DFT in particular is a trap - the field is simply not respected by other physicists for a variety of reasons too complicated to get into here. I dabbled in it at first but was able to switch to hard condensed matter because I managed to pull off passing a QFT course in my first year of grad school which combined with solving some experimentalist&#x27;s problems got the requisite professors to at least listen to me.  A lot of DFT people end up as soft money research assistant professors or switched to staff support scientist positions (if they don&#x27;t drop out and become programmers) because the perception is they never came up with any ideas of their own - they just executed other people&#x27;s codes. Leave the field to the J-1s.