Dear GAP-forum members,

Mark E. Hall had in a letter to this forum asked which universities
might offer a former student of his an opportunity to work on
computational algebra for a PhD and had started his letter by saying

I hope this is an appropriate message for the GAP forum.

Three answers have already been given in this forum, I have myself in
a private letter pointed out a further good place to go to and maybe
others have done the same. Much as I welcome this sense of helpfulness
in the forum, and much as I hope that the student will now make a good
choice between the various opportunities offered, I think we should
keep the forum to its purpose of discussing GAP related matters. It
was not clear to me from the letter of Mark E. Hall if the student
wanted to work in CGT at all, let alone with GAP, (in which case I
think there is a case for sending this letter to the GAP-forum) and in
fact the answers point out a broad spectrum of other possibilities.

I think there are other fora for the discussion of matters of Computer
Algebra in general or such opportunity seeking and the members of this
forum should not be overwhelmed with too many letters that at best are
loosely connected with the reason for which they registered with this
forum.

Let me clarify this point further: I think that the forum is for
*discussions*, that is, questions asked in the forum should also be
answered in the forum. I have tried to see that this happened even in
cases where the answers are likely to be not really of wide interest,
but this means that also the questions to the forum should be of a
kind that makes the answers likely to be interesting to more than the
one who asked the question. It is for this reason that we have
arranged the 'gap' address for reporting installations and asking
about availability of GAP and the 'gap-trouble' address for
installation and other rather local technical problems in addition to
the gap-forum, and in fact the number of letters to gap-trouble that
we also try to answer more or less by return mail, now is at least
twice the number of letters to the gap-forum. I therefore ask your
understanding for the attempt made above to keep the GAP-forum to its
purpose.

Thanks for your attention Joachim Neubueser