Choosing research ideas to include in a statement of purpose The internet is littered with information on what makes a good SOP, but I would like to ask a specific question regarding mentioning one's research interests in SOP.

What points should a student keep in mind while writing her statement of purpose? If there is exactly one specific professor the student is targeting, it makes sense to talk of one of his recent papers and ideas for extending its results in the SOP.

If 1) there are a couple of preferred professors or more, 2) each of them has multiple research interests and 3) the student is unable to zero in on a field or topic, how should the student tailor her SOP to make it appealing to more than one professor?
Should the student worry about the feasibility of her ideas in the SOP? Is an extensive literature survey in the relevant field necessary before putting anything in the SOP?

Your research statement (not "statement of purpose" as university administrators strangely insist on calling it) should be a description of your research experience, interests, and goals, as a supporting case for your potential for independent research.  If you were applying to work in my research area, I would much rather read about your research ideas than mine.

Here's what I like to see in research statements:

What have you already done? What problems have you solved, or at least worked on?  What independent projects have you been part of?  What were your key contributions?  What did you learn?  What did you teach the world?  How do your results compare to what was already known?  What original ideas are you most proud of?  Be specific, technical, credible, and confident (but not arrogant).  Refer the reader to your web page for more details.  Have a web page with more details: preprints, project reports, source code, videos, etc.
What are you working on now?  What problems are you currently trying to solve?  What are you currently trying to build?  What are the open research issues?  What intellectual tools are you using, or learning to use?  What are you reading?  What prior results are you building on?  How are you building on your own earlier work?  What is your current favorite half-baked idea?  Be specific, technical, credible, and confident (but not arrogant).  If you have partial results, refer the reader to your web page for more details.  Have a web page with more details.

You ask whether you should worry about the feasibility of your ideas.  No more or less than if you were actually doing research.  Ideally, I'd like to see both that you have good ideas and that you're not afraid to have bad ones.

What might you want to work on in the future? What problems you would like to solve?  What would you like to build?  Do you want to push your existing projects further?  If so, how?  What new areas are you interested in exploring?  What are your long-term career goals?  Convince the reader that you are  knowledgeable about your target area(s), but be honest about your ignorance.  Be specific, credible, and confident (but not arrogant).

No one will hold you to your stated plans.  You don't need to do an extensive literature survey (although it certainly can't hurt; put a copy on your web page), but at a minimum you should have had a strong undergraduate course on the topic.

How does my department fit your research goals?  (If the rest of your statement is well-written, the reader already knows the answer to this question, but you also need convince the reader that you know.)

A few sentences about motivation are worthwhile, but don't talk about how many programming languages you know, or about how you were a child prodigy, or how many contests you've won, or how many A+s you got, or how Alan Turing was your childhood hero, or how your research area will Change The World.  Write in simple, direct, flawless English.  Like Suresh, I have seen many phrases like "my first trembling steps", but never in successful applications.

The only credible reason to "target a particular professor" is if that professor's research interests already mirror your own.  If you try to craft the bulk of your statements to different professors in different departments, the result will be much shallower, and therefore much less persuasive, than if you describe your own well-developed research interests.

Yes, that means you have to have well-developed research interests.  That's the point.


Why are language test scores requirements sometimes higher for undergraduate than graduate admission? I’ve been searching for the graduate requirements of some university. As regards the language test scores, TOEFL>90 or IELTS>7 are necessary. However, I stumbled upon undergraduate requirements: TOEFL>100 (>25 each) or IELTS>7.5.

In my opinion, graduate studies are more complex thus require higher levels/skills, so what could be reasons that the graduate scores are lower than the undergraduate ones?

While I don't know what exactly went into these decision making processes, here are some relevant factors (some more likely than others):

As mentioned in the comments, undergraduates need to take a wide range of classes (e.g., gen eds) including classes which may involve a serious amount of reading, writing and/or verbal interactions.  So undergraduates need pretty well-rounded English skills.
For graduate studies, one can often get by with a much more narrow range of English proficiency depending on the field.  For instance, less language skills are needed to follow a mathematical lecture than one about politics.  My school has higher TOEFL requirements for certain graduate programs (e.g., business administration and political science) than the general grad college requirement.  A more flexible policy makes sense for grad programs.
While some grad students may have teaching duties, there can be separate English proficiency requirements for this.  My school does this, and international grad students just grade rather than teach until the English requirements are met.
By allowing grad programs lower standards of English, one can get a larger pool of international grad student applications.  (Both increasing the fees obtained and improving one's chances of getting academically stronger international grad students.  If we really want a specific student with poor TOEFL scores, we can petition the grad college to waive the language requirement for them, but if the student just looks at the online requirements, they may not apply in the first place.)
Having higher English requirements for undergrads may make a school seem more selective (this may be factored into college rankings, but the grad student requirements may not be).  Related to this, in the current age colleges are evaluated by student success rates (e.g., pass/fail,  retention and graduation rates).  Colleges may feel/have evidence that international students with lower TOEFL scores have lower success rates, and not want to take chances on them.
Higher TOEFL requirements may boost enrollments in the university's ESL program if there is one.


Professor used the same exam as last year. Is it considered an unfair advantage? I took an exam which was very difficult. I am a senior in college and this is the first time I failed an exam. I was surprised to find out most of my classmates, which usually don't do as well, got an A on the exam.

Apparently, I found out after the exam that they got their hands on the solutions from last years exam, which happened to be exactly the same. Nothing was changed. It seemed that a little more than half the class had the solutions to the exam since everyone was talking about how it was exactly the same as the review. The review was never online or posted by the professor, he only gave us a review which was very different than the exam and didn't include solutions.

Is it fine for me to feel upset, I feel like I put in so much effort studying for nothing. I was planning on talking to the professor, bring it up slowly and tell him how I feel. I know my university has an honor code but, I'm not sure if professors can do this since I have never seen it done before. Is it okay for me to talk to him, or am I exaggerating? I feel like he is going to go against me.

If the class is graded on a fixed scale (e.g., 90% is an A, 80% is a B, ...) then I do not see how you have a complaint. Your grade is simply a reflection of what you know (or in this case didn't know). The behavior of the other students (studying the past exam solutions) means their grades are not necessarily a reflection of what they know, but that is not your concern.

If the class is graded on a curve, then your grade would be unfairly influenced by the students who had the exam ahead of time. I would be concerned if I graded on a curve. If everyone had access to the exam in advance, but not necessarily the solutions, I do not see this as manifestly unfair. That said, I would suggest mentioning your concerns to the teacher. If only some students had prior access to the exam (and possibly the solutions), than this is manifestly unfair. I would mention your concerns to the teacher and escalate from there.

As for possible outcomes, this is messy. If the teacher is unaware that only some students had access to the prior exams, they may attempt to fix the issue. What they can do depends on the department/university regulations and what the syllabus says (e.g., they might invalidate the exam, grade on a fixed scale, identify students who may have colluded). If the teacher is aware and does not care, going over their head, is likely not going to be productive, but should still be done. For example, if no rules were broken by the professor, the department chair would likely face major backlash from the faculty if they attempted to interfere with the teaching of another faculty member. More likely the chair might through out the exam or attempt to punish students for colluding. In reality, it would likely just go as a little unwritten black mark against the teacher.


Different types of publications During the literature review for my Master thesis, I have got in touch with many different types of scientific publications, meaning papers, working papers, conference papers, seminar papers and so on.

I have seen many discussion about sub-categories of these main objects but never one being at this higher level of grouping.

Thus, I was wondering which are the main difference among them in order to do some kind of hierarchy of content reliability when I read them. And clearly if there exist other types, please add them so we can build a complete collection.

There exist a lot of standards for document/publication types. Here are some examples:

ORCiD work types
Endnote reference types
RAK WB, see chapter 1.2 (a system created for German libraries with a hierarchy for document types)
DRIVER used by DINI (repositories)
...

As stated here, each database might have its own definition, i.e. there are a lot of standards. Before creating a new one, I'd check if one of the already existing standards fits your requirements.

Note: Please feel free to edit this question to add more standards for document/publication types.


Do editors need all reviewers to be unanimous in their decision before acceptance? Assume an editor has sent out a manuscript to reviewers.  Let's say the manuscript has potential but with mixed reviews; some reviewers say accept whilst others recommend revision/reject.  The editor recommends re-submission.  So the manuscript goes through the usual revision-resubmission-revision-... process.

As an editor, does he/she need to all reviewers to be thoroughly happy before accepting the manuscript? Can he/she accept/reject the manuscript based on the majority rule?

Note, some journals have a limit on the maximum number of re-submissions, meaning the re-submission process cannot continue forever.

First of all, reviewers give a recommendation. It is the editor who makes the final decision.

It is possible to have an editor going against the reviewers opinion.
An example is this article.
It is open peer-review, so you can read the reviews and the answer of the editor. He says in his comment:

  I decided to continue the review process even though 2 of the 3 reviews recommend rejection.

So the answer is no, an editor does not need to receive unanimous recommendations from the reviewers to make a decision.


