In the first term of my Ph.D., I audited the Quantum Information course taught by Dr. Ashwin Nayak, but did not take it for credit. This was partly because I was so distracted by my predicament, but also because I initially didn’t want the course to appear on my transcript, lest my parents should see it. I was originally just going to sit in on the lectures, but Dr. Nayak convinced me to audit the course, because I had been doing the assignments anyway. And so the course did, in fact, appear on my transcript after all.
During the next several terms, I took some courses to satisfy my degree requirements, while I searched for a way to do research into quantum computing without my parents’ interference. I started to become depressed, because, perhaps unsurprisingly, my parents had begun to attack me for studying bioinformatics. I suppose that the onset of my depression had always only been a matter of time… » [Expand post] [Permalink]