Are universities run more and more like businesses? What are the consequences? I watched an episode of "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" called "Is College Still Worth It?"
In there the point was made, with ample evidence, that universities are increasingly resembling businesses with dire consequences for the professors. The amount of tenure-track professors is steadily declining while the amount of low-paid, adjunct professors, who are seemingly abused by the institution, is increasing.
I am a graduate student in mathematics and I am getting close to finishing my degree. It was always my dream and intention to go into academia and contribute original research to the fields I am interested in: Differential Geometry and Mathematical Physics.
After watching this episode and witnessing for myself what being in academia is like, I am actually considering other options. Now, my question is, how many other academics have seen and are upset by the way academia is going in terms of being run like a business? How are you handling it? Or do you think it's not really a big deal? Any advice for someone who wants to do pure math research for a living but doesn't want to be tied to a university? Or are my options rather limited?
As brought up in a comment, this show and my experience are referring to US universities but I am interested in hearing anyone's perspective on it. I can imagine similar situations might be faced by academics in other countries.
I would like to emphasize what I see as the important parts of this question. People are mainly addressing the title, which is only part of the story. How are you handling this situation? How is effecting your work/life? Are you okay with this, as a professor/instructor/person in academia?
Here is an article that nicely describes what I am talking about with a good amount of evidence. I am sure there are counter-viewpoints. I am posting this to clarify that I am not talking about universities simply covering their costs: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/156375

I'm not going to answer your career questions, but just the title whether universities are run like businesses:
Over the past 20 years (with longer roots), universities have largely been stripped of the substantial state contributions that have financed operations before then. It used to be the fact that states funded the majority of university expenditures because (i) that provided an education for the young people of the state at a small cost, and (ii) the research done at universities translated into state-of-the-art knowledge in the state that led to highly educated students, start-up companies, companies that want to have offices in the state because they needed that knowledge, etc. In return for these state contributions, universities were run in a manner that had the welfare of the state as its top concern -- which includes a focus on education and research. Both provided great flexibility to faculty as long as they reasonably looked towards the bigger goals.
But states no longer provide that money for a variety of mostly political reasons: For example, my own university now receives less than 10% of its budget from the state of Colorado. This comes with consequences:

We rely on student tuition for much more substantial part of our revenue, and so keeping students happy is an important consideration (whether they deserve it or not).
We rely on out-of-state student tuition to a much larger degree because the out-of-state tuition rate is not subject to political pressure that universities are still subject to despite the fact that the state no longer provides a substantial part of the budget. To attract out-of-state students, they need to be treated like the customers of a business.
We rely on Federal and private research dollars much more than we used to. There is substantially greater pressure on faculty to bring in these research dollars than there used to be.

So when people say "universities are run like businesses today", what they really mean in some sense is that there is greater pressure on paying attention to students ("customers") and to go after research grants than there used to be. One can complain about that all day long, but the reality is that that is in large parts a function of how the income sources of universities have shifted, and what the expectations of those who provide this income are today (students, research funders: wanting to get a good education/research product for their money) in comparison to what they were 20 years ago (states: wanting to benefit the welfare of the state's population). The issue that professors complain about is that the expectations that come with these new sources of revenue are not aligned with what faculty like to do: research and teach.
All of this is not to say that there aren't other issues that also fall under the "operate like a business" category and that are much less driven by external factors. Among these are administrator salaries, for example, and I think that for that there really is no good reason why they should be as high as they are.


My colleague *may* have forged data. Any advice? We are about to submit a revised manuscript for publication in a prestigious journal. This is a team work and one of my colleague performed most of the molecular biology experiments, including many electrophoreses.

I just noticed that on one of these electrophoreses, if play around with the contrast etc., some bands are surrounded by a rectangle with a different background as if the image had been assembled.

When pointed this weird detail (without making accusations) and asked where that came from, he said something along the lines of "wrong image, my mistake", and sent me a different gel later on (without this weird signal).

Now, I can easily imagine how one may accidentally mislabel an image, but I have a really hard time imagining how one can accidentally copy-paste signal from one image to another. I am now concerned about the validity of all the work that was performed by this teammate. Not only that experiment, but also graphs etc.; while I have no further evidence of weird results, I am now suspicious of anything that was produced by this person.

The deadline for sending our revisions is in a few weeks, and the experiments performed by this teammate are both 1) too tedious to be repeated within the next few days, and 2) too important to be removed from the paper.

I am afraid that if I bring this up with our PI (who is good friends with this colleague), and if my colleague finds a way to talk himself out of this, I would be seen as the "team breaker" and have a really bad time for the rest of my graduate studies in this laboratory.

How should I approach this, and with who?

Talk to your PI and/or colleague. It might be wise to start with something less confrontational than the "I think [Colleague] may have forged data", however. Maybe "hey, I still want to understand what was going on with that figure. Perhaps other figures might be affected too? What do you think?".

Best case scenario, there is a convincing answer that can calm your nerves. There are a whole slew of other worse possible scenarios that can follow from this discussion, but they're all better than finding out after publication that your suspicions were correct. As for the revision deadline, it can likely be extended if need be. It'd be up to the editor, but I imagine few prestigious journals would say no to a reasonable extension request to double check something important.


How do I apply for a PhD position via email? Should I read papers written by prospective advisors beforehand and write about it? I am a master degree student. I am keen to join a PhD program under a mathematician in a university in France or Luxembourg. I found that in the webpage it is written that I should send an email with my research interests to the faculty. I have some questions regarding those. My questions are as follows:

Do I need to read research papers of the faculty before sending the email and in the email should I include that I have read his/her paper (or some parts of it)?
How should I write the email?

You should look at some of the professor's recent papers so that you can get a sense of what they're currently working on, and whether it is of interest to you. However, I do not think it is necessary to refer to specific papers when you first email the professor. Far too often when people do this, they end up giving a negative impression: it rapidly becomes clear that they haven't actually read the paper in detail, or have misunderstood its content.
Keep it brief: a sentence or two on who you are (what/where you've studied), a sentence or two on what you're asking for (Their suggestions for a project? Funding? Are you hoping to start immediately, or at some point in the future?), and a sentence or two on the general research area(s) that interest you. If you have already written a masters thesis or similar, put it online somewhere and include a link.


Is there a web service that receives a reference and returns the impact factor? Is there a web service that I can send a bibtex entry and receive an impact factor?

e.g.

http://magicalsite.com/query.php?json={MY_BIBTEX}

returns:

{
'IF':37.65
}

So I figured it out...

I use http://www.impactfactorsearch.com which is proposed in this answer.

Here's a quick and easy PHP script to get the impact factor of any journal:

<?php
$name        = "Applied Ocean Research"; //change to suit your needs
$journalName = urlencode($name);

$cmd      = "curl -s 'http://www.impactfactorsearch.com/test.php?json=true&input=$journalName'";
$result   = `$cmd`;
$ifObject = json_decode($result);

$levDistances = array();
if (isset($ifObject->results)) {
    if (is_array($ifObject->results) && (sizeof($ifObject->results) > 0)) {
        foreach ($ifObject->results as $journal) {
            $levDistances[$journal->value] = array(
                'score' => similar_text($journal->value, $journalName),
                'if' => $journal->id
            );
        }
        arsort($levDistances);
        $keys         = array_keys($levDistances);
        $impactFactor = doubleval($levDistances[$keys[0]]['if']);
        echo "journal: " . $name . "\n";
        echo "if: " . $impactFactor . "\n";
    }
}
?>

I recommend you to search the publisher of the impact factor's website which indexes the journals or even the journal's websites themselves in which their IF is written. However, if I want to answer your question; I found one website which may help you the way you want to search for impact factors.

I searched over the net and only found Impact Factor Search website in which you have to enter the journal's full title (seems simpler than uploading the bibtex information) and by clicking on the provided link, a search list will appear to you. You then have to choose the name of the journal you want to get information about and in the output's window you will have the following information:

JOURNAL NAME:

ABBREVIATION:

IMPACT FACTOR 2013:

The website currently prints the most up-to-date IF, for the year 2013, and is ready to support IF for the year 2014 too as the latest data become available .