Paper in somebody else's thesis One of my papers is only published as part of a thesis by compilation by another student.

Can I claim citations of their thesis as citations of my paper?

Is there some way I can instruct google scholar that my paper is inside of that thesis?

Clarification: I am first author on the paper. The other student is a co-author. I allowed him to publish the paper in his thesis. The other student is from another university. For a number of year, his colleagues (who I do not know) would sometimes cite our paper. After he graduated, they choose to cite his thesis instead. I cannot fault them for this, but am a bit sad to not be receiving any more citations on this paper.

(note: I write this answer from a perspective in the biological/medical sciences, and norms about how to 'count' thesis work varies by field; however, in the fields I work in this sort of thesis where separate published or publishable papers are 'stapled together' is the norm)

It's great that your collaborator's colleagues are going to lengths to credit their work by citing their thesis.

However, a thesis is in some ways not a full publication, isn't really peer reviewed, etc.

You should publish the paper in a more conventional way if you want it to be cited by (and read by) the broader community. Your best bet would have been to do this when the work was prepared originally (and then the thesis would have cited as well as reproduced your collaboration).

No, you can't claim citations of their thesis as your citations, you didn't author their thesis and there is a lot of other content in there that is not yours.


What should I do if funding announcements aren't made until after the acceptance deadline? I was admitted to a US PhD Math program but funding letter was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, they send out funding letter separately.

When I inquired about funding they told me that funding offers go out anytime until July, but our class starts in August so I found that a little bit weird.

I get a feeling that they do not fund all PhD students. What should I do? It would be nice to know asap if they are even going to fund me but I don't think they are in a hurry either. This is my preferred college but I don't want to go if they aren't going to fund me.

Edit: Here are many examples of accepted but not funded yet. I just don't know what my outcome will be.

(Converting my comment to an answer, as suggested by @jakebeal.) Making admission offers without funding is a surprising, and not good, practice on their part, if it is as you describe, since people should make decisions based substantially on funding, not just admission.

If you have other plausible choices with funding, I'd take one of them. Don't go to math grad school without funding (and tuition remission).

(Unlike possible funding ambiguities, in mathematics, the funding is generally almost entirely by Teach Assitantships, and it should be possible to make (approximate) decisions about how many to fund well before the April 15 U.S. nation-wide decision date. That is, except for some (hopefully anomalous) budget crises, math depts themselves would not be "waiting" to find out funding for grad students.)

That is, this sort of "admission" is possibly a very low bar. Funding is the serious issue. In particular, don't get your hopes up, I'm afraid.


How important is a grad school visit? I need some grad school advice and I will try to be brief. School A and School B have invited me to a grad visit weekend on the same dates. I booked the trip with School B before I knew there was a schedule conflict. At School A I have secured an RA position and a good relationship with the professor offering the position. School A is also considering me for other scholarships. School B hasn't given me an indication of whether I will be admitted or not. I have spoken to a professor there who reviewed my application, but they did not say much more than I am a good candidate and they look forward to meeting me. School A is ranked higher than B in my field, but B is a top 20 overall while A is top 50. I'm interested in the research areas of both schools.

I asked the professor at School A if I should cancel my plane trip (I didn't mention the other visit conflict) and go to their visit to maximize my chances at the other scholarships that they are considering me for. They told me to email the visit coordinator and explain my situation: that I can't make it, but I want the scholarships and will visit the campus on my own to meet with everyone.

Even with that advice, I'm conflicted. I'm not sure how important this decision is or what the best choice is. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

The decision is probably not that important, so don't stress too much (or, which is basically the same, it's pretty much impossible to figure out what the effect it will have).  Remember that this feels very high stakes for you but for the people on the other end, it's just another day at the office.  I would focus on which trip will get you valuable information.  In an ideal world, I would say go to school A for the weekend, and try to visit school B some other time, but I don't know how much of an issue the expense of the tickets is for you.  It would be a different matter if school B had admitted you; you might want to push them a little harder on getting details (have they admitted anyone).


How do I become motivated after unfairness in research? I'm a chemistry undergrad in the honors college at my school and the following happened:

Last Spring, the college held a research conference and I did REALLY     well with one judge (49/50) and poorly with another. The judge I did poorly with cited the wrong research project, or whoever tallied the scores assigned the wrong score sheet to me.
Another professor was upset about how her student was judged too, and so when she heard about how I was judged, she grouped us together in one complaint, but our emails to the people in charge of the conference went largely unanswered regarding her student, and completely ignored regarding my situation.
Weeks later, a student in my research group who had been receiving massive praise from the honors college for having presented at a conference, received an award for her research. I was actually the one that
went to the conference, not her. It was known by the honors college that I went, but they must have assumed the other girl went too because she was in the same group. Perhaps I should have stepped in and said, "She didn't go, it was just me," when she first received praise, but I felt I was in an awkward place. I asked the girl early on in the school year to correct the honors advisor, but she (the girl) said it wasn't important. Our research advisor assured me there's no way of knowing that the trip to the conference was the only factor in the college's decision to give her the award and that she had not been consulted about it, which made the situation a bit less discouraging. That student did do research in another lab -- although I had heard complaints about her work in the other lab well before she and I were at odds.

A few weeks ago, I talked to the dean of the honors college about the situation, and I was pretty much told, "Sorry 'bout cha', that's life. Life is unfair." It made me feel like I was being really petty, and his tone made me feel chastised for bringing it up.

To me, this isn't an issue about praise, it's about fairness, responsibility, and supporting students. The "life is unfair" argument he used just really bugs
me. In my view, something like having an excruciatingly painful, lifelong health condition is a "life isn't fair" situation. "Life isn't fair," for me, fails to be a legitimate argument for people refusing to be accountable for their actions or even just issuing an apology.

Despite support from professors, my research advisor, and the Dean of Students, I'm still really gutted about these things. I'm demotivated in my coursework and research (research was seriously my lifeblood.) I worked so incredibly hard and I used to get so much joy just out of working without the need for recognition.

How do I feel confident and motivated again in my education and research when I feel unsupported?

In both of the experiences you describe, you were not treated fairly.  I think it's really healthy to be disappointed at unfair treatment: for one thing, this kind of disappointment is a key component in learning to treat others fairly; for another, indifference to being treated poorly could be dangerous just as absence of pain on being burned could be dangerous.

It is however good to cultivate a sense of perspective on such matters.  When unfair treatment has serious, lasting negative consequences, you should fight back.  When it's a passing thing, sometimes it is better to take just one quick shot at rectifying the situation, and sometimes it is better just to let it go.  Let me ask you this: What are the specific negative consequences of what happened to you?  Are they durable?  Will they affect your future?

With regard to the first case: I am a tenured full professor, and I have never had my academic research formally judged and graded at a conference.  So I honestly don't know what you lost out on by being judged poorly.  Maybe some words of praise, a line on your CV, and/or a small cash prize?  These are not serious losses.  The experience seems to have hurt your morale.  I understand that, but I think you can easily shake it off with the right perspective.  Two people evaluated your research.  One person gave you an excellent evaluation, and one person gave you a poor evaluation.  Already that's not so bad.  But wait, it gets much better: the person who evaluated your work poorly had you confused with someone else.  So actually no one really thought your work was poor.  Isn't that great?
The second situation is similar in that in fact you are only receiving positive feedback.  If going to a conference in Pittsburgh is praiseworthy and you went to the conference, then the praise actually applies to you.  The person who gave the praise may not know that, but you know it, and that's much more important.  By the way, when a student award is for something subjective like "good research" rather than being best with respect to an explicit metric, awards are very often given to graduating students rather than non-graduating students.  If an award was given to a graduating student in your research group and you feel more accomplished already than that student, you have quite a good shot at getting the award yourself when you graduate.

There is a general theme here: successful academics are largely self-motivated.  And for most academics, the greatest reward and job perk is the satisfaction they derive from their own understanding and achievements, both at any given time and the experience of being on a steady upward trajectory of mastery and accomplishments.  (I am reminded of my college's alma mater: Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.)  Praise and rewards are not insignificant -- among other things, they are key checks on our own self-evaluation -- but they ought to be less significant than your internal sense of your own academic trajectory.  If you actually love research -- and it sounds like you do -- then that is your reward right there.  I'm not saying you should ignore the rest, but as above you can try to put it in perspective.

To address your questions:

  Is this kind of thing common in academia?

The specific nature of the bumbling you describe is not necessarily so common (though bumbling of one kind or another is hardly rare).  But being underappreciated largely by mistake or inattention is rather common, I'm afraid.  Every academic I know can spin a wrenching yarn about excellent work which was treated rather shabbily by others.

  More importantly, how do I feel confident and motivated again in research when I feel really unsupported?

That's a very personal question, but I have given some part of what I hope is a helpful answer.  Namely, you have to do you.  Being unsupported through what you can clearly and rationally perceive are the faults of others rather than your own should not discourage you from continuing in academia.  It may mean that there is a better place for you, but good news -- repeated changes of location which bring new mentors, collaborators and subsidiaries are a key feature of academia.  As I mentioned, in each of your stories above there is clear positive feedback on your work and no clear negative feedback -- so I see absolutely no reason for you to lose confidence in yourself and in your own work.

