Neil Dickson

Ah, okay. I was probably basing my assumption on that the CS Master's students I talked to hadn't heard of Nature or Science, let alone PRL. It'd make sense that profs or PhD's would probably be more acquainted with them. Makes sense. A colleague has suggested a bunch of possibilities, but I don't know much about the actual research they do yet. I'll need to narrow them down and see if any are a good match. Yeah, I've considered this, but the main issue is that I'd probably fail the Physics GRE, and Physics departments seem to require it. Although I have some very specific quantum physics knowledge and can apply it, I haven't taken any courses in relativity, fluid dynamics, condensed matter, statistical thermodynamics, particle physics... or even quantum physics for that matter. Thanks! Oh, to clarify, the latter two applications were concurrent. For the first one, I only applied to one program, Computation for Design and Optimization (CDO), and I didn't have anything significant accepted/published at the time, only things under review. For the second set, I applied to CS and to CDO, and got rejected by both even with the papers accepted & published. I'd even presented preliminary work to the group there for a paper that I just got accepted at New Journal of Physics today (a few hours after the first post above). I won't apply there a third year unless a professor there directly tells me ahead of time that he'll supervise me and the departments are okay with it. Yep. I do a lot of numerical linear algebra, performance optimization, parallelization, and distribution, which are the bread and butter of scientific computing. If I did grad studies in scientific computing, I'd probably want to get to know what the specific prof is into first, since, for example, it seems like (for unknown reasons) many profs dismiss general performance optimization as pointless, when you can actually get huge speedups from it. Anyway, enough of me ranting, haha. Thanks for the suggestion!

Hi all! This is my first time posting here, but I'm hoping not my last time. Sorry for the huge amount of background info. I finished my undergrad in Computer Science in 2009, and since then have been working at a company (D-Wave Systems), researching practical quantum computers, simulating them, and developing new algorithms for them. As much as I think my research is as much CS as it is Physics, it appears to get lumped into Physics at universities, with just research related to complexity theory being under CS. Consequently, although I've got 9 papers published and more on the way, they're in journals not usually associated with CS, e.g. in Nature, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Computational Physics, etc. They're apparently big journals for physicists (especially Nature and PRL), but few people in CS have heard of them. I applied to do graduate studies at a few universities, and got accepted by University of Waterloo, only to find out that nobody there actually researches topics related to what I research, so I had to reject their offer. (For those curious, there seem to be two separate groups there, one studying complexity theory, and the other experimentally investigating e.g. 1 and 2 qubit systems, neither of which seems to be interested in practical quantum algorithms.) I've been rejected by MIT 3 times, which is too bad, because they do seem to have a solid group there researching quantum algorithms. The only catch is that they're in the Physics department, not CS, and I'm not qualified to apply for Physics, so my applications to the CS department to do research with that group don't work out so well. Should I even bother with graduate studies? If so, does anyone know of any reasonable options? I have contacts into several quantum computing research groups in North America, so I can get more detailed info, but they don't seem to hold any weight for getting in. Any other random thoughts?