PhD

PhD update

Posted Sun, 03/15/2009 - 19:35 by matt

Just an update on my PhD application progress. I've now had all three of my planned interviews and have heard back from two of them. Both Warwick and UCL want to offer me a PhD and I'm still waiting to hear from Imperial College. Funnily enough, both the offers I have so far are involved with the RAL. The Warwick one is an LHCb project (I blogged about it before) and the UCL one is an industrial placement where the company involved is the RAL.

My girlfriend, Rachel, also has an offer from Warwick for an Astrophysics PhD so it's likely that I'll be staying here but there's still some other things to consider.

No matter which one I decide upon, I'm excited to have something sorted out for the next few years.

KDE, LHCb and PhDs

Posted Mon, 02/23/2009 - 23:11 by matt

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.

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