3 Things I Learned During My First Internship #LifeatIBM
There are 3 things I learned from my first internship in my life.
At IBM Quantum, I worked as a Qiskit community intern in Japan from August to December 2022. Like the Challenge recap blog, I would like to write a recap article for my internship. While reviewing my works, I found 3 things I learned during my internship so I will introduce them in the followings; exploration of quantum computing, improvement of business communication skills, and awareness of my own growth through networking.
Exploration of quantum computing
I participated as a main developer of the IBM Quantum Challenge Fall 2022. I contributed to 3 out of 4 notebooks.
For adding contents in them, I also read a lot of Qiskit tutorial notebooks and papers related to error mitigation techniques and quantum optimization algorithms. Especially the lab 3 notebook, Quantum Optimization Challenge, is fully based on this paper. It is very well written to read so that I can look through the whole paper in one day! Just like the paper, the exercises are genuinely interesting. Highly recommended to check out them at here!
Among the 3 notebooks, I mainly focused on the lab 1 notebook, Introduction to Primitives on Qiskit Runtime. In this notebook, there are an introduction of Qiskit Runtime and Primitives. Following the notebook, you can comprehend how to use Primitives in Qiskit Runtime. In particular, it is easy to apply one of error mitigation techniques in your circuit through the Primitive in Qiskit Runtime. For more details, you may visit my another post which contains a summary of this notebook. (For Japanese, you can check this link: Qiskit RuntimeでPrimitiveを使ってみましょう！)
Being an undergraduate student, it is such a meaningful experience that I can fully focus on only one part, quantum computing. On every step preparing the challenge, I could write descriptions, create exercises and develop graders independently and these things encouraged me to study a wider range of quantum computing and understand the structure of Qiskit deeply. On the top of these, this growth is possible that the team allows me to do each task on my own so that a certain degree of freedom was guaranteed. It makes me that I was able to achieve more than expected while building up this challenge. Thank you so much!
Actually, there is one more thing to share related to this challenge. In the lab 1 notebook, there is a part using noisy simulators on Qiskit Runtime and I, Vishal and Ikko made a tutorial with this content. After my internship ended, I kept working on this tutorial and the pull request was finally merged now! The page is deployed on here: Noisy Simulators in Qiskit Runtime.
Improvement of business communication skills
During 5 months, I’ve done a job as a part of the Qiskit community team at Tokyo, As the team is global, I’ve used English in usual meetings and sometimes Japanese in local events.
The common environments for me to use English were usually informal but I received a chance to use English in business, joining a lot of meetings as an intern. I also presented an introduction of the lab 1 notebook for mentors. Not only speaking English, I engaged as a main author of the announcement blog and the recap blog of the challenge in IBM Research blog. For the better speaking and writing, I took English classes in my free time. This is one of the certificates from the English class: English for IT Professionals.
As I wrote above, mostly I used English but occasionally I used Japanese in local events. At the beginning of my internship, I participated as a staff of Kawasaki Quantum Summer Camp and presented my career path in Japanese. At that time, my formal Japanese was not that good but I did it! It was my first time to have a presentation only in Japanese and so worthwhile because I can realize something I need to improve and got interested in learning Japanese more in depth. Now I have a plan to take a Japanese test (JLPT) in 2023!
Awareness of my own growth through networking
During my internship, I can meet a lot of mentors and get advices for my own growth. Based on these advices, I could establish my future career path. In addition, I was in the amazing team so I can learn a lot of things from team members. While joining every meeting, I learned how to communicate well and realized why good communication is important.
I had weekly meetings with Kifumi and found out that receving feedbacks is very great for my growth. In every meeting, she gave me feedbacks and questions which helped to connect my floating ideas into reality. And for the overall process of the challenge, I can put my knowledge and skills into practice well thanks to Vishal. Above all, for Yuri and Sophy, thank you so much for allowing me to have such a meaningful experience. Even though I didn’t mention all the names, I truly appreciate every member in Qiskit community team and Tokyo research team. I couldn’t have done all of my works without the team!
What will be the next?
In regard to the Qiskit community, August is quite special month for me. Building Korean channel, I joined the community from August 2020. And in August 2021, I became a part of Qiskit Advocates and in August 2022, I’ve started working as the Qiskit community intern at IBM Quantum. Of course, a lot of things happened also in between…
I don’t know what will happen in the next August but I would be definitely on my own quantum journey with my point of view! And thanks to everyone who read this article until the end!
Appendix: Blogs I wrote during the internship
💬 Any comments and suggestions will be appreciated.
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