Beware of the Train

No thesis today - I had a six hour job interview through in Edinburgh, for the maths consultancy people (who, it turns out, are university friends of my Canadian friend Jeff - small world!). The interview went reasonably well, though it could have been better - I was a bit stressed out by the whole interview situation and wasn't as sharp as I could have been. The maths questions (all based on tasks they've actually encountered in the field) were completely outside my area, and hence somewhat challenging for me, but I managed to come up with not-entirely-stupid answers to them without too many hints. The programming questions were mostly straightforward (what does this bit of recursive Prolog do, implement the following standard mathematical functions in Java, write a simple method against this random spec), apart from one where I had to find an error in some threaded Java code. Did I mention that I've never written threaded code before, and I don't speak Java very well? Then they gave me lunch, then brought me back to the office and asked me all the questions from the first round again. Apparently the answer I gave to the "where would you like to be in five years?" question was very good :-)

Anyway, the company looks really cool, and the people all seemed to be good guys, so fingers crossed on that one. They've got another couple of people to interview, and they'll get back to me some time in March.