The point of being in an "honors college" is not accumulating honors, by the way.  (To be frank, the terminology is really pretty silly, and even somewhat off-putting.)  Rather it is about being given extra opportunities and being guided towards more rapid mastery: to say it slightly mathematically, it is about increasing the slope of your academic trajectory.  Giving a student an award for going to a conference is also a bit silly, like giving a child an award for bringing home a good book from the library: yes, there was some praiseworthy behavior involved, but the important part is the opportunity, not the praise for receiving it, and whether the opportunity was used well and/or turns out to be significant is for the person who received the opportunity to judge, not the person who gave the praise.  Would you rather have the praise and not the book or the book and not the praise?  Clearly the book is preferable...if you actually want to read it.  Similarly, I hope you will see that by going to the conference and not getting the praise, you were supported more (in this one instance, anyway) than your colleague who was lavishly praised for a conference that she didn't attend!  Ask yourself whether you enjoyed the conference.  If you did, there's your motivation.


Should I talk to my supervisor about including a new field in my PhD? I am a part-time PhD student coming towards the end of my first year – I have another five years left. My PhD is in Music and I do like my topic a lot. However, in the last 18 months I have also become very interested in an area that is not that related to music – computing and open source. I started looking at it as something extra to learn before my PhD started and am now finding it difficult to put down. As well as this, I would like to integrate some aspects of what I have learned into my PhD. I just don't really know what and how.

Is this something that I should bring up with my PhD supervisor or should I just "put up or shut up"? She may think it's a bit weird to mention it since she will probably feel that it doesn't really relate, however, computing (and its related ethics) are fundamental to the ways in which we undertake academic research these days. We've even had a few classes on software use. I feel that I could probably link the two in some way but little has come up yet which is obvious, though it may well present itself in the future. From past experience I tend to function at my academic best when integrating different challenging interests into my learning and I would love to integrate my learning of computing into my music PhD. I feel I have learned – and applied – a lot and I want to continue learning alongside my music learning and to combine the two in my topic.

Question: should I raise this with my supervisor, float some ideas past her about this or should I just ignore it? If I do the latter the question may well come back to haunt me further down the line. I don't think I "can" (nor do I want to) give this up, well, not without forcing myself to since it fascinates me. Do others have experience of wanting to mix in new ideas/subjects into their PhDs and how did you go about it?

For clarification - the PhD in Music is ethnomusicological, i.e. the PhD is to do with the study of music in culture and as culture rather than composition or performance.

First, this makes perfect sense. What you are describing is a project in the digital humanities, and there are others in music using computational methods to analyze music and its social context. The place I would suggest starting is to look at the Music Encoding Initiative, which has developed an xml mark-up language for music. The community there can lead you to many other possibilities for integrating music and computation at various levels of computational complexity. The focus remains on the music as the object of study but applies new research methods to it.


Is it appropriate to ask my professors what they think of me before I ask for letters of recommendations from them? As some students know, sometimes it is not easy to determine whether a professor (restricted to the professors in U.S.) will write a strong letter of recommendation for a student. So the question is, is it appropriate to ask questions like:

What do you think of me compared to other students you taught in the previous semester?

Am I one of the best students in your class? Top 10%? Top20%?

I know these questions are sensitive. Maybe they will dislike me immediately once I ask these questions. I don't know, but I believe that most professors are kind and will be honest to students.
By the way, if I were the professor, I would certainly answer the questions honestly and let the student know if I should be in the their choices. I would not only say something like "you did well in my classes" or "you did better than most of the rest", but also tell them directly if they are in top 1%, 3%, 10% in my mind, but I still wonder what most professors in U.S. universities would think of this.

Closely related to my answer to your linked question:

I don't think it's either necessary or particularly productive to try to interrogate a professor and determine what letter they will write.  Simply tell the professor you're thinking of applying to Ph.D. programs and ask them something like:

  Do you think that you would be able to write a strong letter of recommendation for me?

The "strong" is important here, because that's what will get you the honest opinion of whether the professor thinks well of you or not, and you don't want letters that are not strong.

If you try to ask the question indirectly, by asking things like "Am I in the top 10%?" then you are dancing around the question.  You know you're asking for a strong recommendation, and so does the professor, so you might as well just ask.

Only the most nasty and deceptive of professors will answer dishonestly---and they probably wouldn't have given you an honest answer to your other questions either.


Are posters useful for experienced researchers? Typically, for PhD students who are in their third or fourth year, is it worth pursuing poster submissions at relevant conferences?

Obviously this is a somewhat subjective quantity, but is it generally considered appropriate for researchers who are not new to their field to pursue such publications, and do they realistically have standing, relative to, let's say, short papers?

I'm in the social and health sciences and do not know what field you are in, so this may be discipline specific. However, it is appropriate for advanced PhD students to give poster presentations. As a PhD student, you are considered a junior scholar (as you would also be considered as an pre-tenured assistant professor) and poster sessions are appropriate at this stage of your career. However, if publishing papers is more desirable than presentations in your field, it is advised that you spend more time working on getting your papers in print than presenting them at conferences. I know of academics who did not receive tenure, because they presented papers at a ton of conferences, but never submitted the papers for publication. Posters have great purposes, but may be less likely to turn into a paper.


On average how many research questions do you come up with before finding the one worth pursuing? Like every other Ph.D. student, I am having a tough time finding a good research question.
Thanks to Varian's advice "how to build a model in your spare time", I can come up with a lot of interesting topics and questions (judged by my peers and supervisors). Still, when I start looking at the literature or the data structure I need, I find myself in one of the following situations:

There is already a published article way better than what I thought explaining the issue
The problem is worth pursuing and there is a gap. Yet, the dataset is not available or too costly for my budget

This process seems very time and energy-consuming, and while the latter resource may be renewable, the former is not.
Am I doing something wrong? How many research questions does an experienced researcher throw away as not worth pursuing?

I guess the only valid answer to this question is literally, "As many as it takes". Research is about diving into the unknown and that is fundamentally the issue. When you start, you don't know.
First an anecdote, then some advice.
I worked on three problems for my dissertation work. The first was too easy and I was able to prove theorems every day. Easy, but therefore not significant. I gave up after a couple of weeks. The second problem was too hard. Nothing I thought of could make a dent in any way in the problem and insight was elusive. The third was just right. It was hard, but do-able, and it turned into quite a significant piece of work.
But, and this is the advice part, along the way to solving the third problem I developed insight into not only that problem but into other problems that were related, some closely and some not. I was smart enough to capture those ideas as they occurred as possible future work and when I finished the dissertation I had a file of potential expansions and parallel things to work on in the future. That is a very big deal. That file of ideas that may be more than you can do at the moment, but should be looked at later.
So, as you are doing your literature search, look for those possible extensions and/or parallel tracks that might prove fruitful and keep a file of those ideas. You can attack the most promising ones now and it might lead to success but you will probably also have other ideas as you work. Add those to your file.
If you are really doing research then there are no guarantees that anything will be both doable and significant. You have to keep looking. A good advisor (I was lucky there) can help greatly in this. But the unknown is unknown until someone makes it known.


Need some pointers for starting an application essay I am looking to write a letter of application for a Information Systems Security program but I'm not certain how to begin.

The requirements are seemingly simple, describing relevant work and volunteer experiences, which I have none to speak of.  Transferable skills, knowledge of the field and commitment to professional growth is the other part of the application letter.  I feel more comfortable writing about the second part but my problem is how to being the letter.

I did find a few sample letters from the University but the trouble is this letter of application has a 250 word maximum.  So I'm stuck with what parts to leave in and what parts to omit.

Any pointers would be extremely appreciated!

In general you should start writing "in any way that works". There is no connection between how you start writing and what is at the beginning of a completed written piece. As an example, many writers have written entire books, been dissatisfied with the beginning, and simply removed the first chapter entirely. Start with the part you feel comfortable talking about, the conclusion, whatever.

"Throat clearing" is a common term for the need to start with rather uninspiring junk. But if you try not to write it in the first place, you're likely to feel blocked and have trouble writing anything at all. Go ahead and start with trite, non-suggested phrases like "It's been my dream to..." or "I've always wanted to...". The process of writing is not just about putting words in print, but a process of developing and clarifying ideas. What you want to say, and how you say it, should change naturally through stages of revision - you don't have to figure out the best way to say something before you write anything at all! Get something out, and then review and revise as needed.

There is also a huge problem with word limits, in that the natural impulse for nearly everyone is to try to figure out how to express themselves in so few words before they've written anything at all. Some people are just naturally pithy, but for the rest of us this is just does not work. Do not write to a word limit - in fact, you should naturally expect to write 2X-10X+ as much as is the strict limit for something short like this.

