It's been a week [2] since returning to the bay, and I'm finally starting to catch my breath again. Especially towards the end of my internship, it felt like I was on an accelerating treadmill, moving faster and faster, racing towards the end. The sudden stop after my final presentation felt a bit disorienting, as if I was having vertigo while standing still, and then I was plunged right back into my old haunts. I think I made a rather good decision to allow myself to slowly aclimatize back to the bay, intentionally staying away from my lab (and even accidentally creating a mini puzzle hunt to find Chunny, with the promise of some swag if found) in order to collect my thoughts. But perhaps my thoughts were more scattered than I originally anticipated, and maybe there were more plans to be made than I had desired, and thus, I ended up spending the entire week planning for the year to come, rather than looking back on the summer that had passed.
But huzzah! It is now the weekend once more, and I am (trying to) apply one of the lessons learned from the summer - to take time to sit and be still. There always will be more to be done, and it does pay dividends to permit myself to relax. One of my coworkers mentioned, at my going away dinner, that he always gets his best thinking done while he's sleeping. I thought it was a joke initially (and it probably was meant as one), but it does have a kernel of truth in it. Rest, relaxation, and community are all so incredibly helpful to shift focus from the immediate urgencies towards the bigger picture. [4]
Overall, I would say that this past summer is one of the top three summers in my (short?) 28 years of life. [5] It wasn't all smooth sailing - in fact, there was a period of literal choppy waters whilst on a boat in the open ocean - but perhaps that contributed to this feeling of exhiliaration. It felt like I started off the summer by looking at rolling hills and high mountains, and by the end, I was surprised to find myself on one of those summits. Sure, I didn't end up at the tallest peak in the range, but that was never my expectation to do so. Just to feel the strength of my own body and to feel the connection into the Earth was enough to fulfill me.
Here is my summer in snapshots, week by week. Originally, this was intended to be short and snappy, but I really should know myself better than that by now. As the great Mark Twain never said, "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
Week 1, June 9: Onboarding, and immediately feeling overwhelmed by the firehose of information. I was definitely pretty exhausted from the last few weeks of racing against the clock at Stanford, and it was a really (AC) stark shift. Being thrown into the entire repository of Google Quantum code was really, really disorienting! It was like seeing the measurements that I was familiar with (qubit calibration) through a slightly distorted lens (Google/Santa Barbara terminology), with differences in ideology for all the processes. (It didn't help that most of my intuition comes from fluxonium, where a lot of times, you just shrug and say "do the numerics" rather than rely on analytical solutions.) But once I started building out a glossary/dictionary/thesarus to map this new vocabulary to familiar models, life started to make a wee bit more sense.
Week 2, June 16: Running some experiments for real, and starting to make sense of my project, but still feeling not quite settled. I do start some good habits here, inlcuding the way that I organize my notes in Slides and Docs, and create meaningful Collab notebooks, even if most of the code present in them are stolen/borrowed from other coworkers. But just as I get into a rhtyhm - surprise! Mom chokes on a fishbone collar, and I rush up to Seattle. I actually manage to get to the ER before she gets fully discharged, and I'm so incredibly thankful to Alaska for operating the twice-daily direct flight from SBA to SEA. In addition, Juneteenth and WFH gives me breathing space to be with my mom, picking cherries from our tree and seeing Seattle, and the remote Cloudtops allows me to continue productively with my project. Despite this chaos, I manage to get my first nice result by the end of the week, where I finally feel like I am doing something independently, rather than merely following in someone else's footsteps.
Week 3, June 23: Running and running experiments, especially on population dynamics. Getting into my groove with research, and feel like I finally understand the company culture well enough to have friendly conversations with coworkers, without always feeling a twinge of panic in not knowing enough. I also feel like I have a fairly well defined project, even though the scope seems incredibly large. I have a very productive meeting with Alec, Alexis, and Matt, where I present them a proposed outline of research, and get some really valuable feedback. I'm getting increasingly amazed by how efficiently research gets done - tasks that used to take me days, if not weeks, would simply get done in a matter of hours here. I start to have my own independent research conversations with coworkers, as I feel like I know enough about the bigger picture to understand how my own project fits in. But, I'm still having daily existential crises, usually around 2ish, where I need to go for a walk because I feel overwhelmed by information. It was good to step away to watch (and feel) a rocket launch over the weekend.
