After the two-day ordeal that was the London interviews, I was a little bit stressed at first to find that the Freiburg group had viewed my application and wanted to interview me too. The stressed part came from the fact that was asked to give a twenty minute presentation on my latest research work (yes, we know how much I love presentations) followed by an open interview. Compounded with that was the fact that I received this email on the night that I arrived in Berlin and was relying on Jo's laptop after my own had broken-down in a manner worthy of a Hollywood starlet. So a morning and afternoon in Berlin were spent putting the presentation together which, by the end I was pretty happy with. I hadn't even presented my findings to my own home group and had only just received word from my supervisor the day before that my results were pretty good. But hey, why do things easy - right?
So I essentially transcribed my slides onto paper and saved them onto my flash disk before I left Berlin (thank you to Jo for her computer!) and I had a whole day and a half to go through the presentation sans computer which always makes it fun. Anyway, I arrived at the Freiburg Institute fine (although the taxi driver couldn't find it) and was able to talk to a couple of the PhD students outside while I was waiting. My time came and I went in, had a couple of minutes to set up before the project leaders came into the room, settled and my presentation started.
On the whole, it was pretty good. There were a few times I had to clarify a couple of things, and one of the guys asked a question that I think was designed to probe me than to throw me off, but I got to the end in one piece sans poo. They then asked a few questions about that project (which was great - I actually realised a few things in answering them that were actually important that I hadn't included in my report), and then asked about my undergrad, interests, etc - it was like going on a date with six people simultaneously. I then started setting times to go and speak to the various groups individually, with the first one immediately afterwards and the rest the next day.
Unlike the London group, in talking to them individually their aim wasn't to test me on my maths and to catch me out. Most of the chats were talking about the project and what they were trying to achieve, what they'd done so far and what the next steps were, as well as some general chat. I was a bit frazzled during the first one (mainly because I was in post-presentation fallout) but for the rest, it was very cool to just talk to them on their level about what they were working on - I found it a lot easier to ask questions and came away feeling that not only did I have a real understanding about what they were about, but that I had also adequately showed what I was about, something that I didn't manage in London.
The end conclusion was that I left on Thursday afternoon feeling happy about being a potential PhD student in general, a fact compounded by an email that was sent on Friday morning (which I received in Singapore) that offered me a PhD position at Freiburg on any of the topics that I had expressed an interest in. Confidence in self restored.
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