Do US Universities commonly offer admission without funding? I am offered governmental scholarship (GSch) that I do not want to use for some reasons. I also don't want to lose the chance of PhD in a top university. I would use GSch, if I cannot get funded admission from a top university. Please read my previous question for more explanation of my situation.

My question is that do universities offer an admission without funding? So that, then I will have a chance to say 'I have another source of funding. Let me do PhD there'. For example, will I know I am in the waiting list? Do they put all the rejected students in the list?

Or should I mention about the GSch at the first place? or maybe I should mention it only in applications of some universities.

Would I loose a good acceptance chance of mentioning at the first place, if I wait for rejection/waiting list decision?

Tough to predict how it will be handled with certainty. You could list the scholarship but then say in your SoP something along these lines: "I've earned in fact (a prestigious?) scholarship from my home government which would allow me to... however it comes with a requirement  that... which frankly I'd prefer not to commit to. Thus I would much rather be admitted with financial support from the university, in which case I would turn down the government scholarship."

For highly ranked research universities, I'd say it is not common for Ph.D. students to be self-funded. That said, if they can grab a strong student who is self-funded, what's not to like? :)


How do weekly seminar speakers get picked by a STEM department? When there's a weekly seminar in a STEM department that professors and grad students attend, how are these speakers given slots?
Are they invited?  By whom?
Can they apply to speak at some weekly seminar, e.g. apply to give a math talk at Harvard?
Do the seminar speakers then get their airfare and hotel paid for by the department's own budget?

As has been noted, everywhere will have its own procedures, but I think my department is fairly typical of what I've seen elsewhere:

One or two junior faculty are responsible for organising the main seminar series
Every few months they solicit suggestions for seminar speakers from the other faculty. Nominations come in different forms, e.g.:

"I think Prof. Jones work is cool, we should invite her sometime"
"Prof. Jones is going to be visiting me for two weeks in March, perhaps she could give a talk"
"Prof. Jones emailed me to say she's going to be in our state for that conference in May, maybe we could get her up here too?".

The seminar organisers then try and assemble a programme, balancing many factors (breadth of topics, speaker availability, diversity considerations, political clout of nominator...)
The department expects to pay some travel and a night or two's accommodation for anyone scheduled in the main seminar series. Sometimes speakers will decline this (e.g. if they were in town anyway); sometimes individual faculty will supplement it (e.g. to enable someone to stay for a whole week).

In addition to this main seminar series, individual faculty members may arrange 'special seminars'. Typically this occurs when someone happens to be visiting for other reasons, and there isn't a convenient empty slot in the main seminar series. Special seminars may not be as widely-advertised or attended as the main series. Any costs are typically borne by the hosting faculty member (out of their grants/etc), rather than the department (but they are often minimal, as the speaker was invariably in town anyway).
I think it is pretty uncommon to specifically offer to contribute to the department's main seminar series. However, it is very common to contact acquaintances with messages like "Hi Prof Smith, I'm going to be in town next month. If you have time, it would be nice to catch up and I can show you my new proof of the Basketweaver Theorem. Of course, I'd be happy to make it into a talk!". In such circumstances, you should not then expect any reimbursements, though often you will at least get taken out for lunch/dinner.


Can I have two system models in the same paper, for the same research? I am writing a paper in the field of telecommunication. I would distribute my paper into two parts. In the first (more general) part, the system performance for all mobile-phone towers is considered. Results derived from this part are used to study one particular mobile-phone tower. For the first part, I use probability over the entire region. For the second part, I only consider a single tower and revolve my study around it.

Question: Can I have two system models in the research paper with the explanation that I have given above?

Yes, you can. But be sure to follow the common structure of a scientific article. That means that you have to have 2 subsections at least on the procedure section (AKA materials and methods) as well as on the results section and on the results discussion. These sub-sections are those related to your 2 systems.
I would conclude about the paper as a whole. Also, be sure that your introduction states at the end the interest of studying two separate objects: if the first object is more general, is the idea to apply the methodology to a smaller system in order to validate it. Or is it the idea to get a generalization of the findings obtained for the smaller sub-system? Usually the latter is widely better accepted. In that case, you should put the smaller sub-system first.

I hope I have helped you,
Cheers,
Miguel Andrade
Mechanical Engineer,PhD


How to respond to a perplexing review? I've received a perplexing peer-review to a submitted paper of mine. The editor asks for major revisions, and sent us two reviews. The first one is serious and raises good points: we'll work, amend the manuscript and send a detailed reply to the editor.

The second reviewer, however, has a 3 (minor) weird questions, and his fourth is:

  The authors claimed that “[some sentence taken from the abstract]”. Please give more detailed explanations

where the sentence is actually a summary of our two-page “Results and discussion” section, i.e. the core of the paper.

I'm concerned that the second reviewer has actually not really read the full paper [1], and wonder what the best option to deal with it. I've come with the following ideas:

In the response to the editor, respond to this request by simply saying “This claim is backed up and discussed at length in section IV”.
Do not respond, but write to the editor saying I am concerned about whether the reviewer actually read the paper at all.
Try to do some editing and write an evasive response, like “We have edited the manuscript to improve the clarity of the discussion on this point”.

I want to take option #1, because I think the editor will read between the lines. I'd hate to badmouth the reviewer (option #2), or risk deteriorating the manuscript by silly editing (#3).

What's your take on this? Do you have advice or suggestions on how to act in this situation?

[1] I must say here that I started by doubting the clarity of our paper, first. Trying not to be overly defensive of my work! But after asking a friend a second opinion on it, he agrees with me that the review seems shoddy.

In my view:

Option 1 is fine. You are not required to do what a reviewer asks - if you choose not to do so you just need to explain why.

Option 2 is not a good idea. You are required to respond to every comment made by a reviewer, regardless if you agree or disagree.

Option 3 is also fine. This may be the safest bet - I am guessing you could probably even add a single sentence and the reviewer will almost certainly say its fine.

Probably both 1 and 3 are ok and will get you past this reviewer. You can also go for a combined strategy like: "We feel this claim is backed up and discussed at length in section IV. Nevertheless, we have edited the manuscript to improve the clarity of the discussion on this point."


Finding a PhD scholarship with a Second Class Lower Honors Hi I and a Student from Sri Lanka and I do have 2 Bachelors degrees one with a Class (2nd Class Honors) and another General degree. However I do wish to enroll to a PhD program, possibly in Australia. Is it possible to do so. I have studied mainly in the stream of Cyber Security.

I tried with applying for a few Universities and some hadn't replied as well. However one of my colleagues had received a scholarship for PhD with the same results.

Can anyone explain the feasibility of the things that I have mentioned about?

Unfortunately with your record. you have zero chance of getting an international student scholarship from Australia (formerly called "IPRS" and now "Australian Government Research Training Program International Fee Offset Scholarship").  Best to be realistic about this from the get go.

Equally, I cannot think of any academic who would be likley to provide a scholarship based on your record (low second class) and no evidence of research potential.  If you have a friend who did so, I think there must have been extraordinary circumstances (e.g. research publications) or else it was a very low tier university.

The only possibility you have is to get funding from Sri Lanka and then try to find a supervisor in Australia who will accept you.  This funding needs to have two parts - (1) money to pay the substantial fees that Australia charges overseas students and (2) money to support you living in Australia which is not cheap even living the student life.

The reality is that you are competing with people who have evidence of research capacity.  This comes usually through published papers.  If you have not done any research that is publishable in the past the options are to work in the literature and produce a review paper on a topic of broad interest.  This is a path that I have seen used successfully in the past.  Alternatively do you volunteer in a research lab, do you have experience in research procedures that you have developed through spending time in a research lab?

Without some evidence of a capacity for research, it's hard to be at all positive about your chances of achieving your goal.

Sorry to blunt!

Best wishes


I didn't ask permission before including figures in my thesis - now what? I used a number of figures from journal articles in my master's thesis. I cited the sources in all cases, but didn't ask permission (I didn't know at the time that I was supposed to). Many posts on this site recommend asking permission to be "better safe than sorry". In my case, the thesis is already published - should I ask for permission now, even after the thesis is published and for each of the figures?

I am not sure that one is supposed to ask permission to reproduce a picture from a book/article in their dissertation. From academic point of view, an citation is necessary and sufficient to properly acknowledge the source - otherwise it would be plagiarism.