Nailing the word limit is then process of revision: drop parts that don't really add to your application, remove parts that are just bad and you shouldn't mention (too much self-disclosure, complaints, etc). Then, if the word limit is really small, you begin squeezing out little bits of space: trim, remove unnecessary words, find more compact and expressive way to word things. If you still have too many words, start looking for weaker statements to yank out, and pair down to the best points you make out of everything you say - even if you end up only being able to make 2-3 good points, that's better than 10 items in unsupported list format.

I am told that the more you go through this process, the more automatic it becomes, but I am skeptical that this is true. In 10+ years of writing I still can't say things in the a succinct, concise, pithy way on the first (or second or third) try. Even in this answer I've gone back and erased more than I've written out here!

Once you get out what you want to say, even if it isn't very good and is way too long, there are lots of resources you can use to refine your work, including examples, tips and tricks, asking for people to read your work and give feedback, reading your writing out loud to someone, etc. But none of that works if you don't have raw written material to start with - so start where it's the easiest for you to start writing, and everything else will flow from there.


Question about Data analysis My thesis title is
: Important of user-generated contact in tourism decision making.

I am worried about my methodology. I am not sure what kind of data analysis that can I use.

I will use survey method. In my questionnaire, consist of 4 sections :
Demographic, media habit of visitor, internet behavior of visitor, credibility of source information.
For example, I will ask

-How do you rate the credibility of information from contents created by other users online?
-Would you agree that information from other consumers on Internet is more reliable than advertising?
-What us the most influential source of information when you are about to make a purchase?
-How often do you post contents (rating, comments, picture, video....) on Internet about a purchase.

My questionaire is not Likert Scale.

So far, I only know I can use SPSS to analyse.
But I really no idea at all what should I use to analyse. One type of analysis is enough for thesis?

Since you are using 'will use' in your question I assume there is still time to make asjustments and will just quickly mention some things that you might still want to change in order your get it 'passed' as your thesis.

You say you do not use a Likert-scale. Why not still change it to a Likert scale? (I will also suggest you use a neutral (midpoint) option for all bipolar scale questions you use)
Another important change to make in your questions is that you are now (judging from the few example questions you posted) biasing your questions by how you formulate the stem. You are doing this atm in two manners (you should change this):

"..on Internet is more reliable than advertising?" should be
something like "..on Internet is more or less reliable than
advertising?"
"Would you agree that.." is likely to lead to acquiescence bias, you can change this to something like "do you think that..".

Getting back to your actual question.

The analysis is dependent on what you wish to 'test' and the 'sort' of data you have.
Most commonly you would have a research hypothesis that is 'tested' by seeing if scores (e.g. averages) on question/construct A are associated with (/'can predict' but not te be confused with causality) differences on question/construct B.
(e.g. you ask people how tall the they are in questions A and what size of pants they wear in question B, to test the hypothesis 'taller people tend to have pants in larger sizes. This would be tested by taking both averages and going for a simple t-test (if the variable would have been categorical for example we would have needed to choose a chi-square test instead)

So the actual test you would choose (e.g. SPSS) depends on this design/hypothesis (or you using 1 variable to predict 1 other variable?) and the datatypes of both the predictor and the dependent variable (nominal, ordinal, ratio etc).

This makes it difficult to answer this question without having a lot more information.
Here is a link to a simple in-browser tool that asks all those question about your research design and variables and rolls out the acceptable significance test (tool).

Hope this helps!


How to mention a completely rewritten article in PhD thesis? First of all, I am from Europe. At my university are hardly any regulations of the form of my PhD thesis, especially nothing that concerns the following question:

I published a paper as a first author together with my supervisor. I have rewritten my work of the paper, the structure, each sentence, and all images, because I didn't want to give a Journal the copyright of a part of my PhD thesis. However, the original methods and ideas are still the same. Currently, this rewritten paper is one chapter of my dissertation and I have not cited the paper.

Would you recommend to let the reader know that the ideas of this chapter have been published in a journal?

Edit: Thank you for the answer, here are some remarks that didn't fit in the comment section:

I asked the journal, they responded:

  Permission is granted for you to use the material requested for your
  thesis/dissertation subject to the usual acknowledgements and on the
  understanding that you will reapply for permission if you wish to
  distribute or publish your thesis/dissertation commercially. You must
  also duplicate the copyright notice that appears in the Wiley
  publication in your use of the Material.

However, I didn't want to duplicate the copyright notice of the journal in my thesis.
I will now mention that the chapter is based on the publication. I thought its fine to not cite yourself, because it was mentioned in the first comment of the question How to reuse complete paper for my thesis? that it is common in UK to rewrite the article so heavily that citation is not needed anymore.

because I didnt want to give a Journal the copyright of a part of my PhD thesis

Have you checked the copyright agreement? Various academic publishers explicitly make an exception of their exclusive right of publication of the material (although graphics might be a different question) for the author's educational theses.

  Would you recommend to let the reader know that the ideas of this chapter have been published in a journal?

Yes, this is absolutely required. Otherwise, you are committing self-plagiarism, which is considered a form of academic fraud. This could have severe repercussions during your later career. The reason is that if no citation is given for something non-trivial and substantial, the reader will assume it is new and has not ever been published before it appeared in your thesis.

A good idea to handle this is to add a remark in the beginning of the respective chapter(s) that says that the following text is partially/largely based upon your journal article.


Reliable Asian university rankings datasets suitable for evaluating applications to a graduate program Our (American) university has a lot of applications coming in from Asia- especially China, India, Japan and Korea.

Each of these seems to follow a different grading scheme and it is hard to do  apples-to-apples comparisons of students scores across universities. We don't request WES transcripts.

What is a good way to normalize students across Asian universities? Which ranking schemes (global and local) are reliable? Do these ranking schemes provide fine-grained, easy-to-parse data that we can use for CS and ECE admissions (not just relative ranking)?

ADDENDUM: There seems to be an XY problem with the original question, as @FedericoPoloni points out. What we're interested in is indeed-- "What is a good way to compare transcripts for graduate admission, especially from Asian universities? Admittedly, this is a broad problem and solutions may be reductive or simplistic, but it seems unfair to not consider the quality of teaching, research and the cohorts worked with, when evaluating student transcripts.

The current answer and comments, while helpful, will leave admissions restricted to IIT, Tshingua, KAIST-- since we do not trust transcripts from other universities, and though exceptions can be one-off, this approach does not scale. I'd be grateful if you could share references to meaningful datasets and ideas to use the data without unfair bias.

I believe that using university ranking as a criteria for admission is fundamentally unethical.

Extremely good students end up going to middling or poor undergraduate institutions for any number of reasons. To downgrade somebody's application just because they went to a mediocre institution is actively going against the academic ideal that merit should be able to rise, and even poor institutions generally have at least a few students of excellent potential.  Complementarily, pedigree is no guarantee of quality: rubbish students graduate from elite institutions all the time.

Now, there is, of course, a strong correlation between the quality of an institution and the quality of the students that it produces, and there are, of course, basic matters of accreditation: nobody should respect a degree from Trinity Southern University.  In general, however, you should judge the students and not the institutions.

So, how do you judge a student from Asia? The same way that you judge a student from an unfamiliar university in Europe or North America, by the accomplishments for which they can give evidence.  To judge classwork, one of the methods is to ask which textbooks were used (this is what some MIT departments do).  To judge other work, look for the concrete products, such as research papers, code or web pages online, etc.

Students from universities you do not know will still be at a disadvantage, and doubly so for students from a very different environment and who may lack English communication skills, such as will often be the case for many Asian universities.  But you can at least take steps to not prejudice yourself unduly by sorting their universities by their ability to game semi-arbitrary ranking systems.


Getting grants at a teaching department while officially being considered an R2 institution My department is focused on teaching. We teach 6 classes/year with heavy undergraduate mentoring. It actually feels like teaching 8 classes per year. I know that there are grants "designed" for teaching institutions (RUI at NSF, for example), but to be eligible my institution has to be officially a PUI (primarily undergraduate institution). By all measures my department would qualify (no masters/phd degree), but other departments in the university are research active, so we are an R2 institution.

Furthermore, the university has been heavily pushing to be considered an R1 institution. They are giving a lot of resources (time/money) to these research-active departments. People at the teaching-intensive departments are at a significantly disadvantage since our research is less intensive, so we never get the internal grants.

When I talk to the administration the conversation goes like this (not literally):

  They: ..., we support your efforts to get grants.

  Me: It is difficult to get grants due to the heavy teaching load.

  They: People at (teaching department at another university) get grants.

  Me: They qualify as a PUI.

  They: That may help them, but if your proposal is good, it will get funded.

  Me: To do good research I need the time to do it.

  They: You can apply for internal grants to get seed funding/time.

  Me: Most of my department applies, but we are not funded. It is difficult to
  get internal funding when competing with people in other areas that have more time for research.

  They: Then you can apply for external funding, we support your efforts to get grants....

In summary, I work at an undergraduate department, but due to funding agencies rules, I am considered to be at a research intensive institution. Also, I have applied for grants, and colleagues at panels told me (in confidence) that other weaker proposals were funded because they got the PUI classification. My research was not considered strong enough (for a research intensive institution).

Has anyone had this experience?