Week 4 June 30: Surprise! Car breaks down on the highway, right before Independence Day. Spend most of the holiday desperately car shopping, doing my research on different models, trying to make sense of the chaos. Take my first train ride down to Ventura for car shopping, and wander the city on Independence Day by accident. Arrive back in Santa Barbara in the midst of the firework festivities, and despite my feet feeling like they are about to fall off, I still manage to walk the length of the pier, of the beach, of the trek home. It's a short week of research, and not much gets done over the weekend, but it does feel like a major life milestone - having a car break down, but still handling it with a modicum grace.
Week 5, July 7: I take the bus to work every day - thank goodness for BCycle, the city ebike sharing program - and go car shopping in the evenings, making friends with a very enthusiastic (and snazzily dressed) Honda salesperson. Even though I thought I would be exhausted by this juggling act, I end up more energized and enthusiastic about my research as ever before. I have my first interesting results, even as I struggle to understand some of the other tools that I have built. The bus keeps me on a tight schedule, and given the free time in the evenings, I start wandering the city, making my way over to the Red Piano a few times. I still manage to do more good research at work than I would have ever expected for this level of disruption.
Week 6, July 14: Less than 2 weeks from when I say goodbye to Scooby, I say hello to Kirby, my new 2025 Subaru Crosstrek. I work furiously on my poster - it's such a struggle to give a presentation when you don't understand your audience, and you feel like you haven't had enough time to really understand everything. I drive down to LA with Stefan, a fellow intern, and we work from the Google Playa Vista (home of the former Spruce Goose, but it's no longer there, so boooo) on Friday. I then spend the weekend travelling - it's kinda insane to spend ~2x more time travelling to a place over actually visiting friends. (The accounting of this: 3 hour drive from SB to LA, 6.5 hr flight from LAX to BWI, 2 hrs fight at the rental car center, 4 hr drive from BWI to State College. Total of 15.5 hours, one way, times two. Vs ~12 hours of being with friends, including sleep). Yet, State College, PA was absolutely worth it to see Lauren & Ahmed's nuptials, and to catch up with my UChicago cohort. I miss them dearly.
Week 7, July 21: Go and attend the PhD intern summit in Mountain View, while getting progressively sicker in the days leading up to it. I'm kinda struggling just to get through the days, but there's still much to be understood. I think I was making a lot of incremental progress this week, where I was polishing some of the tools that I was using because I was getting confused by what they were reporting back to me. However, it probably wasn't the most efficient usage of time, and I felt like I was going in spirals. In retrospect, part of the fogginess of the research questions I was asking were likely just due to feeling physically unwell, and I test positive for COVID the day after the conference. Barely limp back down, from Menlo Park back to Santa Barbara, and crash for the full weekend.
Week 8, July 28: Recover from Covid in a very short time (boosters are good!), and get some of my best work done. Felix's presentation was this week, and we have a stunningly good discussion in the conference room afterwards. By chance, I had happened to be thinking of a rather related topic that morning, and had done some simple tests/numerics, which pointed to a rather interesting physical phenomenon. Getting immediate validation from two other researchers during the post-meeting discussion was the spark I needed to push deeper into it. Even though I was incredibly sleep deprived that day (due to a tsunami warning, among other things), I plant the seeds of one of the first original pieces of research that I complete at Google. Mom comes and visits for the weekend, and we do house shopping, driving around town, and just catching up.
Week 9, August 4: With the sudden breakthrough from the past week, Alec encourages me to give a midterm presentation, or more accurately, a "second trimester" presentation, at the standing Gates and Noise meeting. It goes better than I could have possibly imagined, where I feel like I genuinely understand a concept deeply, and also make an interesting/engaging presentation to showcase the knowledge. Sadly, I once again learn that I am seemingly incapable of beginning a presentation less than 24 hours before when the presentation actually is scheduled to be given. This is the second (2nd) time I have learned this lesson this calendar year. It will not be the last. But on the bright side, I feel like I have "earned my stripes" with this presentation. I manage to smoothly handle questions during the talk, and also show progress towards a significant research question about the architecture. I overall feel sufficiently confident about how research is done at Google Quantum. It took 8.5 weeks to get to this point, but I finally feel like I'm really a colleague here, not just a kid who is messing around.