IANAL, but I don't think there are any copyright issues here, since your thesis is a non-profit academic publication and a relatively small quote from another academic source should be normally treated as a fair use.


Should you conform to journal formatting requirements for the initial submission? In my past experiences, I have almost never typeset my manuscripts according to the formats required by the journals to which I would like to submit. I leave my manuscripts as produced by the LaTeX article documentclass.

Recently I am wondering: Would such a behavior generally give handling editors a negative first impression?

I'll venture a minority opinion (I'm in mathematics, where the culture is very possibly different than in other fields).

As a referee, I have an instinctive negative reaction if I know that an author has taken the time and effort to conform to a particular journal's style. The grounds for this is that most journals employ typesetting staff for this purpose. Especially considering the very high price of many (if not all) journals, for authors to refuse to do this suggests to me a principled refusal to waste their time.

That said, I can see that many people hold the exact opposite opinion, and even that my own feelings may be a little bit silly. So I certainly don't actually hold this against authors when evaluating submissions. (Indeed, if I receive something formatted, I never know if it is the author or the editorial staff that has formatted it.)

My impression is that most (but maybe not all) mathematicians wouldn't hold it against you if you don't bother. Moreover I believe that most mathematicians in fact don't bother with such formatting guidelines.

I have never heard anyone voice @jakebeal's opinion before. Of course, counting the upvotes, he speaks for at least eight other people! You might take this as evidence that the answer to your question is dependent on what your field is.


Can my PhD thesis supervisor be a reviewer for my paper? I want to know whether my PhD thesis supervisor (with whom I have co-authored many papers) is allowed to be a reviewer for one of my journal submissions?

In many cases this would be inappropriate. PhD advisors are considered to have a permanent conflict-of-interest when it comes to their advisees.

Some conferences/journals relax this condition and allow for reviews from former collaborators if there has been no collaboration in the past 5-6 years (or some similar time window). You should check the rules around CoI for the particular journal if these are publicly available.

However: it is best to not have your PhD advisor listed as a potential reviewer. If the Associate Editor or Editor-in-Chief makes that call -- to have an advisor review the advisee's work -- it is a different matter but one should not rely on obtaining reviews from former advisors.


Paper get rejected despite positive recommendations from both reviewers I have submitted a paper to an IEEE conference before this. I received a rejection today despite the fact that, both reviewers recommend to accept my paper.

The reason for rejection is not mentioned at all in the email. I try to analyze the reason and from my point of view:

The paper is not out of the conference's scope. If my paper is out of scope, it should be rejected at the first place without sending out to be reviewed.
Both reviewers recommend to accept my paper.
The conference should have not received too many papers. This is because the deadline for submission has just been extended to 10 Nov. In other words, they continue to accept submission of papers at this point.

I was really surprise after I read the following email:

  Dear xxx:

  Unfortunately, your paper xxx for xxx has not been accepted for
  publication. We hope that you will find the reviews useful when
  revising your paper.

  The reviews are below or can be found at xxx.

  ======= Review 1 =======

  *** Originality: New or Novel contribution Strong Accept (10)

  *** Technical Contribution: Technical/Scientific Contribution, also consider papers that contributes to development of applications.
  Accept (8)

  *** Significance of Topic: Relating to knowledge contribution & conference scope (relevant to Science, Engineering & Technology)
  Strong Accept (10)

  *** Presentation: Clarity and Organisation of Content (Includes Language & Formatting) Accept (8)

  *** Recommendation: Overall view and recommendation Strong Accept (10)

  *** Detailed comments: What are the major issues addressed in the paper? Do you consider them important? What are the major reasons to
  accept or reject the paper? Comment on the degree of novelty,
  creativity and technical depth in the paper.[Be brief.]

  Please provide detailed comments that will be helpful to the TPC for
  assessing the paper, as well as feedback to the authors.

  The paper was reporting an original findings by the authors based on
  their simulation. xxx. I reckon it is of sufficient quality for the
  conference.

  ======= Review 2 =======

  *** Originality: New or Novel contribution Accept (8)

  *** Technical Contribution: Technical/Scientific Contribution, also consider papers that contributes to development of applications.
  Accept (8)

  *** Significance of Topic: Relating to knowledge contribution & conference scope (relevant to Science, Engineering & Technology)
  Accept (8)

  *** Presentation: Clarity and Organisation of Content (Includes Language & Formatting) Accept (8)

  *** Recommendation: Overall view and recommendation Accept (8)

  *** Detailed comments: What are the major issues addressed in the paper? Do you consider them important? What are the major reasons to
  accept or reject the paper? Comment on the degree of novelty,
  creativity and technical depth in the paper.[Be brief.]

  Please provide detailed comments that will be helpful to the TPC for
  assessing the paper, as well as feedback to the authors.

  Good paper and well written. Easy to understand. xxx.

I replaced some of the reviewers' comments with 'xxx' because it will reveal my unpublished works. Please believe me when I say they are all positive.

Has someone been in this situation before? What is the possible reasons for rejection?

This is a perfectly possible result.  The reviewers' recommendations are just that: recommendations.  The conference's scientific committee has the ultimate say over whether a paper is accepted, and they do not always follow reviewers' recommendations.

There may be quite legitimate reasons for a paper to be rejected despite positive reviews.  For example:

There might be an abundance of high quality submissions on the particular topic you submitted on (even if the deadline was extended because they didn't get enough submissions in other areas).
There still could be a scope issue.  Yes, a paper that is clearly out of scope should be rejected before it goes to review.  However, if the committee felt it was at the margins of acceptable scope, they might send it to review but ultimately reject it because the reviewers' comments weren't sufficient to overcome the scope problem.
The conference reviewers were generous.  It is hard to interpret the meaning of the reviewers' scores without seeing the distribution of all scores.  It is possible that the reviewers were really "nice" and scores tended to be high for everyone.  It is quite difficult for many people to give a negative decision when they know that someone else is going to see the result and be affected by it, so scores can tend toward the positive, and rejection recommendations may be rare.
There was some kind of rule preventing them from accepting it (This should have led to rejection before review, but it could have been missed.  Of course, they also should have told you the reason if this were the case).

You are correct, however, that this is a fairly unusual decision.  I think you ought to follow up and ask for clarification.  It would be helpful for you to know the reason for rejection, and there is always the chance that there was some kind of clerical error, as well.


How to apply to a prestigious American university as an international student? I am planning to do a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in the US, more specifically California, and recently started looking into potential Universities that offer a good physics programme. A number of questions came up.

I understand that an American Ph.D. program is very different from a European one in that it usually takes around 5 years to complete and involves coursework. If a master's degree was already obtained, do American universities allow for a more European style Ph.D. completed in around 3 years? Does a Ph.D. necessarily involve paying the university's tuition fees?
Ph.D. students in Europe are employed by their university, receive a monthly salary and don't pay tuition. Does this model exist in the US, i.e. is there any way to avoid paying tuition fees as a Ph.D. student?

I appreciate any helpful advice including to questions I did not ask but maybe should have.

I am planning to do a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in the US, more specifically California

Many American prospective graduate students limit their search with severe geographic restrictions.  I view this as being a poor investment in a future academic career, but if someone truly prioritizes being an easy drive from their family and childhood friends, that's certainly up to them.  If you are coming from abroad it makes no sense to me to concentrate your search in "California".  California has some excellent institutions, but certainly only a minority of the nation's best institutions are in California.  Moreover, if by chance you have family living in, say, Los Angeles, going to graduate school in San Francisco is not going to put you close enough to them to be helpful to you.

  I understand that an American Ph.D. program is very different from a European one in that it usually takes around 5 years to complete and involves coursework.

First of all, American PhD programs can take less than five years to complete -- though it is quite rare to see a student graduate in less than four -- and also more than five years to complete.  In my field (mathematics) the time to completion is certainly less than the overall average, but I think there are very few, if any, math PHD programs where the average time to completion is 5.0 years or less.  (I went to one of the top programs in the country.  I did graduate in five years, which was most common in my program.  I think though that more students took more than five years than less than five years.)

  If a master's degree was already obtained, do American universities allow for a more European style Ph.D. completed in around 3 years?