How can I maximize my chances to get INTERNAL funding when competing with people that have much more time for research?

How can I maximize my chances to get EXTERNAL funding when competing with people that have much more time for research?

A few thoughts -

One is that extramural funding is more about gaining prestige from your institution than actually resulting in a net revenue gain to your University.  See this article from the American Association of University Professors website for an explication of the ways in which the focus on extramural funding harms universities.

That said, if your tenure and promotion system is based on securing external funding and/or having time to do research, then you probably still have to play that game even if you know that it's harmful to the university in the long run.  One thing I'm thinking is psychological research about locus of control; if you believe that you are in control of your own success or failure it's been shown that you put more effort into and consequently have better performance than if you believe that others control what happens to you and that what you do doesn't matter.  It does sound like the system is rigged against folks in your situation, but nonetheless, you can still do your best to put together a competitive application - have folks read over your applications, look at other people's successful applications, etc.  Perhaps there's an office or staffperson on campus that helps with applications for external funding that could be a resource?

Finally, it sounds like there are some more systemic issues about courseloads and advising loads being too high.  These seem like great things to raise during faculty union meetings or to bring up to your Academic Senate representatives - you're probably not the only one feeling this way, and if you can open up a conversation with other faculty maybe there are some changes that can be made in the way things work.  Here's a case study about how faculty unions dealt with this in Ohio that might offer some inspiration for taking collective action.


How to find a scientific review of a theme? I'm trying to search for a scientific review article of determined theme. That is, I'm not searching a single scientific article containing an analysis of a determined theme, I'm trying to search a scientific article containing a review of many articles about the theme and its conclusion.

What are the terms which I should include in my search (using Google)? Example: "free trade revision", or "free trade paper review"... what are the recommended terms for this search?

Extra question: What are the best sites to search about this? (scientific reviews, scientific articles, papers, books, etc..)

Note: I think my English is legible, I'm brazilian.

I think the easiest option is to use Scopus (if your University has access) and in the title, abstract, etc, fields type your keywords and in the document type field just select "Review".


Does Arxiv count as publication? I am an undergraduate student graduating next month. I wrote a research paper done by myself, but it's been rejected by two journals sofar so I haven't been able to publish it.

I am applying for scholarships and  having a published paper would improve my chances.

If i upload my paper in arxiv, is it considered as published paper? can i write it in my cv as published paper and what is the most suitable way to write it *in my cv?

Thank you!

No, it's not considered a published paper in the usual sense of peer-reviewed publications. ArXiv is meant as a preprint server where you upload preprint versions (essentially polished draft versions) to quickly disseminate your research, before submitting it to a scholarly journal where the paper undergoes peer review. Only after the paper has been peer-reviewed and published by the journal do you have a "real" publication. (Depending on your agreement with the journal, it's then possible to update the arXiv listing to reflect revisions made to the manuscript during the publication process.)

It's still appropriate to list such preprints on your CV - especially early on in a career, when you might have few peer-reviewed publications. This is fine as long as it's made clear that these are preprints, or manuscripts under review or similar.


Does consistency in how my name is presented/abbreviated as author on a publication matter? Assume I have the name: "First Middle Last". I have been publishing as "First Last."

At my current job (postdoc) my adviser prefers that I list my name on my paper as F. Last (or F.M. Last), and I'm afraid that the change in style will make it less obvious that all the papers I've written are from the same person. Is this an issue that matters? If so, does it matter enough to insist on using "First Last" in spite of all other names being abbreviated on any papers?

P.S. If this is a community dependent question, I'm a physicist in the AMO physics and optics communities (e.g. APS and OSA).  I'm asking about how my name appears in the list of authors on the paper I wrote (not about how citations are formatted).

If you find yourself publishing under multiple names, e.g., "First Last" in one journal and "F. Last" in another, you might want to consider registering for an ORCiD. ORCiD provides a unique identifier which a researcher can use to unite all the different names she/he has published under.

If you have a more common name, like "John Smith", an ORCiD can help differentiate you from other researchers with similar names. And if you change your name, ORCiD can help you link the older to the newer.


How can a professor who has signed The "Cost of Knowledge" pledge review papers without having to recant? A large majority of researchers in my field publish in Elsevier journals. However, a professor who is widely regarded as an authority in my field has, some years ago, signed The Cost of Knowledge pledge to neither publish nor review for Elsevier. I think this is sad, since someone who is highly qualified to review these papers will no longer review them and improve their quality.

This professor has published in other journals, but it does not seem that others are following suit, since these Elsevier journals seem to be highly prized. What can he do to be able to review papers that would have otherwise come to his perusal without having to recant?

Sounds like he's sticking to his moral principles, which is the best anyone can do. Maybe he could evangelize his opinion more to increase the impact of his crusade, but that's about it.

I disagree with the insinuation that he may be doing his field a disservice, since moving away from the ancient publishing model is a good thing for any field in the long run. Besides, it's not like he has left the field; just a small part of its publication scene.

Just because nobody seems to be following him (yet) does not mean he failed in any way.


Citations in a Paper After the Whole Quotation is Shown Say I have a quotation that is written at the top of my page something like this:

Abook
Robert Contor was always an odd fellow, but when the neighbors discovered his secret, everything changed. (p. 12)

Then, in my paragraph, I reference the quotation like this:

In Abook, it says that Robert Contor's life changed irreversibly after "the neighbors discovered his secret". This shows that .......

To be fully correct and not even have to worry about plagiarism and incorrect citations, do I have to include:

(Abook Leauthor p. 12)

or something like that? Can I legitimately get away with not adding the inline citations after every quotation, even though it is obvious what I'm citing? Does this apply in general when it is fairly obvious where the quotation came from?
Thanks a lot in advance. All responses are greatly appreciated!

I'd look for some form of "short citation" format in whatever style you are using. E.g. the first time around give the full citation, and later on the short one. Another technique would be to cite once, and then just go "As Leauthor says, ...", or even just try to keep all this together. If it is a long discussion, you might even dedicate a (sub)section to this, using sectioning to have it hang together.

In LaTeX/BibTeX I use the plain citation style, which gives a unintrusive [42] only. But that is major surgery...


What do I put for my affiliation on a paper when I have none I have been asked by a journal to provide my affiliated university. The assumption is that I am a professor or researcher. I work in industry and spend my non-working hours doing research. What is a common way to handle this problem?

It depends upon your specific company. At one extreme, your company might not want you publishing anything, even if your research has nothing to do with their work (as an example, read about the story of Gosset who used the pseudonym "student"). At the other extreme, your company might be happy with you publishing and listing their company as your affiliation. Or, your company might be somewhere in between and be okay with you publishing, but not listing them as your affiliation. I would ask around or see what other people do at your company in a similar situation.

Also, you say you did the research on your own time, however, your company may still be able to prohibit you from doing any research, even on your own time. You would need to read the fine print on your contract or employee handbook to answer the specific question: "May I publish while working for company X?".

Last, I have seen authors that simply list their home address either because they are retired, unemployed, or in a situation similar to yours. See these similar posts:

Author without institutional or professional affiliation
What to put in "affiliation" field when submitting paper without affiliation?


Having my first supervision soon, but I have nothing to tell or even ask I have my first supervision soon, but I don't really know what to talk about. I am working on a particular problem in the Humanities; my supervisor has given me a reading list, and well, I am currently working through it. I haven't come up with any novel ideas so far, but I also cannot think of any questions to ask her. I have not encountered any problems, but I am also not far enough to have anything written, or a table of contents ready.

What shall I do? What does my supervisor expect from me now? Obviously you won't know, but maybe you can guess? I am quite worried.

I would guess that your supervisor simply wants to stay in touch, in general. I am in mathematics, but/and in early stages and even during their thesis-writing, my students often have said that they have no coherent questions, nothing to show, etc. In recent years I've attempted to more forcefully make the point that our weekly meetings are not at all necessarily about "good questions" (in math, the usual joke is that to be able to ask a good question is often more difficult than proving a good theorem...) nor about "progress". Rather, it's to stay in touch, chat about the project and related matters. Often, by-the-way questions come to light, often disclaimed as "dumb", but these are really the only questions anyone every has, and mostly I can answer them.

In a subtler way, "chatting" about things related to your project, or even only very distantly related, helps your advisor get to know you in that context. Very-experienced people can make a lot of high-likelihood inferences from details of casual technical conversation.

Also, there's the pep-talk aspect. Assuming things are going even approximately alright, your advisor has that opportunity to encourage you, or reassure you, etc. For that matter, especially later, it may become rather difficult for you to see whether you're making good progress, or not. After all, you've not written sooooo many theses? In contrast, presumably your advisor has seen many examples, and can reassure you that, yes, everything really does take this long, even when one works very hard.


How can one join the Royal Society of Chemistry as an AMRSC (or MRSC) without a referee? The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is an amalgam of what used to be many different societies, and has a long and rich history going back to Faraday (who incidentally, never received any degree), and it is considered a learned society, like the ACS in the USA, of which I am a long-standing member.

