Prize-winning advice on a career in engineering research
Will Gilbert is an engineer at quantum computing company Diraq, where he develops circuit technology.
Will Gilbert is an engineer at quantum computing company Diraq, where he develops circuit technology.
Will Gilbert is an engineer at quantum computing company Diraq, where he develops circuit technology. He is a UNSW alumnus, graduating with an Electrical Engineering degree in 2018 and completing his PhD in 2022.
Will is the recipient of this year’s Malcom Chaikin Prize for Research Excellence in Engineering. The award goes to the faculty’s best PhD thesis. Will’s dissertation is about finding technologies that will allow people to build quantum computers at scale.
I think I was always pretty interested in science since I was quite young, but I took a few different pathways. You know, the kind of windy avenues of finding a career that I was interested in. I even went off and studied music and did that professionally for some time. And then I had a job where I was involved with electronics and that was quite interesting and fulfilling. I thought, “I want to be more involved in it professionally,” so I thought I’d go study engineering and get involved in building electronics and how it works.
We've got a great team [at Diraq] and it's really enjoyable working with them every day. Having people that you enjoy hanging out with and working with and trying to solve problems with is important. The other thing is, I think, the challenges with the technical development. So, having things where I really need to sit down and think about how to solve the problem, and maybe I have to go for a walk or a run the next morning and see if the solution comes to me. Or, talking to people either within the team or people that we collaborate with.
The award was a pleasant surprise. One of those moments where you kind of reflect and think, oh, yeah, it's not all just hard work. It's easy to miss all that stuff. You kind of get caught up in the stress and the activity. But it’s good to look back on a few years of work and you think, “no, we did build some good stuff.” I find it very fulfilling to see a project through and have it completed.
We have a lot of technologies, at least in quantum computing, where they've been only ‘research technologies’. And we're in a phase now where we have to be looking way into the future. What does the product look like and how do we build it? Not just how do we build the next little thing in our road map, but how do we build that thing that's five years or 10 years away? And can we do it? What are the challenges there that we need to start working on now?
The first thing is: Don't stress. Whatever decision you make now is not locked in, you can follow your interests.
Keep thinking about what path you want to take. But think about what kind of things you want to work on for a long time. And in engineering, science or research, we're interested in building things, and that can be all sorts of different things.
You can look at completely ‘blue-sky’ research. Finding completely new technologies. Or you can be interested in developing existing technologies and developing products and creating things that people actually use and have in their hands.
You want to think about, “what are the things that actually interest you?”
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