I think you may be misunderstanding the system slightly.  There are (virtually) no length requirements in American PhD programs.  You probably do have to complete a certain amount of coursework, but this is just what you would automatically get by spending 2-3 years in the program.  In most cases you can get "course credit" for your thesis work, so the amount of actual courses that PhD students take varies considerably and to a large degree is up to them.

Entering a PhD program with a master's degree makes much less of a difference in an American PhD program than you might think, and the better the program the less it matters.  For instance, I had a sort of "secret master's degree" in that I got it along with my bachelor's degree.  I don't think having this master's degree impacted my studies at all (except of course to convey that I had roughly equivalent training to the excellent foreign students who were admitted to the program).  At a certain point in our PhD program we "earned a master's degree" and could, with a little paperwork and a small fee, formally collect it.  I seem to recall a few people did that, perhaps to get a leg up on some summer job.  I already had one; I could have gotten another, but what PhD student needs two master's degrees in the same field?

My present PhD program (mathematics, UGA) is around the 50th best in the country, and things work differently.  Up until a few years ago having a master's degree was actually a formal disadvantage to our entering students in that it conferred one year less of guaranteed PhD funding.  But we observed that students with entering master's degrees were not in general better prepared than students without, so we rolled back that requirement a few years ago.  In this regard let me say: in the American system a master's degree is kind of a "no man's land": we have absolutely no agreed upon notion of what skills and work a master's degree should convey.  If you get a master's degree from a low quality institution, you are probably less prepared in every way than if you get a bachelor's degree at a solid institution.  Conversely, a master's degree at a pretty good institution is worth something: of my first four PhD students, they only one who graduated in five years came in with a master's degree from a good place.  This counted for something: in fact he started working with me in his first year in the program, whereas many PhD students spend a year or two or three entirely focused on coursework and exams with no research in sight.

  Does a Ph.D. necessarily involve paying the university's tuition fees?

Nooooooo.  As a good rule of thumb, if you are in a STEM field, you should not enroll in a PhD program unless your fees are being paid.

  Ph.D. students in Europe are employed by their university, receive a monthly salary and don't pay tuition. Does this model exist in the US, i.e. is there any way to avoid paying tuition fees as a Ph.D. student?

Yes!  Most PhD students in STEM fields not only do not pay tuition, but also receive a livable stipend (which is some combination of money for teaching, for research assistance and outright scholarship money).  There are some circumstances in which one might want to consider enrolling in a STEM PhD program without such a stipend, but they are the exception, and you should think very carefully before agreeing to this.


How important is number of publications and prestige of the publication outlets for getting a tenure-track job? More generally, what are the most important factors for getting a tenure-track job?

This anecdote suggests that number of publications and prestige of corresponding journals/conferences is not as important as people usually think:

  Summary data of the short list from a past search for an assistant professor in Psychology at the University of Virginia. For this particular search, more than 100 applications were received. The Table presents the 11 applicants that made it to the short-list. All short-list candidates had at least 4 publications and at least 1 first- authored publication. Based on publication numbers, there are clear stand-outs from this group such as the postdoc with 35 publications, an assistant professor with 21 publications, and a graduate student with 10 publications. Further, these candidates published in prestigious outlets. However, none of these three were selected as a finalist. In fact, two of the three interviewed candidates were among the least productive on the short-list.
  This anecdote suggests that some degree of publishing productivity is essential to get into the pool of competitive candidates but, after that, other factors are more important for getting the job. http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4251

The cynical interpretation of this anecdote is that the only thing that matters is whether A) you know someone and B) the committee happens to like your research topic. However in my experience what's more important is C) how high-quality the committee judges your research, together with it being on a promising topic. "Promising" is of course very subjective, and usually has something to do both with the topic being good science and its ability to get grants and yield interdisciplinary collaborations with others, including others in the department.

Unfortunately, people do get really downweighted for being in an area that doesn't mesh with the department or meet its needs. And those needs often aren't clear from the job ad.


Cheating during a test I took a test today morning and I saw that the person sitting next to me used her phone repeatedly, I believe it was to check the power point slides for answers. The fact that this student also asked me for the answer to a question before I left also raises my suspicious slightly.

I don't know this person. I decided not to report it this morning because I don't feel quite alright accusing anyone, at least not in person. I am tempted to send an anonymous email and explain what happened, although I don't think it will make any difference. I'm not happy at all with the incident, because the test wasn't exactly trivial and some of us might fail, while other people could pass simply copying the answers from their phone.

What should I do?

A good question!

There is not much you can do now. You cannot prove anything and can not even name the cheating person. If you think that explaining the situation can help the invilgator to make cheating less likely the next time, you should write them an anonymous email.

I've heard that there are some universities with so-called "honor codes" that tell you to report this - if this is the case for you, do absolutely report it (anonymously).


Benefits of taking postgraduate/PhD-level courses during Master's During my master's studies, so far, I have taken quite many postgraduate-level courses (i.e. courses that are accepted as a PhD-level course for a PhD student at my university). Some of these courses were a part of my degree requirement, so I was obliged to take them, but few of them were my personal choices to take them. I am now wondering if this can be a positive point in the future in my CV, e.g. when looking for a job. In the transcript of records, it is not indicated anyhow that those particular courses were postgraduate level, except for a "P" in front of their names and that's about it, so even if I send my transcript to someone they probably won't realize those courses are PhD level courses. So was it really worth the trouble to take such courses which mostly took me twice as much time to complete? I am not talking about things I have learned from these courses, but merely talking about their benefit in the future when applying for a job or PhD program?

While it might make a small difference, I doubt that you will get all that much benefit from the courses based on how they appear on your transcript, even if they are annotated with information about their level.  The simple reasons for this are that:

Courses cannot readily be compared from institution to institution, and
Even a high grade in a course doesn't really say anything about what you took away from it.

Instead, the main "resume" benefit you are likely to obtain from these courses is in their side-effects: higher-level graduate courses tend to give you opportunities that don't come in more stock courses, like doing significant projects (which sometimes even lead to publications!), giving class presentations, getting involved in research, getting to know faculty, etc.

Those are where I would recommend looking for benefit, and why it's often better to take less classes but invest more deeply in each at the graduate level.


How to Store Incidental Information Gleaned in the Course of Conducting Research I'm in the throes of writing my first substantial research paper in the field of Information Science. The topic looks promising and my advisor seems pleased with the work. Because of the nature of the work, there are a lot of intermediate steps involved in obtaining the raw data, preprocessing the data, then running the experiment proper and recording the results. These intermediate steps involved a lot of programming on my part, building one-shot tools to solve problems along the way to conducting the experiments.

I understand that reproducibility is a huge issue in computer science and I wish to lessen the burden upon my future self and upon my lab mates if/when the time comes to follow up on this trail of experiments. Certain software has to be installed, path variables have to be configured, firewall settings have to be set up to allow transference of data - and similar technical problems that wouldn't be appropriate to include in the resultant research paper proper.

How do I record all of these technical and procedural steps such that a future interested party (be it myself or one of my lab mates, or perhaps even an outsider to the lab who has an academic interest in the resultant paper and software) can reproduce the experiment? Do I leave myself open to being "scooped" if I set up a website with an academic blog or wiki in it?

These are excellent questions! You are especially wise to recognize that your future self will have unfortunately hazy memories of what parameters you chose and why. (I've also been mulling this process myself, and was considering asking a similar question!) Your question is definitely related to prior questions here, but I think those don't necessarily cover collecting data, and some of the answers haven't aged as gracefully as others because they deal with "try this kind of software."

To the extent that your advisor and lab already have a workflow set up, try to work this into it. Is there a shared server for documents, or an application like Dropbox or Box? Do you have a shared Zotero group for bibliography and files? Do you use Git or other version control software? (Version control may be less relevant to you if you're the only one working on the code, whereas it will be critical if multiple people fiddle with it.)

Keeping notes about results

Many scientists are trained to use research notebooks, and there have been interesting discussions about those; aeismail suggested Colin Purrington's tips on maintaining a lab notebook. From looking at an excellent question across tools and a question about Python in particular (though it can be extended), Jupyter is the next tool I will look into for myself, and it may be what you're looking for.

For my own dissertation, for tables and charts I created in Stata, I had a clear file naming scheme about where I outputted and saved them. It was easy (conditional on already knowing LaTeX) to make a LaTeX doc that pointed to those files and could update with the newest version of the results.