Week 10, August 11: More social activities than I have had in a while! Alec and Alexis and Matt were all away at the QEC conference, so I started collaborating more closely directly with WIll and Nick, riding the momentum of the presentation. (Although, to be truthful, there was also a fair bit of adrenaline crash after the presentation, so the second half of Week 9 was a bit slow). But since the previous weekend was when a friend visited me, and the student researchers/interns went to Santa Rosa Island, and it was the week where a lot of the "going away" activities were happening, it ended up being way more social than I expected - my personal gcal shows an average of at least one social activity per day, and that's even after cancelling the Monday Axe throwing. I finally got to know some of the student researchers well, and say tearful goodbyes to my fellow interns. Visit LA for the second time over the weekend, see friends, learn more about myself, think harder about what I want.
Week 11, August 18: Research goes surprisingly well here, where one of the tools I co-developed suddenly starts making sense. It took at least five weeks of effort to make it properly useful! I don't think I would have developed the nuanced insights of the underlying physics without having struggled in Week 5 to comprehend the fundamentals of a different tool that I made. [6] (Nor would I have been able to understand it without the help of a very talented theorist/numerical modeler, Nick! He's so patient and kind to support me through it, and I owed a lot to him this week.) But through good conversations with the people around me, I finally get something that I would genuinely consider novel and useful, validating the output of a tool that I co-developed against the real world.
Week 12, August 25: It's becoming increasingly obvious that my time at Google is coming to a close, but I still have too many ideas that I want to work on. I start prioritizing wrapping things up - writing down ideas of things that someone else should try, and trying to keep a laser-sharp focus to what I'm actually running. I do make the mistake of trying to collect too much statistical data here, whereas I really should have already started making final plots, but eh, a boy can dream, right? During this, I still try to keep myself open to other conversations, reminding myself that the scientific project that I'm working on is only one part of my overall goal of being at Google - talking and learning from others, learning the culture, and just gaining a better understanding of life is the more important half of the equation. I take the Pacific Surfliner down to San Diego and get to walk through that beautiful naval city while working remotely, just for a change of scenery. I start thinking about some big picture ideas, for both how my final presentation would look, but also, for how my upcoming (final???) year of grad school would look.
Week 13, September 1: The end is nigh! I sadly do work through Labor Day, and the three days before the talk in QEC Pathfinding are filled with just endless presentation prep. I almost have a bit of a meltdown the day before, because again, even though I had a solid five (5) days to prepare, the overall story of my presentation is still not coherent just 18 hours before when I'm due to give it. This is the third (3rd) time I have learned this lesson this calendar year. It will not be the last. However! Because of my advanced planning, the presentation actually goes really well. There are some small things that I do regret - because I was still working on some of the actual data collection, I was less sure of myself, and had put less effort into advertising my talk as I would have otherwise done so. Some parts of the story also feel a bit half-baked to me. If only I had just one more week! I could run the (relatively simple, because I spent sooooo much time building the tools) analysis on all the additional datasets that I had collected. Alas! I do think that I came up with some really creative ideas, and the process of assembling the talk did give a sense of closure to everything. I'm proud of what I've accomplished, and I am incredibly satisfied with the amount of new friends, ideas, and perspectives I've gained over the summer. I have one of the most fun dinners of the year at my going-away celebration, and just get to feel confident in myself, ready to be back on campus.
Despite the length of this ramble, this post is still missing the truly crucial points of the summer. Watching the sun fade behind the mountains while dipping fries into lobster bisque. Being dragged up and down State Street, first as a chore to get to the beach, then as an old friend enjoying the atmosphere. Belting out songs at the Red Piano, finding a soliloquy that I can actually sing. Connecting with friends, old and new, and sharing meals, walks, parks, conversations, and life together. Feeling at times hurt, broken, and exhausted, but finding time to rest, recover, and rejuvenate myself. Seeing the poetry of a million different pieces come together to form a beautiful picture. The late night walks, the smell of the food truck tacos, the quiet morning drives. Even Jake the Snake and the lemon trees were missing from these snapshots!
