QGSS 2020- Beginner's golden ticket to the Quantum world.

I am a Physics teacher and an early-stage researcher in the Quantum Computing field. The curiosity to learn more about it led to a fascinating experience this summer. I have spent the entire summer developing quantum computing technical skills and knowledge.

I aspire to apply for a Ph.D. in the quantum computing-related domain.

To enhance my knowledge and get hands-on experience, I decided to join a summer school in the quantum computing-related domain.

After a lot of research on the internet, I applied for five interesting summer internship programs. These included

SMBQ 2020, Quantum summer school organized by UBC, IBM’s QGSS 2020, and two more.

I was thrilled to get a positive response from SMBQ 2020 and Qiskit’s global summer school. According to the organizers of Qiskit summer school, they had anticipated online registrations of about two hundred students. However, they were amazed to find about five thousand applications when they opened the portal for registration. Accommodating such a huge number of quantum computing enthusiasts in QGSS 2020 was a big challenge for the organizers.

Rather than putting restrictions on the number of participants, they decided to open it for everyone who wished to attend, learn, and gain experience from the summer school.

For someone like me, whose application was rejected from a couple of summer schools, it was a golden opportunity to make the most of it.

The QGSS summer school lasted for ten days. The duration was three hours per day, and it covered lab exercises, basics of quantum computing, important topics like Shor’s algorithm, implementing a quantum algorithm’s on a real device from the industry and academia researchers.

The first two thousand participants who had completed the registration process were assigned lab exercises.

The two-weeks event kicked-off on the 20th of July 2020 with more than 2500 attendees from across 128 countries across the globe. The first lecture was delivered by Ms.Elisa Bäumer from Institute of theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich who is currently doing her Ph.D. in Quantum Information Science.

The links for the online lectures were sent to all the participants 10 minutes before the lectures along with the login credentials. The lectures were delivered on Crowdcast.

The efficient Qiskit team created an official discord channel for all the participants for networking and solving technical issues related to viewing online lectures and lab exercises.

I enjoyed the teaching-learning process of this summer school and the hands-on experiences I got doing lab exercises. The event ended on the 28th of July with a discussion session on careers in quantum computing. A panel of six scientists interacted and shared their experiences with everyone.

It was my first summer school and I really enjoyed every session a lot. I would recommend all my connections to attend the QGSS, since it does not have boundaries like a limited number of participants, fees, age, and desired qualifications.

I believe that many universities and research departments will also try to follow and implement the same structure as IBM did. I look forward to attending more summer schools this summer and would like to extend my best wishes to all quantum computing enthusiasts for their future endeavors.