File naming and organizing hierarchy

TCSGrad pointed to Jason Eisner's advice on file organization. In particular, I like his advice there of putting in files or file names or folder names the tags: to-do, how-to, logbook, acknowledge, and send-to.
I also highly recommend having, in your project folder, a folder called "Raw Data". This is the original data, as downloaded or found or whatever. In "Raw Data", have a readme doc, whether it is a text file or spreadsheet or whatever, that says where each bit of Raw Data came from, when, under what conditions, etc.

To capture the software setup and system parameters, perhaps have a similar Setup folder (with the executable files for software you install, and a similar readme). (Docker is one tool to capture and easily replicate the correct computing environment. A group like Software Carpentry might be able to provide guidance.)

A separate "Data" folder can have your cleaned versions of the raw data, and folders for "Code" and "Output" should be similarly separate. (Datasets you create should still go into Data, probably.) You might even find it useful to have separate folders for (nicely formatted) "Tables" and "Figures".

Whenever you submit something or have a major draft, try to save a copy of all the things you're relying on, as-is.

Making the notes available?

This prior question asks about the (dis)advantages of an open lab notebook, and there was some good discussion.


Adviser-Poaching and the Politics of Graduate School My boyfriend, Mark, is pursuing his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at a prestigious school. He has just finished up his 2nd year and passed his qualifying exam last semester. His adviser is Chinese, and the two other students are Chinese as well.

My boyfriend, being the only American citizen, feels like he is more or less the designated "proof-reader," always writing and editing their papers, presentation, and even their post-doc's papers. On top of that, his adviser is a "paper-pusher" and is more interested in publishing papers than the actual research. There have been instances of "academic fraud" where data plot graphs depicting test results are shown with a perfect straight line. Research papers and perfect results seem to be the most important thing in which his adviser is interested. Mark is very unhappy with the lab group dynamic (it's very difficult being the only American student), and the research.

When Mark first visited the university during his senior year of undergrad, many professors had turned him down (he had a 3.0 GPA, which barely makes the cut-off), except for this adviser. Mark feels indebted to this one advisor who showed faith in Mark. Although nice, the advisor did leave Mark to believe that the research and studies would be focused on Thermal-Fluids and aircraft design. This adviser has a track record with the university being misleading and vague. The research that Mark has been doing for the past 2 years have strayed away further and further from what he actually wants to do.

Now being in graduate school for 2 years, Mark has maintained a 3.9 GPA. He has spoken to another professor about his research. This professor is interested in Mark and has the funding to provide to Mark, but is very concerned about poaching students, even though Mark was the one who approached this professor.

Mark has tried to convey to his current professor that he is unhappy with the research and the lab-group dynamic. He also mentioning about this other professor. Instead of "quitting" oh his current professor, he tried to compromise saying how he can have "co-advisers" still working with his current adviser, but getting funding with the other. He tried to meet in the middle, but instead his current adviser dismissed this idea and avoided the situation.

Mark then talked to the administration: the department head and another person who handles these cases. They agree with him, and come to understand the situation. Like mentioned, this adviser has a track record of being misleading, so they are aware of his intentions. When the four of them met, the adviser was very angry, calling this meeting unprofessional and unnecessary, talking about Mark like he wasn't in the room, and accusing the other professor (who was absent) of poaching. It became apparent during this meeting this adviser is more invested in the research (in fear of losing lab researchers), than Mark's academic future and his studies.

Two days after this meeting, the adviser sends Mark a very long email. It entails a very "guilt trip" paragraph claiming that he wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him (how others turned him down for funding). He also seems to be playing the victim card saying he wished that Mark had talked to him about this. He also mentioned that he had talked to the other professor.

It appears that this is a very manipulating and toxic adviser. What Mark is concerned about is what his current adviser had talked to this new professor about. This new professor is VERY concerned about making it seem like he is poaching Mark away from his adviser. He is concerned that the new professor will back out of all of this, and he will be left going back to his old adviser since he's depending on funding.

What should he do in this specific situation? Any thoughts, suggestions, insight will be helpful.

The damage has already been done in this situation, and your boyfriend should move on with his future.

Basically, at this point, I don't see any way in which the relationship with his current advisor can be mended. The name calling and guit tripping makes for an impossible working environment. Even if he were to stay, he would have to deal with the cloud of the previous attempt to leave hanging over his head. Therefore, it is in his best interests to find a new advising situation as quickly as possible.


What are refereed and non-refereed journals? What does it mean by publication in refereed and non-refereed journals? Are these terms applicable to conference papers too? Is there any relationship with peer-review?

In your original question, "referred journal" is a Freudian slip, perhaps on your part.

Refereed journals/conferences are the ones where the published papers have been peer-reviewed.


Do conferences get indexed? A funding organism is offering to pay for the travel and stay of young researchers to an international conference, when said conference is indexed (Scopus, WoS, ...). They insist on the fact that it’s the conference that should be indexed, not the proceeding or subsequent publications.

I never heard of a conference being indexed, and would like to know if this even exists.

I insist on the fact that the indexing in question concerns the conference, not the proceedings or abstracts.

I don't have a precise answer. However, the fact that some papers & abstracts are indexed in Scopus or Web of Science implies that the conference is indexed there.

If the funding agency wants the conference to be indexed, it might mean that some of the papers/abstracts should be indexed, not necessarily yours. With that, they will be able to judge the quality of the conference (very subjective, but that not's the point), and your acceptance letter is enough for them.

One example is IEEE APS/URSI. There are different formats of submissions:

full papers (that are indexed for sure)
two-page abstracts in IEEE 2-column template (which are indexed unless author opts out)
one-page abstracts in a 1-column template (which are not indexed)

Thus, some submitted papers will not be indexed; however, the presentations will be made during the conference for all submissions. So, the conference is indexed, but not all the proceedings.


What did a good academic job market for mathematicians look like and could it ever come back? I'm about to enter a math PhD program at a pretty good school, but the job market for research university professors has been terrible as far as I can remember (since the late 2000s recession). I hear many stories of hundreds of excellent candidates applying for one or two openings.

Older professors tell me it wasn't always like this. What did the market look like when it was considered "good" and could it ever come back by the time I finish in 5-6 years? Or has there been a fundamental shift in academia preventing the good times as we knew it from ever returning?

First, some historical perspective: Francis Sowerby Macaulay and Hermann Schubert, two mathematicians from the late 19th century whose names you still hear repeatedly these days if you come anywhere near algebraic geometry, both taught high school.

Second, a counting perspective: Research university professors probably average a doctoral student at least every five years, with some averaging more than one a year.  This means every professor produces somewhere between 6 to 40 replacements over the course of their career.  Assuming no change in the number of jobs, only one of those replacements will get a research university professorship.

Third, a practical perspective: It's hard to imagine research in mathematics, especially but not only pure mathematics, having direct practical benefit to many people.  That means the amount of funding purely for research tends to be rather small.  Even at research universities, teaching is an important rationale for paying a professor's salary, and the benefits to teaching are an important justification for research.

What happened between the 1950s and 1980s, particularly in the US, was an enormous expansion in higher education along with a massive increase in research funding.  The US went from having about 5% of its 20-year-olds going to college to about 50%.  Assuming a corresponding increase in the number of professors, this meant a professor could advise 10 PhD students and have every one of them get a job.  For obvious reasons, we will never see a 10-fold increase again.  Also, the US was enormously wealthy and had resources to spend on less practical purposes like mathematical research and providing high quality university education.  (The US still spends about 50% more per university student than Germany.  Most of that is going to smaller classes with more attention paid to helping students along.)


How normal is it to have published as an undergraduate? I’m currently in the first semester of MSc of psychology in a university in Germany and we got a lecturer from a university abroad who wanted to know what we had published. To his surprise, none of us had any publications. For us at least, not having any publications when entering the graduate program is normal.

I know of a couple of peers who were able to publish their bachelor’s thesis and one person who had several publications even before he started his masters, but at our university those are the exception, rather than the rule.

How is the situation in other countries and disciplines? Do undergraduates generally have any publications?

Throughout every country and every field that I am familiar with, it is fairly unusual to be part of a publication as an undergraduate.

