76. Year 3–5 — International Transition
Theme: close the last gaps — credentials, hardware access, location — via the paths Ch. 63 mapped, choosing the branch that fits your evidence.
Path A — master's / PhD / research position. Months 36–42: applications (Ch. 63.3–63.7) — target ecosystems, not just rankings (Ch. 63.4's Germany/Netherlands/Nordics/Canada cluster; program deadlines 12–15 months before start); the artifact portfolio is your application's spine, Ch. 63.11's dossier its evidence annex. Months 42–60: the program itself — and its real payload: laboratory access (physical labs, research hardware, the supervision that Ch. 63.8 said artifacts can't fully substitute), credential, location, and the first institutionally-supported research. In-program strategy: your Parts XIV–XVIII head start means you arrive as the student who reproduces, builds, and ships — spend the surplus on the lab craft and depth that need institutions.
Path B — quantum industry. Months 36–48: targeted entry via your specialization's meritocratic channels — the QEC/compiler/application roles of Ch. 60.4–60.9 where public artifacts + OSS committership + the Year-3 contribution are the actual hiring bar; internships and trial-projects (Ch. 63.6) as the wedge; remote-first and EU-based employers first (Ch. 63.1's geography). Months 48–60: the role, converting to the on-site/visa transition (Ch. 63.9's skilled-worker and talent routes — your dossier serves both). Industry's payload is the same as academia's by different means: serious hardware (production systems, not cloud queues), research infrastructure (engineering teams, real constraints), and compensation that funds the whole enterprise.
Path A/B is a real fork but not a wall — the artifact-first strategy makes you credible on both; apply to both if uncertain; the paths recombine after (industry→PhD and PhD→industry are both routine in this field).
Deliverable: access to serious hardware and research infrastructure. The book's founding constraint — starting from a laptop in a country whose access is complicated — is dissolved: you work daily on or around real machines, inside a research community, with the credentials to stay. The five-year exit audit is short: you are doing, institutionally, what Parts XVII–XVIII had you doing at home — but at the frontier's scale, with collaborators, and with the trajectory's next decade visibly open (Part XX is your map of it).