I have perused the RSC website extensively and I possess the necessary education and experience to join as a Associate Member, but one of the requisites when completing the application is that I name a referee, optimally someone who is already a member.

I do not know anyone who is a member as I live in the U.S.A. and simply have not crossed paths with such a person who would know me well enough.  I am aware there are offices in the US (Philadelphia) and there is not categorical statement that you must be of a certain nationality, so how do "Americans" apply?

Does anyone know how this process works?

From the help page of the Royal Society of Chemistry:

  Who can be a referee for my membership application?

  Preferably a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, however if you
  do not know a member who can act as referee, a member of a similar
  professional body can provide a reference. In some cases, a reference
  from a senior colleague, for example, your line manager or head of
  department will be acceptable.


Can I use a section title from another paper as my paper's title? I recently read a paper which had a really interesting section with a very interesting title. I google'd it and it seems that they just made it up and it's not a common term.
Can I title my paper that? I will mention in the introduction that x et al. calls this practice such and such and that's what we'll explore and expand in this paper.
I'm asking if it is allowed, but also if it is not frowned upon etc. It's sort of an homage & it's a catchy title.
Thank you.

General advice is hard here, not knowing the specifics. If the title actually represents an intellectual contribution, then probably not. But if it is just language cleverness there is likely no harm, but a note on the origin would be appropriate.
For example "Differentiation, As She Is Played" is probably just a tricky pop culture reference and has no intellectual content, so safe enough. With apologies to Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics fame and who plays that game occasionally


What is the duration between a conference and its online proceedings? I recently attended an IEEE conference and presented some work. Empirically, how long does it take for my paper to appear online?

On both: live chat and the FAQs, I got the response that it may take several weeks. That is less than useful. What is the average duration in general?

  How long does it take for conference proceedings to be loaded in IEEE
  Xplore?

  IEEE publishes more than 1,300 leading-edge conference proceedings in
  electrical engineering, computer science, and related fields each
  year. Conference proceedings appear in IEEE Xplore approximately 30 to
  60 days following receipt of the content by IEEE. Please note that
  conference proceedings often arrive at IEEE several weeks after the
  conference date. To view the status of a conference, download the IEEE
  Xplore conference proceedings title list (options at bottom of the
  page).

Depending on the particulars of production on both the conference side and the IEEE side, you should expect anywhere from a few weeks to six months.  Both the IEEE and the conference staff can introduce delays here (I was recently publication chair for a conference whose proceedings were delayed by five months by the IEEE simply because they kept dropping the ball).

Note, however, that the IEEE allows authors to put a copy of their own work online.  This means that you can make your own work accessible much more quickly, and can often find PDFs of the works other others as well, well before the official version appears in IEEE Xplore.


Publication - discovered an error in the proof of theorem which the referees have not spotted, what to do? I have finished my Phd in maths shortly. A few days ago, I have heard a revision decision from a very good journal where I submitted my paper. The comments from referees are generally fairly positive, and are not too difficult to address. However, I have found a mistake in a theorem proof,  which the referees have not spotted. This mistake is difficult to fix, or may be unfixable. The theorem is the extension of the main result of the paper. I assume it is not an important result, as there are no comments or revisions from referees on this part. Then how to write to the referees to address this issue? I imagine it would annoy both the referees and the editor. When I am going to submit the revision, is it better to remove the wrong theorem or to keep it there? Many thanks.

You absolutely have to advise the editor and referees of the error, and either correct or remove the erroneous part.  It doesn't matter how much it annoys them, or even if it leads to the rejection of your paper.  Keeping it there would be totally unacceptable and unethical.

Just tell the editor straight out:

"I discovered an error in the proof of Theorem 1.2.3.  It does not seem to be fixable, so this theorem should be removed from the paper.  The rest of the paper is unaffected [assuming that it actually is]."

The editor will probably ask the referees to re-review the paper with this information.  It might change their decision, or it might not.  But even if it gets rejected, that's something you just have to live with: fix the paper and submit it somewhere else.

You seem to be assuming that the referees noticed the error but decided not to say anything about it in their review.  I doubt that.  It's far more likely that they didn't notice it at all.  Referees are humans and not omniscient gods, and just because they overlook an error does not mean it is okay to publish it.


Request for additional documents for faculty position I applied for a faculty position about two months ago through an online system for a university. For some reason, I did not receive any email on a request (apparently from the search committee) to upload additional documents. In fact, I had not been asked to upload these documents (teaching evaluation, unofficial transcripts and two more publications) during the initial submission but they just asked for a cover letter, research stat, teaching stat, CV and two publications.

My question is that does it mean I have been shortlisted? I should note that the recommendation letters were (and have not been) asked (yet). They have indicated in the ad that the letters will be asked for the semi-finalists.

They indicated that they would request reference letters for semi-finalists.

They have not requested your recommendation letters (yet).

Therefore, you are not a semi-finalist (yet).


Is it possible to become a professor in a field where you don't have a PhD degree? I am a economics major student who will be applying for PhD programmes pretty soon. I am quite interested in economics, but I find myself even more interested things related to probability theory, such as stochastic processes. And if I ever get into a econ PhD programme, I'm pretty sure that I should be looking for co-advising from the math/statistics department if allowed.

So I am curious about what happens in academia if you ever find yourself more interested in a topic that you don't have a degree on. If you can write some good papers during your PhD, can you find good career opportunities in that field in academia even if you did not start out as a "professional" scholar in that field?

Any idea would be very much appreciated!!

Yes, it is possible to cross over between different fields following the PhD-level studies. However, in general, this tends to be more applicable to "interdisciplinary" fields that can fall into multiple disciplines. For instance, the engineering department I studied at hired people with PhD's in applied mathematics and physics, because their research fields—in fluid mechanics and interfacial science, respectively—meshed well with the research interests of the department.

To give a counterexample, however, it will be much harder to make the case for a high-energy physics person to move into another discipline, just because it is so strongly identified with physics.

Thus, if you have a PhD in a field such as mathematical economics or econometrics, it will be a lot easier to make the lateral shift. However, if you're in a more "traditional" subfield, that move becomes much more challenging.


Should my SOP be a narrative of all the events in my life that lead me to develop my research interest? I am applying to a master's degree in computer science and while writing my SOP I see two options:

I participated in a bunch of competitions, read a bunch of papers, worked with a senior scientist and produced a draft of a paper which is about to be published. These are all chronological events. Should I describe each one of these events in a separate paragraph and explain what I have learnt from these that caused me to develop a research interest?
Should I just directly mention all the events very briefly in 5 ~ 6 sentences and the next couple of paragraphs talk about the specific topics I am interested in conducting research in, without mentioning the motivation behind what got me interested in these topics.

While concluding I would like to mention few specific faculties whose work fascinates me. I would like to describe the works of few particular faculty members which I would like to work under(Possibly have them as my thesis advisor if it is fine by them).

Are either of these two options fine or which one should I choose preferably? Also how the should overly narrative(Tone and everything) of a SOP be?

To answer your top-level question:
Absolutely not.
Your statement of purpose should be an account of what you want to do in graduate school, and your qualifications to undertake that research. Admissions officers do not want to read about everything you've done as a researcher since you were a child. Nor do we want a blow-by-blow account of your research career.
Instead, briefly summarize your history, and move on from there. The bulk of your essay should be what you plan to do, not what you've already done.


How do Universities deal with poor teaching? At one school I worked at the strategy for dealing with poor teaching was to get feedback from students around midterms. If the students criticism was strong enough the teacher was pulled from the class and replaced by someone else in the middle of the semester.

Naturally this led to administrative and departmental chaos when, at times, a handful of teachers would be shuffled in the middle of a semester.

I would like to know if this is common practice at other schools and if not, what mechanics do other schools have to support teachers struggling to perform well and ensure the quality of the courses assigned to them?

This is the first time (in 45 years) that I've heard of acting on a mid-term teaching review. Even a mid-term review is, I think, very rare. At least in the US. Students here usually provide a course evaluation at end of term and the department head is open to student complaints at any time, but I think that any formal system of supporting struggling teachers is also very rare. Prior to obtaining tenure, you are subject to being fired for poor teaching at many places. But, in general, it needs to be a pretty clear cut case for that to happen.

Instead, poor teaching is dealt with at the time of hiring and often as part of the tenure process, including at mid-tenure review. At most places, poor teaching is a mark against you, though at some universities a star researcher will still be hired. Such a person won't normally be put in a class room with novices, however, and teaching will be at upper levels where advanced students may be more able to deal with it.

Generally, though, if a major part of the job is teaching, you are expected to already be good at it in order to be hired. In many of the top research institutions where teaching isn't really expected of researchers, there is a special faculty track for teachers who handle much of the undergraduate program. These jobs can come with (eventual) tenure and a different set of responsibilities from those on the research track.

In many fields people are employed as TAs as part of the doctoral education and some of these positions involve actually teaching a course. Thus, you can get some experience teaching before entering the job market. That isn't universal, of course. If a TA turns out to be a poor teacher, they won't be put back in a classroom (one hopes, at least) and will be given other duties.