It is also the case, however, that those who did publish are more likely to go on to graduate school, and that it would be unusual to have a class of any significant size with nobody who had published in it.  I don't know the actual statistics, but let's assume only 1 in 10 undergraduates who go on to grad school have published something as an undergraduate, in which case in a class of 20 students, there is a ~88% chance that at least one person would have published.

Thus, it might well be surprising to the lecturer that nobody had published, even though publishing as an undergraduate is fairly rare.

Note: the numbers that I gave were notional, just in order to illustrate the way likelihood is non-intuitive for a whole class.  As a point of reference on the high extreme, however, consider that 85% of MIT undergraduates participate in on-campus research programs.  A lecturer coming from a high-density research environment like that may well have biased expectations about research frequency.


Is it best to avoid all interactions with disreputable or predatory conferences? Potentially predatory publishers and journals (as listed on Beall’s list here) are springing up more and more often, but they do not always stick to journals and publishing articles. Some host conferences, workshops, or other events with reputable chairs and directors.

If the publishing agency behind a conference is fishy or believed to be predatory, but the conference it hosts is chaired by reputable names, is it still best to avoid the conference?

Has anyone had experience going to a conference or workshop like this?

Publishing in predatory journals looks bad on your resume.  It suggests that your work was not good enough to publish in a respected journal/conference, and, frankly, you're better off not publishing the work.


B- in a Major Class Last 60 Credits (Mathematics) I'm a mathematics undergraduate at a research university, and recently got a B- in Advanced Calculus I this semester as a junior. I would like to know how much this could affect my chances for getting into graduate school for a PhD in applied mathematics.

The reason is simple: time management. I received a research scholarship in Biology and spent too much time on this commitment (it was my first major project). However, my mentor is confident this project will get me a first authored publication within a decent journal.

My other classes that semester were straight A's. As a result my overall GPA is now 3.79 and my major GPA 3.72. I completed an AA in high school, so all of my electives have been in statistics, maths, computer science and graduate level genetics.

However, this is not my first bad grade: I also go a B- in physics and withdrew from a chemistry course my freshman year but was quickly diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and given reduced course load + double test time. These are the conditions under which I got my B- in Advanced Calculus I.

I would greatly appreciate an expert opinion (I'll also talk to my math adviser next semester). My research interests lie within gene expression/regulation, so I really want to enter a PhD program in applied mathematics that is also associated with a NIH funded center for System's Biology (such as UC Berkeley, Stanford or MIT).

Next semester I'm taking Advanced Calculus II under the same professor, a course in C++ and a 6000 level PhD track course in Genomics/Proteomics/Transcriptomics with 3 exams and 4 semester projects (I have a 4.0 in all the prerequisites). Any advice?

Any advice?

Yes.  Since you have a designated adviser, I recommend talking to them about it.  They can guide you through the rest of your program.  You can talk to them when classes resume, which is fine, because you have  long term considerations in which absolutely no action is needed or helpful over the semester break.

Your question here is not really practical or answerable.  Yes, it is better to get higher grades than lower ones: you heard it here first.  Obviously if you could retroactively increase your B- grade, then your hypothetical PhD application would be at least slightly stronger.  No one B- is going to make or break a PhD application.  If you are having time management issues, then you should take steps to address them...starting with talking to your adviser.  You might consider delaying taking the sequel to the course you got a B- in to shore up your knowledge, acquire better time management skills, or both.  On the other hand you might need to take this course right away in the context of your program as a whole.

Finally, I notice that you seem to have more success with biology than mathematics: compare a likely first-authored publication with a B- grade in an intermediate level course.  If you apply to a program in mathematics, then your math skills will be compared against others whose interests are solely or primarily in math.  If you apply to a program in biology then your math skills will likely be found to be very strong and set you apart from many of the other candidates.

Enjoy the holiday break.


Ethics behind using external excel freelancer to help with my thesis? I have been working very hard on my thesis and I have reached a point with my data where I am required to code.

I am no where near experienced in coding, and there is also not enought time left to learn it.

Simply, the coding is required to re-format the information and figures I already have.

I have used an external source (freelancer) to re-format my data and provide instructions as to how he has done it. I asked for instructions so I could carry out the task myself, and the reformatted data so I could  check this against my work. Now, I am not sure if this is ethical and could compromise my degree?

I have not used the re-formatted data or instructions yet - as I am now unsure. I want to ask my supervisor about the ethics of using external assistance but I am unsure if this is a good idea?

In order to re-order my information and make it easier to process my initial formula instead of the manual way which I have been doing (there are close to 980,000 rows), the excel freelancer constructed a macro to essentially do the same work (which I still have not completed manually). I 100% want to give credit, and of course do not want to do anything unethical which is why I am asking here for advice.

What I mean by reformat is creating a macro/code  that performs a process. I have been doing this manually and have not scratched the surface considering the large volume of data. The creation of the macro gives the same answers I have been getting manually. So essentially it is not creating anything new, except for the macro. I hope this clarifies things. Again, I do not want to pass any work as my own so I would appreciate any more advice!

What concerns me is that I paid this freelancer to create the macro, a very small fee. Nonetheless, it does not sit right with me. So, What exactly should I explain to my supervisor? Should I mention I have already found someone? Or will this raise suspicion?

From what you've said in your question, it doesn't sound like there's a problem here. You said the information and the figures are your own, you've just had some assistance with making the data easier to work with.

It doesn't sound like what's been done is much different than if someone had pointed out that Excel already has a function that does what you were doing in a more streamlined fashion. Of course, this would be perfectly fine.

It's quite common for a student to have had the help of someone else in the course of working towards their thesis. This is particularly the case in technical matters like coding. You just have to make sure that you acknowledge their assistance appropriately (typically, by saying in your Acknowledgements that they provided assistance with your data). It's perfectly acceptable to get help from other people in your work. Seeking advice from people whose expertise is different to your own is an extremely common part of academic work. Where it becomes problematic is when you don't acknowledge that the advice came from someone else, and you (even inadvertently) pass it off as your own. I don't see that the fee changes this at all.

If you want to know for certain that this is acceptable then you should obviously ask your supervisor. Just explain the situation in full and ask "Is it okay to include this work in my thesis?" The thesis has not been submitted yet. So in the case that what you have done is inappropriate then no damage has been done. You would just ensure that the figures that appear in the thesis were not those that the freelancer produced.


Is it possible to get a PhD in physics in 3 years? If not, why? Almost every two weeks I get to know another PhD Student who needs much more time to obtain his/her PhD than he/she actually thought he/she would need. I would like to know if this is a specific Problem of my university/ my country or if this is completely normal. Besides that, I would like to know why you think that the PhD students actually need so much time to get their PhD. When talking about needing more time than planned, I mean that instead of needing 3 years they often need between 4-6 years.

Some observations that I have made on my own are:

-Often the PhD students are loaded with work that does not relate to their PhD-project. This means for example, that they have to do a lot of work for their professor, do some teaching, supervise undergradute students,... But I think the "worst" part here is that often they are loaded with work by their professors.
-The Project gets longer and longer. Even if they accomplish their project withing two years, the students will be told to do something new. This may even happen several times.
- As a consequence from the last point that I mentioned a lot of the PhD students do not work as much as they would if they knew that they only have to finish their project and then they are finished. Since they know that even if they "finish" their work, they will get an additional task and won't be finished. Therfore, the motivation to finish the work as quickly as possible is rather low.

I also have the impression that in theoretical physics it is rather possible to obtain a PhD degree within 3 years, but not in experimental physics. I have recently heard that the average PhD student in physics needs 4.5 years.

What are your experiences? Do you share my expressions or am I wrong? Is there a way to "make sure" at the beginning of your thesis that you won't need 5 years for it?

If there is the same problem in other areas of research, of course I would like to hear about this, too.

I have personally known only 2 people who got their PhD in 3 years in the US (though in Computer Science, not in Physics). I don't think it's impossible in Physics either, especially if you already have a masters going into the PhD, and if you have some research experience already so you can hit the ground running.

The problem generally with time to completion of a degree is simply that to do it in the near-minimum amount of time requires everything to go more or less according to plan, and you either have to get pretty lucky or just accept any outcome of your research efforts. I believe the root cause is simply that having a PhD where you have done the absolute minimum required, in the absolute minimum of time, has an uncertain (and perhaps limited) value.

