I'll second all of that. It's well worth actually learning C++ (and not C masquerading as C++) if you want to go into the broader scientific computing job mark

I'll second all of that. It's well worth actually learning C++ (and not C masquerading as C++) if you want to go into the broader scientific computing job market. I certainly wish I had focused more on "real" C++. I have maintained some very large C++ codebases, but I still don't really know C++, just "C with classes". Thankfully, C++ is not my day-job anymore. I'd also give a quiet nod to trying to get familiar with modern dev-ops tooling. E.g. docker, kubernetes, and interacting with at least some forms of cloud storage. Get used to the idea that a bucket is not actually a directory, it's a hierarchy of prefixes and learn how to use that. Think of a dockerfile as learning how to write a makefile. It's worth learning the basics of, and it's not hard for simple things. HPC work has traditionally been a lot of fairly custom clusters (Condor, anyone?) or problems that are best solved with a lot of RAM on one machine. However, things are moving towards commodity solutions (i.e. "the cloud") or at the very least, common software layers. You don't need to understand the the ins and outs of managing a kubernetes cluster, but it's helpful to have used kubectl to spin up and debug a pod or two at some point. However, I will say that there seem to be more Python-based jobs than C++ or Fortran jobs in the industry-based scientific computing world these days. Perhaps less so for fluid dynamics or finite element methods or other "simulation on a grid" problems, but there are a lot of python codebases out there in industry right now. I think it's very important to be comfortable working in higher level languages as well, and python is kinda becoming the lingua franca of a lot of sub-fields. For better or worse (I'm in the "better" camp), a lot of users are going to want a python library for what you're writing. It's best if you're used to "thinking in python" and can design a pythonic api.