On Friday I had my first (hopefully of many) interviews for a PhD place starting in October. One of the PhD places being offered at Warwick is an LHCb project in conjunction with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). Now, as you probably know, LHCb is one of the detectors at the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN, along with ATLAS and others. Now, you might remember that it was previously noted that the ATLAS experiment uses KDE in their control room. Now, interviewing me were some members of the EPP group at Warwick as well as a member of RAL who was teleconferencing in. When the topic of conversation went to my involvement in KDE, the RAL guy made a point of thanking me and the KDE project for a great DE since apparently they use it in all their offices there. Perhaps if I get this place then there's a chance that there might be a chance for some KDE programming.

This also makes quite the difference from an interview I had last year for an internship at Barclays Capital where not a single person I spoke to seemed to have heard of KDE.