The last day of SQuInT and Qubits

Today was the last day of SQuInT

• It was nothing short of amazing! There are so many things I can talk about, including how great the community was, how much fun I had, and how humbled I felt being here; it was just really wonderful.
• For our final keynote, we had Ben speak, who told us about the Prehistory of the Qubit.
• His talk was so passionate, so fun, and so inspiring, that at the end, he got a standing ovation. It was just incredible, and even better, his talk was on quantum information theory and contained cryptography and he even mentioned Leibniz (who I did an art installation on in undergrad!) and Monads! (haha!)
• It was electrifying. Also, his number plate totally reads Qubits, which is hilarious. I love that he spoke about asking the right questions! I’ve been feeling so much that there is less and less room for this in so many spaces, like in Academia, where people would prefer that you churn out a bunch of papers using tweets or whatever and get loads of citations, or in industry, where the goal is to do things that relate directly to products that the company could patent. It was so refreshing to hear that message again of asking the right questions, and I wished that more of the people who have “made it” in research and speak openly today about their path would emphasize this, rather than the whole “publish or perish” message.
• What’s even more amazing is that his talk related directly to a project I’m working on, too, which just made me SO happy!
• It made me feel so much more worthy to exist in academia, taking my time and thinking deeply about things that are interesting to me, rather than chasing the things everyone says I should be, because there is money and clout in those areas. My heart is with this community.
• Everything about this community shares my values, and people were just so friendly, and I just had a wonderful time!

Afterwards

• I hung out with a friend and we caught dinner. I met him only last week, during a recruitment event, if you can believe it, via Zoom! He’s from Ghana, but lives out here, and we had dinner at this restaurant that is pretty popular with the students in the area, called Frontier. Then we drove around on Central Avenue and saw some Halloween costumes, and it was just a great day.

Here are some photos from the talk

• Okay, so this is actually a vehicle we saw that had caution tape and fake blood and clowns in the backseat, which was hilarious.

• We went to Frontier and got food before heading back. I got to see the campus and got a tour of Central Avenue.

• Ben beginning his talk, “A Brief Prehistory fo Qubits”.

Coming back

• Once I get back, I definitely am getting back to working on my projects, get caught up on my abelian varieties work, and do a 1:1 with my Lean professor, since he decided we could meet and continue get coaching on that.
• I have a notebook filled with ideas, and many happy memories with this group.
• It’s a pity I can’t take any tacos back with me, though!

And that’s it