[Vivtek]

She got her PhD in 1999, shortly after the birth of the kid who just finished his first year of grad school.

Sure, you're working, I totally get that. But you're also sometimes reading about stuff relevant to your eventual academic interests, if only articles you see on HNN or whatever. Sometimes you'll have a thought in the car. Develop the habit of journaling them when they come, in some place you won't lose over the intervening years.

You will be astonished at what you both do and don't retain over those years. It's mostly still down in there somewhere, but if you've got a few clues to unravel the threads, it'll help more than you think now.

[markus_zhang]

Thanks for the tip. I'm thinking maybe I should at least register for a few pre-requisite courses and see what happens. I did have a Math Master degree but I forgot pretty much everything except SV Calculus and basic Matrix computation. Or I could just use Coursera to advance my learning -- for hell, the topics I'm interested in, e.g. General Relativity, do not need experiments so I might not even need a degree.

Regarding the last paragraph -- yeah I recalled that my first programming adventure was Foxbasing in the mid 90s. I definitely forgot all of those!

Good luck to you too.