>>11666937>dealing with frustrationYou have no idea how many bugs you can introduce while coding some shitty quantum chemistry program. Mostly because you have limited time, so thorough testing is out of the question.
>while an older prof who's already accomplished a lot might just be more annoyed.I guess this depends on the person. My experience with old, famous professors (Jørgense, Olsen) have been nothing but pleasant. In contrast to younger, more ambitious guys the old ones mostly do it for fun and don't have the same stress of funding.
>Do you think a PhD in EST is a good way of getting familiar with quantum mechanics more generally?Well yes and no, depending on the area of EST. Novel ways of solving the electronic schrödinger equation is highly QM, but not advanced QM. Also, there's a ton of physical measurable properties like X-ray absorbtion, excitation, double-excitations, NMR spectra, hyperfine couplings, all which the working equations can be derived in the coupled cluster formalism for instance, or DFT, or something entirely else. There's a lot of interesting research in Density Renormalization Group based techniques and quantum monte-carlo as well.
Sure, doing EST won't let you work with anything smaller than an electron, so no particle physics and stuff like quantum field theory is also not of much use in EST, although some research has been done in coupled-cluster QFT which is highly mathematical.