But just as Google Quantum prohibits taking photographs and notes of actual research, so too must I concede much of the summer only to the vagueries of my imperfect, human memory. There are some sharp moments crystallized in photos taken with friends, but most of it is a melting pot of different emotions, sensations, and thoughts - not only jumbled up together, but even fluidly flowing from one scene to another, waves crashing upon a sandy beach. For all that I once cared about having high fidelity documentation about my life, lest I forget it, I have finally come to be more accepting about the grace and beauty found only in decay and loss.
Some lessons that I will try to hold on to, as much as I can, before the sands of time (and the stress of grad school) wash this away too:
One of the bigger lessons that I learned over the summer was the ability to, once again, have confidence in myself. I have to be frank here - I was still struggling a fair bit in the first half of the year. Even though I had felt much recovered from the events of the past year, there was still much comparison and envy to be had, especially as I saw folks from my cohort (both undergrad and grad) begin to publish their final papers, travelling the world for postdoc job talks, and move on to bright positions in industry. I looked back at my own research - or more accurately, at my own understanding - and felt small. Was I really just an inferior scientist? Did I really just take longer to comprehend a topic that others grasped intuitively? Was I behaving more like a mindless ant, needing direction, rather than like the graceful cricket, composing music? For all that I had studied and wrote and sought to understand education and failure, I still was falling into that age-old trap of feeling like - perhaps not an imposter, at this point, but - a let down. Someone who had resources poured over me, like oil spilling out of a chalice, yet instead of allowing it to soak into my bones, it just ran off, falling helplessly into the mud around me.
But. [8] The experiences over the summer helped provide a fresh perspective. When I was surrounded by infrastructure, focused on a well-defined project, with talented people enthusiastically willing to help and discuss, and with the balance of being able to rest again, I can do great things. Just on a pure numerical perspective - typically, over the course of a year, I feel like I'm capable of giving one, maybe two group meeting presentations that are ~45 minutes long. Over the course of 13 weeks at Google, I gave two 45 minute project meeting presentations (that exceeded my usual standards!), with almost completely novel content in both presentations. And that's on top of the poster presentation that I delivered to a room full of other PhD Research Interns. And that's not even counting the amount of travel I did over the summer - two trips to LA, one to San Diego, one to Seattle, and one to Pennsylvania. Pound for pound [9] , I was getting more done in this corporate environment.
And it does make a lot of sense, right? Look at the things that I spend my time doing on campus - I'm a senior graduate student, and even as I make myself redundant by shedding my responsibilities, people often do ask me questions, simply because I have a lot of institutional knowledge/experience shoved into my skull. Any time an instrument acts up, our team of 2 grad students + 1 postdoc needs to fix it ourselves. We are already incredibly fortunate to have minimal funding constraints in our lab, but even spending the time to evaluate different off-the-shelf solutions, creating a plan, actually placing the orders, and then assembling & testing the instruments takes a very, very long time.
All of that work is good training, because it teaches you how to dive into the nitty gritty! Yet, our own energy is not boundless. Do enough of that prep work, and you don't have the mental energy to do more physics. Or, you start sinking into the old cycle of overpromising/underdelivering. Or, you simply just burn yourself out. Again.
The main takeaway that I found is that, indeed, perhaps my PhD is a little bit less shiny than others, because as much as rational scientists hate to admit it, there is so much of life governed by fate, chance, and luck. How would my life look if I didn't take a gap year, and started in 2019 rather than in 2020? What if Covid never happened? Or if Dave never moved across the country? Would we be in a completely different state, not just for my research, but for fluxonium, or for all superconducting qubits? I know, I know, it feels like my head is getting too big here again. But I do wonder how life would have been - if I would be happier.
Ack! I keep on getting distracted by the negative, when what I wanted to focus on was the positive. I now do feel like I have indeed picked up on the skills needed to be a good physicist, because when given the same opportunities and access, I feel strong and capable of doing good work, of making an impact. I felt like I was at least keeping up with all of the other PhD interns, as well as with the other new hires fresh out of the PhD. Sure, I might not have the same knowledge base, but I was able to pick things up swiftly, and was able to provide a few good ideas along the way. All that to say - I'm returning to campus feeling more confident and capable than before, and I'm ready to tackle new challenges. Gone are the days of austerity, of carefully metering out my energy in fear of stalling out! Here are the weeks of abundance, of growth, of exploring with wild abandon, of chasing after interesting ideas just because of their aesthetics, of meeting with old friends and meeting with new friends, of wandering down footpaths and alleyways, of quiet meals and dark mornings, of boisterous laughter and sparks of insight!
