the chords and scales follow very naturally if you go that way, in my experience teaching to a few people

@Devesh Vedantha do you play keys? I smell a potential combo forming here

Check out Boulder Opal https://docs.q-ctrl.com/boulder-opal. I used it for developing some controls on transmons. It's mostly Python, and integrates readily with industry-standard hardware. You can also simulate hardware.