That’s part of the problem here. 99% of a PhD is your choice of advisor. It fully determines your experience. Going to do quantum computing research in a lab th

That’s part of the problem here. 99% of a PhD is your choice of advisor. It fully determines your experience. Going to do quantum computing research in a lab that doesn’t understand quantum computing is really on the author; any questions about the core competency of the lab can be answered by their publication history. Step 1 of doing a PhD is reaching out to people actually doing the research to see if it’s a match. Also having no one with whom to talk about QC tells me it’s a very small school or a specialized school. Or just the wrong school! Not all schools are created equally; they each have their own core competencies defined by the skills of the department faculty. If no one in the faculty had a history of QC research, why is the author attending that school to do QC research? Did they not think to ask before they applied? And why don’t they just find a better school to fit their interests? Transferring is not unheard of at such an early stage of the degree. But the author is done completely, which tells me they weren’t that serious in the first place.