Well, it will be interesting to see what comes out of the peer-reviewing and whether the results will be reproduced by other teams. Thankfully, it shouldn't be too long until this happens.
And congratulations on the interview. What would the topic be? It's not been too long since I left education, but I am absolutely itching to get back. Did you do a masters before applying for a PhD? I actually left my masters year halfway through and didn't complete it for certain reasons. Doing a PhD weighs heavily on my mind, but I'm not sure whether I would get far in applications for funding/a place without having a masters under my belt, and I'm not sure how I would be able to afford going back to do a masters.
Also, you may know something about this: can people transfer subjects between masters and PhD levels? My workplace may be able to offer me a chance to do a part-time masters in statistics, but I've been wondering how easily I'll be able to transfer to another research topic if I were to go on and do a PhD?
Well, I can't tell you what the story is in maths, but for physics at the very least a masters usually isn't a prerequisite for PhD work. It's a full time job, so they're not really expecting you to take another year or two with low to no income before you can get at it (this isn't the case everywhere I should say, for example I was going to apply for a spot at Max Plank, but they're big into masters students for some reason.)
As to interdisciplinary work, there's loads of opportunity for transfer. There are a tonne of chemists in my physics department for example. Maths and physics are very transferable, particularly for theorists and modelling. A maths degree is a pretty versatile thing to have from what I can see.
Anyway, the position I'm going for this week is mainly centred around nanolithography. That's making devices on the scale of about 100 nanometers or less, which is about 1,000 times the thickness of a human hair. I've also applied to this new centre for metamaterials in the University of Exeter which I'm really excited about. They're doing some very cool things with graphene and nanodevices.
TRF_SelimNiai said:
Astronomy is one of these things I used to be into as a kid but never took it further. Wish I had now, find the whole space, stars, nebulae etc really fascinating. I can spot a few things in the night sky, one night a few weeks ago had a clear view of Orion, and his belt and the main stars in it, Sirius, Jupiter and the Gemini constellation.
Oh man, astronomy is one of the easiest things to get into if you're still interested. You don't need a telescope worth hundreds of pounds to enjoy it, just a keen sense of interest. SmartCookie is pretty into it if I remember correctly.
Here are some cool resources about what's going on in the sky at the moment if you're casually interested. They're made for North America, but as we're in the NH it's not a big deal.
This Week's Sky at a Glance:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/ataglance
Tonight at a Glance:
http://earthsky.org/tonight
Heavens Above (satellite tracking):
http://www.heavens-above.com/
Also, you should check out some of the astronomy subreddits, they've got a tonne of useful info.