There are also, in some fields, special interest groups who hold conferences dedicated to teaching that subject: SIGCSE as part of ACM, for example, which holds several conferences per year. Here teachers can learn about the craft of teaching. But it is up to the individual, with encouragement from the administration, to participate in such things.


On obtaining references from people who don't know me in person but have cited my work I'll be applying for a few academic positions (both postdoc and permanent positions in Western Europe.) I've done my PhD in pure math (from the US) and subsequent postdocs mainly in use of machine learning in medical imaging and also partly in statistical machine learning (all were in Western Europe.)
I wrote to my PhD advisor regarding the above, who is familiar with my doctoral (pure math) work but isn't familiar with my recent work. While he'll still send the recommendations, he advised me that I should contact people who cited my work and ask them to see if they can write a recommendation.
I don't doubt my advisor's opinion, and I've deep respect for him as a mathematician, but the only thing that I'm asking myself is that if the above strategy will work outside pure math. While I was applying for pure math postdocs back in the day, it did work. But will it work for applied areas like medical imaging or statistical machine learning?
Thank you in advance!

Personally, I'd worry about this strategy for use for a permanent position. A bit less for another postdoc. Your papers speak for themselves without reinforcement by a letter writer except in, perhaps, exceptional cases.
I think the purpose of a letter of recommendation is to go beyond the product you produce and speak about your total fitness for a position. Someone who doesn't know you at all can hardly help you with that.
I'd guess that letters from postdoc PIs, for example, would be better, since you have worked with them.
Someone you know from conference contacts and who has used your work might also be (just) ok, since they can say something about you as a person. Even letters from someone like your old advisor who doesn't know your current work can fill in some blanks about what it would be like to work with you and how diligent you are in various necessary things.
Use the whole application to fill out a whole picture. If you overemphasize one part you will be neglecting other important parts.
If it were just your advisor and, say, two others who don't know you personally and haven't worked with you, then I'd really advise against it. One such letter might be ok if, for example, you've actually communicated with them in the past.


Careers at the National Research Council of Italy and difference from the university system What is the organization of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR)? In particular, I'd like to know

How does one get a position there? I assume there are public competitions (as for university positions), but I've never seen an announcement: Are they very rare or just not advertised as much?
What is the career progression in the CNR? I've seen people being called "Technologist", "Researcher", "Senior Researcher", and "Research Director" within them: What are the differences/seniorities/career progression mechanisms?
What are the other differences between an academic career at a university and at a CNR unit? In particular, in terms of teaching load, administrative tasks, and salary?

First, CNR is a giant entity with a hundred units, spread across all Italy, and with about eight-nine thousand researchers. It is therefore quite different from a university.

Yes, there are public competitions. All available calls can be found here. These calls are also published, like all public calls in Italy for whatever position, in the Gazzetta Ufficiale 4ª Serie Speciale - Concorsi ed Esami (in Italian).
In principle, technologist and researcher are two different paths. A technologist is a kind of senior technician. However, the distinction between the two paths is frequently fuzzy. For researchers, the career progression is Researcher (equivalent to an Assistant Professor in the university system), Senior Researcher (equivalent to an Associate Professor), and Research Director (equivalent to a Full Professor). For technologists, the career progression is Technologist, Senior Technologist and Technologist Director. You move from one level to another through competitions. These are all permanent positions.
CNR staff does not have any teaching duties, because it's a research only institution. Some researchers, though, are also affiliated to universities (and some CNR units are hosted by universities) and may teach classes. The salary between CNR and universities is about the same. Within CNR, also the salary between technologists and researchers, at equal level, is about the same. You can find details about the gross salary in these tables, which are however quite hard to interpret. The salaries for researchers can be found from p. 3 of the linked document. According to my understanding, the levels (abbreviated Liv. in the document) correspond to the positions: Liv III, Researcher; Liv II, Senior Researcher; Liv I, Research Director. The fascia corresponds to the number of years of employment: one starts from 1ª fascia, then after three years moves to 2ª fascia, after five more years to 3ª fascia and so on (the number of years between each fascia is reported in this page).


Editor-in-chief sent an email to resubmit my manuscript I've submitted an article to an Elsevier-based journal and after one month,
an email has been received from Editor-in-chief stating: "Please upload figures separately from manuscript and resubmit it as soon as possible".

What does the email mean?

What will occur after resubmission?

It means that you should resubmit the manuscript with figures separately, as it is probably stated somewhere in the journal's instructions for authors.

They probably cannot deal with the formatting otherwise, and depending on field and journal I would say that it is quite likely that your manuscript has not yet been reviewed, as stuff not living up to guidelines tends to go to the bottom of the pile.


What if the value cannot be accurate to one decimal place? I have read a lot of papers, and the tables they draw are accurate to one decimal place. But my data looks like this: 0.003% 12.736% 19.255 and so on. If it is accurate to one decimal place, 0.003% is zero. There are three more data in my table: 5.265*10^8  6.840∗10^4  2.213∗10^3 and their sum is 5.266∗10^8, but if I am accurate to one decimal place, it becomes 5.26∗10^8 6.84∗10^4 2.21∗10^3, their sum is 5.26∗10^8. The sum equals the first addend.
How precise should I be?

Thinking about data in terms of decimal places is misleading.  You should really be thinking about data in terms of the precision with which you know the values, also sometimes referred to as significant figures.
How precisely do you actually know those values? It is 12.736% because you actually have enough data to say that it is accurate to one part in 100,000, or is it because of something like Excel defaulting to three decimal places?
You need to figure out the amount of error in your measurements, and once you know that, then the answer to your questions will be clear.


How can I run a keyword search that targets only papers resulted from industry or industry-sponsored research? I want to know -- if there is a way -- how I could customize my keyword searches to target research papers or other research artifacts generated by industry or industry-sponsored research?

In particular I am interested in Software Engineering. I have access to Google Scholar, Web Of Science, and Scopus so if there's a way to do this in either of these systems that I would love to hear it.

A proxy would be to search by affiliation (link to Scopus doc, probably feasible with other tools). List companies working in the topic and search papers with at least one author affiliated to them, or possibly with the company name in text (acknowledgements).
This will miss companies you did not think about and those with weird affiliations (for instance if "Foobar Inc." has a research division "FB new stuff", the affiliation does not include the string "foobar").


Why reference articles from and/or submit articles to low impact factor journals? I recently read this FAQ that explains a bit about impact factors. After reading, I was curious... what would be some reasons why researchers would use papers from a low-impact factor journal, say, a journal with IF = 1?

Wouldn't all researchers concentrate their efforts on starting their literature search from the highest impact factor journals, and then develop their new work on this basis?  That seems logical to me and also most beneficial to a researcher's career in academia.

What would be some reasons why researchers would use papers from a low-impact factor journal, say, a journal with IF = 1?

Researchers use papers that are relevant to their research, regardless of where they've been published. Being published in a less prestigious journal doesn't mean the result is less true - it usually means the paper is seen as less significant, usually because the authors/referees/editors think fewer people will be interested in the result.

But sometimes those people are wrong, and a paper is more significant than it appeared, and sometimes the paper may be obscure but it has exactly the thing you need for the work you're doing.

(Also, IF values vary dramatically by field.  The top journals in my subfield have impact factors between 0.6 and 0.7, so an impact factor of 1 doesn't sound low-impact to me at all.)

  Wouldn't all researchers concentrate their efforts on starting their literature search from the highest impact factor journals, and then develop their new work on this basis? That seems logical to me and also most beneficial to a researcher's career in academia.

No, they wouldn't.  Indeed, if everyone else were doing that, a researcher could get a big advantage by being the only person mining paper published in low impact-factor journals for ideas that other people were overlooking.  In my experiences, researchers skim pretty broadly, looking for papers that might suggest new ideas or ways to advance their work, and I've never heard of anyone restricting their reading to the journals with higher impact factors.


How important is it for the corresponding author to be known in the field he/she is going to publish? How important is it for the corresponding author to be known in the field he/she is going to publish? Is the academic position of the corresponding author influential? How about the co-authors?

Getting a paper accepted for publication in a normal journal is a matter of credibility: you must be able to convince the peer reviewers that the content of your paper is both true and novel.  Very high status journals such as Nature or Science work somewhat differently: there you cannot reach the peer reviewers until you first convince the editor that your work is "important" and "broadly interesting" enough to consider, which is a somewhat arbitrary process.

Let us consider only normal journals, however, where the bulk of all publication takes place: they still have an editorial filter, but it is generally only to ensure a submission is at least vaguely on-topic, not plagiarized, and basically sane.  These are pretty low bars to pass, though they are definitely affected by being known.  If I see a paper that has come out with a well-known PI as author and that looks like a logical extension on their prior work, I'm unlikely to scrutinize carefully for being on-topic or sanity: it would be such a blow to the reputation of the PI to misbehave there that I am comfortable to take the small risk that the reviewers might get annoyed because the paper turns out to actually be crazy or off-topic.  Not being known won't generally hurt an author here, it will just mean their paper is more likely to actually get checked for topic and sanity, rather than simply trusted.