This seems like as good of a spot to end this post as any other, given the amount of meandering I've already done. I can only hope that these lessons will stay with me, and the memory of happy days will serve to brighten whatever storms may come ahead.
[1] Yes, this is a play off of the book, "My Year of Rest and Relaxation". (It's also a play on qubit leakage resets and coherence relaxations, so yay, multilayered puns!) Like the Hirshorn museum, I absolutely despised this book - it just made me feel so many kinds of discomfort while reading it. I couldn't stand the idea of someone throwing away their life in that manner, in this detached, disaffected manner. But, as a work of literature and art, it certainly left an emotional impression on me, which I guess is the point of postmodernism, right?
[2] And now, by the time that I write these words [3], another week has passed. It's shocking how much there is to always be doing, and how easily focus can drift. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, another 7 days have passed. I feel ever more grounded and starting to move to the rhythm of this old, familiar dance again. But with it comes old habits that I struggle against, to preserve the lessons that I have learned, so that I don't make the same mistake once again.
[3] Sorry, I'm now on week 3 post-Google. Life keeps on moving forward, and getting the energy & time to sit and reflect is so difficult! Even when your head knows that you can safely step away from things and the world will keep turning, it's so very difficult to do it in practice! I hope that it isn't an ego thing - and rather, that it is just the joy of being with my labmates that keeps me distracted. That being said, I have found some remedies for this - primarily by physically removing myself from the office space, so that I'm just a little bit less accessible to others. That allows for still urgent business to be taken care of (I'm still in the same building!) but for casual conversations to not be a hinderance on what I'm trying to focus on.
[4] Even so, I would caution against recommending it as a silver bullet to solve problems. I think it's advice that seems rather easy to give (oh, just take it easy! relax!) without actually considering what issues the advicee is genuinely facing. I think I've learned that, sometimes in life, there really are just insurmountable challenges, where no amount of additional well-meaning advice can really help with. Sometimes, all you can do is to be like Job's friends - sitting and weeping together.
[5] The other two summers, if you're interested, was the summer before my senior year of high school, where I was able to attend the summer science program, studying asteroids in Santa Barbara, and the summer before my senior year of college, where I was first truly learning microwave engineering in Prof. Devoret's lab, and living with my best friend. Perhaps you can consider this upcoming year to be my "senior" year of the PhD, as I am at least hoping that it would be my final year, and notice that there seems to be a pattern here. Or perhaps you can make a claim of how two out of the three summers in this list were physically collocated in the county of Santa Barbara, California. IDK, draw your own conclusions please.
[6] Apologies for the vague posting here. I'm trying to thread the needle here, describing the emotions of what had happened during the internship, without actually talking about what I had done. It's kinda killing me, because isn't the point of being a scientist to be precise and analytical with my language? It's really the politicians and lawyers job to be this vague!
[7] More seriously, I think she's referring to glase cherries, or candied cherries. She also thinks that I frequently set overambitious goals, which, given my track record of actually meeting the deadlines I set for myself, is very fair. However! My argument is that doing so keeps our project more focused. There are just too many rabbit holes that we can fall down into, and not enough rabbits at the end of the hole. But, when I'm under those time constraints, I also feel a bit more stressed.... so, touche.
[8] And there always has to be a but here, right? Otherwise, that previous paragraph is just the worst of my own negative self-talk realized into digital print.
[9] Yeah, yeah, I know this is a poor mixed metaphor. #SorryNotSorry. I'm just trying to say that it felt like I was accomplishing a year's worth of research in the span of a summer. I think some coworkers tried explaining it as a "honeymoon" phase, where being in a new environment allows for more creativity to emerge, but I'm personally a bit doubtful of it. I attribute a lot more to the infrastructure and access - I've been in plenty of new environments, and did not have quite the same kind of experience in the past.