If you've learned all you really needed to learn, can demonstrate appropriate mastery, fulfill all program requirements, and have established the level of knowledge, skill, and experience required to move on to whatever you want to do after your PhD - fantastic! Based on the fact that average time to completion is higher than 3 years, this suggests that a large portion of people don't find that 3 years was enough for them.

There are myriad reasons for why time to completion of degrees is well beyond the minimum on average, but you could roughly condense them to: personal factors, adviser factors, and program factors. Some people just don't achieve the minimum to get approved for the PhD in 3 years, and some people just go way, way beyond the minimum before officially completing their program. What's most important is that you are clear - or get clear - on what you want to get out of your program, and what you want to do after you have completed it, and then plan appropriately to get the most out of the opportunity you have. That may mean a  completion time that is lower or higher than average, but what is most important is that you get what you came for in the first place.


Career for a mathematician outside academia Briefly, the question is: what are sensible career choices for a trained mathematician (with a doctoral degree) outside of academia?

The situation I've found myself in is the following. I have been employed as a teaching assistant at one of the top Polish universities for a year now. The salary of TAs in Poland is borderline acceptable (as in, if it were a little bit less, one wouldn't be able to make ends meet), but when I was signing a contract, I was promised I will be promoted to assistant professor after a year.

Now, I was informed a few days ago that I am not getting said promotion, but they'll be happy to keep me as a TA. It was stated very clearly that this is happening not because I am not doing my job properly (in fact, I have a pretty solid track record); apparently the university is in financial troubles. As a corollary, I may be stuck as a TA for quite some time.

I have a family to provide for, so this is unacceptable for me.

To make matters even worse, the timing of the information left me without any option to pursue a postdoc position. This got me thinking that -- even though I enjoy doing research and teaching very much -- perhaps it's time to take that step and decide on changing career path. The problem is, I don't really have any experience in work outside of academia. I feel that I am professional and disciplined enough to handle any kind of work, but sending resumes at random doesn't seem like a good idea.

I realize the question may be too vague, but I'm thinking maybe someone has already been down that road and has some advices to share.

The past few years, many friends, either mathematicians or people from physics/chemistry who knew how to write code, have gone other to various financial companies to do algorithmic trading, data analysis, that sort of things… and some others have joined web startups. In short: their coding, algorithmic and reasoning skills were more valuable than their specific academic knowledge.

What I would advise you to do is to look where alumni from your department have moved. Ask the department for statistics or listings, if they publish them; otherwise, look up people's names on the web or professional networks (LinkedIn comes to mind). See where they are now: this will give you an idea of who is hiring people with your skills (and network).


Is "no late work" a common policy? When I wrote my syllabus for this term, I added the line "Late work will not be accepted." In the past, I just took off a large percentage of the grade per day, but I became tired of the added work of managing papers that students handed to me at random times and places.

The students, naturally, complain this policy too harsh, especially when some larger projects are worth 25% of their grade. I searched the Internet to try to establish what the norm is. I found many syllabi from famous universities, but found very few even list any policies at all.

Is "no late work" a typical rule?

One issue not covered by the many good answers is proportionality.

There's nothing wrong with having firm deadlines and sticking to them, or allowing a grace period with corresponding deductions, and so on. But it's your job as lecturer to make sure the 'punishment fits the crime'. If you have a zero-tolerance late policy and a short time window for a hard assignment that counts for a lot of points, then the policy is disproportionately harsh even if it's fair and clearly stated. I bring this up because you mentioned assignments/projects that carry upto 25% of the grade.

This is partly why I use a sliding scale late policy, where students can turn in things late, but lose a percentage of their score for each day they're late, upto a week for a 2-week assignment at which point they earn nothing. If you wish to have firm deadlines for a project that accounts for a large portion of the grade, then you might consider creating intermediate deadlines to break up the penalty. This way, students can learn the consequences of missing deadlines without facing huge penalties. It is also more robust to unforeseen events that no one can control.


How many people are generally shortlisted for a postdoc interview? I just applied for and got shortlisted for a Skype interview. In a mid size University and Department in Germany (in Physics), how many people are generally shortlisted for postdoctoral positions?

I cannot tell for this particular case, nor for that matter for a typical German Physics Department. But in my experience (also in Physics), it is a few, i.e. 4 ± 2, for a single position (depends also on the number of good applications, could be as few as 0 but unlikely more than 8).


Is it (ab)normal to propose a course to another university as a PhD candidate I'm an external PhD candidate at a university in Germany, meaning that I have neither a post at the university nor funding. I know this isn't ideal, but my question is this:

My research is related to language education, and for my field work I'd like to compare students from a certain Asian country (mine) with German students. I have done the field work in Asia, and now I need to teach a class in at least two German universities to observe the students' attitude first-hand.

Would it be very outlandish to write an email to a department chair at a neighbouring university in order to propose a class in relation to my PhD project? I've checked their program, and the title of my proposed course isn't there. As this is for the sake of my project, I could do it voluntarily, although I'd be very glad if I'm paid. Should I state that as well (at least the first part)?

I have no idea whether an unsolicited application like this is common in academia (particularly in Germany). In any case I don't want to sound desperate or forcing someone's hand. Thank you in advance for your insight.

P.S. My supervisor is taking a sabbatical leave, so he's not around at the university, and I cannot easily ask questions like this.

Yes, I think it is quite abnormal to suggest that a department takes up a course in their program for the purpose of research field work of a PhD student from another university. To me it seems unlikely that they are going to agree to that.

My field is not education research, but I have a hard time imagining that teaching yourself and evaluating something that goes on in a lecture on a higher level goes very well together.

Some points that you may want to consider to increase your chances of getting to do reliable field work:

Maybe it is sufficient to sit in one or two sessions of an appropriate on-going course just as an observer? Find a suitable course, explain your plans to the instructor, and I think you'll have much higher chances of getting this done than getting to teach a course yourself.
If your field work absolutely requires that you are the teacher, then I would propose that you look for a suitable course that already exists, and ask the instructor of that if you'd be allowed to teach one or two sessions in that course. Of course you have to show your qualification to do that, and it may be helpful if your supervisor could actually make or support that request (assuming that he/she is knowledgable in the field you're looking to teach in).


Conference paper rejected without any fault in algorithm I am working on a hard problem in computer science. The problem is NP-complete. Untill now, the fastest algorithm for this problem runs in $O(3^n)$ time and I came up with an algorithm with a time complexity of $O(2.82)^n$. Yet the paper, in which I described my approach, was rejected in three A* conferences. I am wondering why.

First conference: They asked why I did not compare my algorithm with
algorithm X. They appreciated my algorithm and have not found any
fault with it.
Second conference: Now I compared my algorithm with algorithm X.
They asked me why I did not compare it with some parallel algorithm Y.
Again they appreciated my algorithm and have not found any fault
with it.
Third conference: This time I compared my algorithm with algorithm
Y. They did not find any fault with my algorithm and said that it
still is exponential and that for large input number it will take
much time. The paper was rejected. But isn't 2.83^n a clear
improvement over O(3^n)?

I'm at a loss. What should I do next to publish my result in a good conference?

Since you are describing an algorithm paper, I assume you are submitting to algorithms conferences, and the "A*" description refers to the CORE ratings of CS conferences originally developed by the Australian Research Council.  The only A* conferences in algorithms are FOCS, STOC, and SODA. I've served on the program committees for all three.

These three conferences are extremely competitive, and standards for acceptance are extremely high. It is not enough for your algorithm to be correct. It is not even enough for your algorithm to offer a significant improvement on the state of the art for your specific problem. At STOC and FOCS in particular, papers are judged on their likely impact on theoretical computer science research beyond the scope of the specific result. For algorithms papers, that means either that you're describing a significant advance on a problem of central interest to the field, and/or that you are introducing new techniques that are likely to generalize to many other problems, and/or that the PC finds your result both surprising and technically impressive.

I would not expect these conferences to accept a paper that only describes a faster exponential-time algorithm for an NP-hard problem. We've seen lots of those before; yet another one is not that surprising. Unless you are proposing a strong general technique, or the specific problem you address has resisted significant progress for a long time, I would recommend aiming for a lower-tier algorithms conference: ESA, ISAAC, COCOON, WADS, LATIN, ....