The peer reviewers are another matter.  Peer review is a very noisy process, and even when double-blinding is used, it is often possible to have a good idea when a well-known person is involved based on the methods that they are using.  Most peer reviewers are conscientious and try to do a good and neutral job, but a (frustrating) minority are sloppy, selfish, pushing an agenda, or abusive.  Even for those who are trying to do a good job are human and thus are subject to same standard cognitive flaws we all are, like implicit bias.

All of this means that an unknown's credibility will likely be assessed differently than a person who is well-known as a good and careful researcher. The unknown person will generally either have to present stronger evidence to be believed or will have the evidence that they do present scrutinized more carefully.  That unknown will actually be better off, though, than a well-known person who has a history of sloppy or controversial work, who will typically have an even harder time convincing peer reviewers.

Do not draw the wrong lesson from this, however: a person most certainly can publish well as an unknown, early in their career, without relying on the name recognition of co-authors.  Many of us do exactly that.  It's just going to be somewhat harder than after one has already established a reputation as a careful and productive researcher.

Final note: if you ever find yourself saying "They only rejected my paper because I'm not [well-known / popular / one of the cool kids / etc]" then you are probably wrong and engaging in sour grapes kvetching.  If they rejected your paper, then you should also have been provided with clear information about what types of evidence would improve your ability to get accepted.  Do that instead.


How to cite the same source multiple times in a row IEEE I have several sentences in a row that that cite the same source.  For example,

Here is question one [1].  Here is question two [1].  Here is question three [1][myOriginalWork].  Here is question four [1].

What is the proper way to cite this using IEEE?  Do I cite my use of the source each time or do I cite it just once at the end of all my references to this source?  I don't think that citing each of my references to this one source is the way to go, but at the same time I have other sources mixed in and I want to make sure that credit is given where its due.

This is somewhat of an open ended question about citing the same source multiple times using IEEE.  I am just learning the style and want to make sure that I am using it correctly

Thanks in advance for any help.

According to this guidance document (See page 7) on the IEEE website it appears that you do should the following when citing the same source multiple times in a row.

  References Within a Reference:

  Check the reference list for ibid. or op. cit.
  These refer to a previous reference and should be eliminated from the reference section. In text, repeat the earlier reference number and renumber the  reference section accordingly. If the ibid. gives a new page number, or other information, use the following forms:

  [3, Th. 1]; [3, Lemma 2]; [3, pp. 5-10]; [3, eq. (2)]; [3, Fig. 1]; [3, Appendix I]; [3, Sec. 4.5]; [3, Ch. 2, pp. 5-10]; [3, Algorithm 5].

  NOTE: Editing of references may entail careful renumbering of references, as well as the citations in text.

On the same page (7) of the document in the section referring to references it states that;

  ... they appear on the line, in square brackets inside the punctuation

It would appear from this guidance note that the example that gave is correct unless you are referring to different pages of the same document then you need to reference as per form above.

Also the IEEE document says that you may refer to The Chicago Manual of Style, published by the University of Chicago Press, for anything not covered in their own guide.


Is it appropriate to contact professors after application submission? I have applied to PhD programs in engineering in the US. I have been early in applying to most programs (deadlines range from mid-December to mid-January). I have not contacted any professors prior to applying, as I have been told by many that it would largely be a waste of time. Instead I reached out to several grad students and read/skimmed through many recent published papers by faculty. In my statement of purpose, I talked about at least two professors that I thought had interesting topics for research and why they interested me. I tailored this part of the statement for each program.

My question is, is it appropriate to contact faculty post application submission? I would like to say hello, let them know that I have applied and that I would be interested in working with them if I am fortunate enough to get in, and ask them to keep me in mind if they are looking for students.

I thought it might be a good idea to just put myself out there. Who knows? Maybe they'll recognize my name once they start going through applications and give it another good look. But I also do not want to annoy them. I recognize that these professors are busy and that they get many of these emails every day. I want to be considerate of their time too. I also do not want to come across as being arrogant or silly or needy..

What is your expert advice? Would you recommend that I sit tight? With my application already out of my hands, I understand that there is nothing I can do now to improve my chances. But I am always hoping. Thanks in advance for your advice!

After reading some of the other reponses to your questions, I feel I need to give you fair warning that we receive tons of these emails, many of them obviously scripted (e.g., my name is in different font, the area described is irrelevant to me, for female faculty the email starts with "Dear Sir," etc.) My default reaction is to delete. Mind you, this is not to say your email would be like this, I'm just letting you know what you're up against.

The only emails that I try to pay attention to are of two types:

1) There's something obviously strong about you by just quickly scanning your email: You are an undergraduate student from a top school, or your grades are super-strong, or you've done some interesting research, or it's obvious that you've read some paper of mine and have legitimate comments about it.

2) Your subject line reads: "Undeterred prospective student." This is actually at the bottom of my info page for prospective students, which is linked to prominently on my home page. The vast majority of email requests I receive is from students that didn't bother to read it, so when I get an email with that subject I make a point of looking at it.

This is irrespective of when I receive your email; in fact, one could argue that the closer to the review period, the better.


Can you list a "last-minute" invited talk on your CV? A session at an annual professional society meeting that I regularly help to organize includes an "invited" talk to anchor the session. Some years, the invited speaker is unable to attend the meeting (due to illness, travel problems, etc.). If we are able to arrange a last-minute substitute speaker to fill the time slot (rather than canceling it and risking losing the audience to other parallel sessions), would that speaker be able to list the talk as an "invited" talk on her CV, even though it's not been advertised or listed anywhere?

Why not? Of all the possible people to give the (new) talk, you invited that person, and even trusted them to give a good talk on short notice!


What are the pros and cons of laptops in a classroom? I simply could not pay attention in a lecture if I brought in a laptop. I always take notes by hand, especially since that's supposed to be better for learning.

A professor of mine stated that laptops are distracting to other students and moved them all to the left part of the lecture hall.

I'm curious, what are the pros and cons of using laptops in a lecture, from both a note taking and teaching perspective?

I would like to teach someday and I can see myself banning laptops (I also hate the typing noise but that's just me).

I think due to increasing lecture sizes, and in complex or technical courses, having something like a tablet or laptop is considerably useful!

There's something to be said of classroom etiquette, however, in that not everyone is equally courteous. Some big no-no's for most of my lecturers were:

(1) No recording via the built-in camera, especially without permission, and no holding things up and taking photos. People learn in different ways, but we have to standardize the classroom somewhat, because not everyone can idly sit by and concentrate while 10-20 people are holding up their tablets, taking flash photos, or doing something otherwise weird/distracting to copy lecture notes.

(2) If you have the slides up on your personal device, make sure it's the only thing you have up unless otherwise specified. No one wants to see someone elses Youtube, Facebook, etc. during the lecture.

Beyond that it is distracting to hear the tapping of many keyboards vigorously trying to take notes all-at-once. I think that these people do themselves a disservice by taking word processor notes, however, and that to a great extent hand-writing the notes even if you have a personal device helps to enrich you in the material. My personal method was laptop set to slides, write notes on paper. But again, not everyone learns the same way. At that, for some complex courses I constantly search terms I didn't understand or concepts I might have forgotten about so I don't get utterly lost in the process. To me this decreases the amount of hand-raising and review questions.

I think that having some ground rules, and a little talk about common courtesy in the beginning of the term is good. It's penalty enough for some people to get called out for being discourteous in front of the class, so a ban? Perhaps not. And like I said in the beginning, lecture sizes are up there and not everyone has choice hearing/vision, so laptops/tablets help supplement those people who can't see the presentation or can't hear the lecturer.


Private company using my dissertation Context: I work for a small private company in the US energy sector. Recently, my colleague found an application opportunity for the tool I developed as my PhD dissertation. We tested it out with a public utility to great success, and it's getting some press. There is a high likelihood of future business.

Lack of citation: The company is trying to represent the work as a "Company Project" and they have removed all citations and mentions of me individually. I am worried that if I leave the company at some point, they will continue using my science, continue not crediting me, and I will feel cheated, even though I brought up the idea of using it while working here.

Lack of public voice: In addition, I was told all press contact must go through our Marketing department, even though I have been contacted independently by journalists that saw me present this project / my science at conferences earlier this year. I am not supposed to speak with them, and instead redirect them to our Marketing group. I find this very odd.

Question: On one hand, I am an employee of this company where the project was carried out. On the other hand, I did not develop the tool while in this role - I developed it as a PhD student five years earlier. I feel that because of this, I should receive due credit. The company doesn't own my dissertation knowledge - or do they? What should I do?

I think that your best bet is to contact the IP department at the academic institution where you did your PhD:

They can inform you about your rights concerning the work you did there as a student
Potentially it's also in their interest to get credited for the work done by their PhD students, so they might be your ally in case there is a legal case.

Edit (addition):
Alternatively, you could try to negotiate internally with your company, they might be open to offering you something. But in this case you wouldn't be in a strong position, so it depends how you think the company might react.