I am currently doing a PhD in maths, in the UK. UK PhD scholarship are typically only 3 years, and mine can't be extended. I do need every day of these three years to finish my thesis. For a small fee, I can hand in my thesis up to 1 year after the money has run out.
I now received an offer from a german university for a half-time teaching position in theoretical computer science. The position would start 3 months before my PhD scholarship ends.
Should I accept this offer? A similar question has been asked before, but there are a few circumstances that make the decision harder:
- The university where I could teach is in germany. It typically takes a day to go from one place to the other, and it isn't too cheap. (There might be some financial support from the german uni.) So I would be meeting my supervisor significantly less often, but possibly this is not so much a problem towards the end of the PhD?
- I would have to switch fields. While there is enough overlap between the particular topics so that I can learn the teaching material without too much effort, I'm unsure how risky this is for my career. In the worst case, I will not be able to establish myself in computer science because I would "only" have a maths PhD, and could neither return to maths because I left the field for too long a time. But again I'm not sure, how realistic these apprehensions are.