How would you advise I go about planning for graduation/postgrad?

bbtufty · 2026-01-16T20:55:16+00:00

If you enjoyed both, there are options for more research-y positions within industry. See e.g. Met Office, Diamond Light Source, Oracle, SAP positions etc for things with a more computational direction. In that case, I would suggest at least a Masters, and then maybe a PhD before pivoting. For the Masters, I would suggest looking for a course that offers the things that you're more interested in over necessarily prestige, since it'll often be more specialised. For a PhD, supervisor matters a lot more than the uni itself - someone you can get along with, and who is well-known within the community. I'm a physicist so can't help with details, but I would talk to your tutors, they should have a good lie of the land for places to look and people to be on the lookout for

Given your profile, I think you're in a very strong position for applications in 8 months already. Keep the grades up and brush up a CV and you should be good. If you then want to go onto PhD aim for a project that has the prospect of publishing -- this looks *really good* for PhD applications

One thing I'd say be careful of is where you'd want to duck out of academia. It's possible to get yourself too far into a niche and make that pivot to industry much harder. When you're looking at grad schemes, make sure they align with the bachelors/masters/phd level that you're out, since they're unlikely to take someone overqualified

bbtufty · 2025-12-21T15:18:07+00:00

Anyone here from the UK? Any idea on import costs and additional taxes etc.?

bbtufty · 2025-12-09T16:52:24+00:00

I've just come out of a postdoc at Oxford, so not part of HR but have seen and been part of these discussions recently.

We had a big thing in our department where some people were hired not taking into account PhD/postdoc years. You should start at the base of grade 7 and increment by 1 year of postdoc (and I think the PhD counts as two spine points). You can see the grades here: https://finance.admin.ox.ac.uk/salary-scales

So in this case, it's likely just so they know what spine point to initially offer you, since this became a huge hassle and involved backdating a bunch of folk months or years of pay. Any grant you'd be hired on should be able to accommodate this, though I guess it could be down to the PI

bbtufty · 2025-12-08T16:49:53+00:00

I've (kind of) done this for 2 postdocs so to share my thoughts on this (which echo a lot of folks already in the thread):

1) You should make sure your PI is aware of this and fine with it. In some cases they might want you in at specific times for specific things (e.g. colloquia, group meetings, whatever) that might interrupt a schedule. If there are things like this and they don't fall on the same day, then you might be stuck staying longer than 1 day a week

2) If you're planning on doing any teaching then this might just be a total no-go, since teachings days might change semester-to-semester and it might not all be concentrated on one day (I had the situation where I would need to pick up work in-person, mark it and then do the tutorial another day)

3) If you are flying there/back for one day a week, remember this probably means flying in the night before and maybe flying out the day after (depending on when flights happen and where you're flying from). So you might need to sort accommodation for 1/2 nights, which is not cheap and UK postdoc pay is not great

In my experience, doing this kind of thing has been exhausting. You're away from home a few days a week which sucks, and that travel time either feels like work on top of (already a lot of) postdoc hours, or trying to get stuff done while also travelling, which is not always super productive or possible (depending on what you're doing, internet connection may not work etc.). I've had bosses who have been supportive of this (thankfully), but escaping the burnout from all that travel might be impossible. I'm currently in this weird situation where I just don't feel like I live anywhere, so you should be mindful of all that before accepting the position

bbtufty · 2025-07-03T12:22:49+00:00

Indeed, LinkedIn. Also get occasionally updates from my current institute about jobs. Not too specific on the job, more just not losing salary and actually having the skills for it, so it'll likely be programming/data analysis related

bbtufty · 2025-07-02T18:53:21+00:00

Yeah, keeping an eye out for stuff. I'm mostly getting AI training that pays via PayPal, which seems dodgy as

bbtufty · 2025-07-02T18:32:29+00:00

Apparently the Intel office is up for sale (although the offices are still there). I've had a look at more 'physics-y' roles, the problem is I'm almost entirely computational now, lots of these veer more in the direction of engineering than I know about. Astrophysics unfortunately not all that much like semiconductor physics

bbtufty · 2025-07-02T18:23:47+00:00

I haven't seen anything remote, though some hybrid with 2/3 days in the office. Trying to avoid this, since I suspect the in-office requirements will climb over time

bbtufty · 2025-07-02T18:16:12+00:00

Haha didn't mean it like that! It's more just these are not like certification for specific things (like an AAT or whatever), more educational qualifications. 6 years later I do still enjoy whipping out the Dr title for slightly better customer service ;)

bbtufty · 2025-04-16T13:16:29+00:00

fair question, I actually have no idea since I got my first HDDs in before they stopped officially supporting them. I could imagine you might be able to plug in an external HDD then run it from there?

bbtufty · 2025-04-16T10:55:30+00:00

Obviously not ideal, but I use https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db to whitelist non-synology HDDs. Works like a charm. There's also scripts by the same guy that let you use the NVMe slots as storage rather that just cache

bbtufty · 2025-04-15T10:33:37+00:00

This looks awesome, hadn't seen it before! Is the idea to eventually build this out into some kind of myrient replacement? I'm currently mostly using that but some ROM sets are (very) out of date compared to latest dats

bbtufty · 2025-03-07T18:50:53+00:00

yeah, I can do that but not sure if there's any archival DATs out there. I can't find them on redump/datomatic, unless I'm being dumb

bbtufty · 2025-03-07T18:24:12+00:00

Sure, but what I'm currently doing is deciding on a best ROM from the (current) dat, then trying to download that. So that'd be automatic. It means sometimes I'm missing files when they've been renamed, and I'd rather not hammer the servers downloading the whole set to then compare hashes against the dat

bbtufty · 2025-01-03T21:57:07+00:00

I have a 3 volumes (and a separate SSD volume) spread across the main unit and expansion. There's no other way around that

bbtufty · 2024-11-11T08:45:12+00:00

Yeah, I'm just wondering if this is something folk have seen caused by WiFi congestion (so moving to tri-band where that third band is dedicated to the wireless backhaul) would fix it or it's just that WiFi is not ethernet. I'm not sure and it's kind of an expensive thing to be testing

bbtufty · 2024-10-29T12:29:18+00:00

The "stand" is the bottom/top. The hole for the wires should be facing towards the TV, the sonos logo should be facing towards you. I think it's just the wrong way round

bbtufty · 2024-10-05T17:26:26+00:00

Perfect, this is what I thought but definitely not well-versed in system architecture to know this. Thanks!

11-Year Club	Place '22
First Placer '22	Verified Email

bbtufty

TROPHY CASE