Focus: Alice, from a PhD in Quantum Physics to Software Engineer
Hi, I’m Alice and I joined Joko as a Software Engineer after graduating from a PhD in Computational Quantum Physics. What led me to these choices? How did I settle in a new job that seems in appearance so far away from my previous experience?
Let me take you through my professional journey as I’ll tell you about solar eclipses, levitating magnets, crazy equations and the great engineering team we’re building at Joko.
🌘 How a Solar Eclipse led me to Ecole Polytechnique
August 11, 1999. I was almost six years old at the time of the last solar eclipse in mainland France, and I can still vividly remember the excitement I felt as I witnessed the sun hide behind the moon for a few minutes. I was already a curious child, but from this day on I craved knowledge for the world around us. My parents were always supportive of my home-made experiments (except when they involved the cat) and my father, a mechanical engineer in a big car company, would bring me to science museums and teach me how things worked — from engines to the universe.
One day, I was sitting in the back of the car when I asked my dad what a PhD was. His answer was: “It’s a higher education degree for which you have to make a new contribution to science.” My child mind was instantly set: that was exactly what I wanted to do.
This interest naturally led me to scientific studies: at 16, I joined classes préparatoires, a competitive program for French top higher education schools, Grandes écoles. After studying intensively and putting my social life aside for two years, I got accepted at Ecole Polytechnique. The teaching there is aimed at being very broad, so I studied mathematics, physics, computer science, as well as biology, economics and geopolitics. During my last year, I went back to my first love and specialized in physics, finally getting in touch with modern theories such as particle physics or general relativity. Willing to sharpen my knowledge further and to have an experience abroad, I then enrolled in the Master of Science at ETH Zürich, in Switzerland, where I studied theoretical condensed matter physics (a fancy name to talk about solid states of matter, in contrast to liquids or gases).
And after all these years of studying, it was finally time for me to embark on my own research journey!
🛸 Electrons and Levitation
In September 2017, I joined the condensed matter physics group of Antoine Georges in Collège de France, a centuries-old research center located in the very heart of the Parisian quartier latin, to work on “Novel algorithms for strongly correlated systems in and out of equilibrium”.
… 🤯
Right, let’s start from the beginning. At the microscopic level, all matter is made of atoms and, if you remember your high school physics classes, atoms themselves are made of a nucleus and of electrons that ‘gravitate’ around it. In solids (the focus of condensed matter physics) atoms arrange themselves in regular patterns called lattices, that highly influence the material’s properties. For instance, in copper wires, atoms are organized in such a way that electrons can freely hop from one to another: this is the definition of electric current (and it allows you to charge the phone or computer you’re reading this on!). On the contrary, electrons in the plastic around the wire can’t move and no current is flowing: you can safely plug or unplug your charger.
In most materials, such as copper, electrons are mostly independent and very rarely ‘see’ their neighbours. But in other materials, they strongly interact with each others, leading to exotic phenomena such as high-temperature superconductivity: compounds that perfectly conduct electricity without any loss, and that also happen to levitate above magnets! “Strongly correlated materials”, as we name them, are very difficult to study because it is impossible to model so many interconnected pieces. This is called the many-body problem and is still one of the big mysteries of science today, across many research areas: for example, we have a good understanding of what a neuron is — the building block of our brain — but how dozens of billions of them allow us to feel, think and love is puzzling scientists.
What makes this problem so difficult? First, it is impossible to solve analytically (that is with pen and paper, as you’d solve math exercises in school for instance), so you need numerical simulations to gain insights. But this doesn’t get much easier: if you consider the full quantum problem without simplification, we’re able to model today with the largest supercomputers on Earth… 16 atoms! That’s pretty far from the billions of billions of atoms that make up materials.
So, now that you got a glimpse of modern physics, what did I actually do on a daily basis?
🧪 My PhD journey between Paris and New York
As I began my PhD, my main advisor took the lead of a brand new research lab in downtown Manhattan, the Flatiron Institute. Despite being very busy, it was particularly important for him to closely follow my progress (for instance I was his only PhD student, which is quite uncommon in research) so we quickly decided that I’d often visit, and even spend my second year full time in New York.
Working in Collège de France, in the center of Paris, was already amazing but my time in the US was truly exceptional. I was joining a private research institute funded by an ex-mathematician who made billions in finance: the institute itself was located on 5th Avenue, and I was living in SoHo, one of the trendiest New York neighbourhoods. The place was brand new, we had our own computing resources onsite (CPUs and GPUs), and we could even enjoy some crazy benefits like on-tap kombucha, a fermented-lightly-effervescent-very-hipster tea. On the professional side, the Flatiron Institute gathered scientists and software engineers to tackle the hardest numerical problems in different fields (astrophysics, quantum physics, biology and applied mathematics). It quickly became the place to be if you were working on complex problems and huge numerical simulations: you were running into top researchers and even Nobel prizes, with whom you could casually chat in corridors, writing cool equations on blackboards, Big Bang Theory style!
I was developing open-source C++ code and, as my PhD went on, I got more and more interested in the algorithmic questions compared to the physics of a given material — much to the discontent of my advisor who really wanted me to work on the resistivity of Ca2RuO4… I also grew tired of often being the only woman in the room, and I wanted to start a new adventure, joining a more diverse environment in which I could evolve quickly.
So after graduating in July 2020, I said goodbye to the research world, took well-deserved vacations and started to look for a software engineering position.
👩🏻💻 From Quantum Physicist to Software Engineer
I’m not the kind of person who enjoys slacking off for too long, so I quickly started to work hard to prepare the technical interviews, studying extensively books such as Algorithms or Cracking the Coding interview (by the way I highly recommend them if you want to sharpen your technical skills!). Nevertheless web development, database management or JavaScript were unknown to me so the impostor syndrome quickly kicked in. At first, I was looking to join big US-based tech companies as I felt they would more easily see the added value of a PhD to software engineering positions. In my mind I lacked the specific skills to join a small, fast-growing environment such as a startup.
But it was fall 2020, Covid was all over the place, and Google or Palantir had frozen all their recruitments for months. Luckily this forced me to take screening calls out of my comfort zone, including one with Joko’s CTO Alexandre. I entered the recruitment process and, after each step, I was excited to have met incredibly interesting people, and to have learned new things. A few weeks later, I was joining the team to start a new chapter of my life.
At Joko, we value people eager to learn and able to solve complex problems over mastering specific languages or frameworks. In this regard, we have a very strong onboarding process on Notion where we have gathered tutorials and training sessions on tools we use so that newcomers can easily ramp up on the technical stack. This, alongside the great mentorship of Alexandre, led me to tackle my first complex feature involving intricate backend-frontend interactions only two weeks after starting as a software engineer — remember, when I started I didn’t know JavaScript or any of the different AWS services!
The impostor syndrome still kicked in from time to time during my first months, but I quickly got over it thanks to our great feedback process as well as my weekly and monthly meetings with my manager.
Now, a year later, this switch from my PhD to the Engineering team at Joko appears most natural and obvious. I learned over the months that many of the hard and soft skills I developed during my research years directly applied to my current daily job, from clean code to project management all the way to pedagogical presentations. I also professionally grew faster than I would have in academia, being strongly involved in the recruitment process and myself mentoring other team members. I understood that what I really like is to learn new things, solve complex problems and interact with people.
Do you recognize yourself, even though you don’t master mobile or web development? We’re hiring, so don’t hesitate to get in touch and discuss with us, we’re always looking for great talents to join the team!