All the advice in the other answers still applies when submitting to those penultimate-tier conferences, of course. It's still not enough for your algorithm to be correct. You still need to clearly explain your precise contribution and its importance to the research community. You still need to give a thorough comparison of your algorithm to the state of the art. You still need to convince the PC that they should trust you and care about your results.


Teacher has done nothing all semester - should I say something? My Teacher for a required course has been completely unreliable for any amount of actual teaching. He is honestly the worst teacher myself or pretty much any of the other students have ever had.

It's online, and it's actually very obvious that he's taken the format of his lesson plan directly from another teacher as many of his materials have their name listed instead of his. He'll ask for things on assignments that are very confusing (for instance, meet with your groups and discuss x) and the student body will be frantically messaging each other trying to figure out if we missed something because we were never assigned groups etc. It's not just us asking each other either, we send him messages. At several points it took him until after the assignment's deadline to respond to any one of us, so this isn't a one off occurrence.

His version of MLA format that he expects is adjusted, but how it's adjusted is up to speculation and seems almost dependent on how he's feeling. The only thing that he actually has to grade (since everything is online - he just pointed us to do pre-programmed worksheets from the book company) are three written reports at the tail end of the semester.

The problem with those reports is that because of the unclear formatting I, and a few others, received a drop in grade with no explanation or "this isn't what I was looking for". Nevermind that we've been wondering what he's been looking for but rarely responds to anyone about anything. The same thing happened with the next assignment but I lost significantly fewer points and I have zero idea what the difference was between the two formats.

I understand that Teachers have to work incredibly hard and they are often undervalued comparatively to that, but even giving him an incredible amount of leeway I have to be honest and say that he should never have picked up this course if he wasn't actually going to teach us. Is this something that I should bring up to the school's HR? This semester has been absolute torture for all of us and it's ridiculous that anyone should be "taught" like this.

Not if this is the format you're going to bring your complaint in. You really need to get a group together with very clear, well documented, explicit examples of the problem behavior and bring that to the attention of the administration. You've probably got an ombudsman who would be a good first place to bring such a complaint to.


Is there a reason to spread your research into multiple journals instead of just one? Suppose one works in field X, and has say two or three manuscripts ready for journal submission. Journal A is a good fit for all the manuscripts, but journals B and C would be appropriate as well.

All else being equal, is there any benefit in having papers in different journals? Does it hurt to have all of your papers, or say a substantial amount of them, in the same journal A? For example, would it be a good idea to submit one to journal A, and the other one to journal B?

I could think of someone saying "I read journals B and C, but not A", so in this sense spreading your research in different journals would make sense. But maybe this is not so typical to begin with.

There is obviously no right or wrong here, one should try to publish in the best suited journal. That said, in fields where there are several options, sticking to a single journal may look a little strange. If you publish in different (but suitable) journals, it may be looked upon as that your research is accepted by a wider set of peers. Some may perhaps also think you have a special connection to the journal etc.

So the need to publish in different journals should primarily be the focus of the journal. Some people I know enjoy the fact that they are published in widely different journals and some people may see that as your research being more widely accepted (right or wrong).


Should I email my professor about a recommendation letter if he has offered me a job? So I've just finished my Master's and my advisor has offered me a tentative position to work in his lab. I say tentative because it's dependent on if his project gets funding. He emailed me recently right before his leave that his project has been shortlisted and that they'll hopefully hear back by early Fall and that he'll keep me updated with regards to the position. This was last month and in the meantime i've been doing an internship to keep busy.

Recently however I've been thinking about applying to other jobs and PhD positions to keep my options open. However, I'm not sure if it's appropriate to ask my advisor if I can list him down as one of my reference and I don't want to blow my chances with him either. I drafted an email telling him that as his offer is not yet guaranteed I'm considering applying to various other positions and if he would be able to provide me a letter of recommendation. Yet I made it clear that I would still prefer to work with him. Is this fine? Or should I not ask him at all as he might then see me as a fickle candidate?

As you seem to have a good relationship with that professor, I think it is wise to ask for his recommendation. In some context, the absence of a recommendation from the former advisor could be frown upon.

I think any normal researcher will understand why you are applying to other positions, especially if you mention that his offer is your number 1 choice. In short, yes, ask!


What are valid publications to put on a grad school application resume? I am in the process of applying for MS in CS and saw that an academic CV is pretty long and detailed (not like the business ones max. 1-2 pages). Apparently it is common to list all publications. However, I am wondering what counts as a valid publication?

I have a section Publications (peer-reviewed) and one Publications (non-peer reviewed). Is it valid to state publications which exist, but are not publicly downloadable (e.g. confidentiality)? For example I wrote research paper and teaching material at my company or uni research project papers etc. Are these eligible?

I am asking because I don't want to put something in my resume that might make me look like a fraud (because of unknowing).

The type of publications that you should list in the publications section of an academic CV are those writings that contain technical work at the level of a typical scientific publication.  This can include non-peer-reviewed and unpublished works, but they should be the sort of thing that, if circumstances were different, might be reasonable to send through peer-review.

With regards to the examples that you list, then:

Confidential company research paper: this would be reasonable to put in a non-peer-reviewed research section, with a note that it is not available due to confidentiality restrictions.
Company teaching materials: these would go in "teaching experience," not publications.
University research project papers: these would generally not be listed, unless something above and beyond the usual happened, like they were actually sent off for peer reviewed publication.


Is it okay to view my recommendation letter once I've been accepted at a college? I had a really reputable person write me a recommendation letter for colleges. He told me that he wrote the best recommendation letter in his life. He told me that the recommendation letter hints that I'm the next Steve Jobs and that I'm enlightened etc.

I waived my right to view the letter. I was accepted at many colleges. Now, I think as the recommendation letter is very strong and from a reputable person: it may help me in my future elsewhere.

I really want to see what he wrote. Is it okay to ask the college where I am accepted to give me a copy of the recommendation letter? Otherwise, is it okay to ask the professor who wrote the recommendation letter to send me a copy?

Why would you ask to see the letter? If the professor in question tells you it was extremely strong, I presume you believe him. Asking to see one's letter after waiving the right to do so is a strange request, and doing so conveys an ignorance of or insensitivity to the norms of the profession.

I would be taken aback if someone asked me this, and would also feel very uncomfortable either refusing or agreeing. Why strain what seems to be a very positive relationship? It is certainly not worth doing so simply for the idle pleasure of reading flattering things about oneself written in another's hand.


Is Google Scholar reliable for reporting citations? When quoting the number of citations for each paper you have published, different sources can be used, Google Scholar, ResearcherID, Scopus.
Google Scholar covers a larger range of literature.

Is it acceptable to use Google Scholar? Or it is not a professional resource, and we necessarily should use ISI Web of Knowledge for counting citations?

None of the citation databases are particularly good.  Google Scholar tends to err on the side of inclusiveness (thereby over-representing impact), while the more curated databases (e.g., ISI WoK) tend to err on the side of exclusiveness (thereby under-representing impact).  This is particularly acute in some fields: computer science, for example, is notoriously under-represented in the curated databases to the degree that it has is own independent citation database, DBLP, which of course has its own different problems.

You can potentially use any of these databases reasonably to report citations in a reasonable and professional manner, as long as you are consistent and make it clear which database you are using, such that readers can adjust their expectations accordingly.


Putting the cart before the horse: to state a claim without proof then prove it later or use a worse method? I am a statistician working as an applied analyst on a paper. As I went through a set of analyses, I decided upon a detailed and thorough data analysis method using a regression model. Traditionally, that regression model is presented alongside a set of assumptions that one should check in the model approach. I had a gut feeling those assumptions didn't matter in a broad sense. I performed some simulation studies to show that that was the case. The results are interesting and we will attempt to publish a paper about those as well.

However, turning to the present analysis, should I present without proof the results of the "robust" interpretation where assumption checking is eschewed. Does it make sense to await a reviewer to raise a flag about this issue? There is a lot of pressure to publish this quickly... which is not unusual or surprising. Would it make more sense to include a sentence saying, "The authors will show in later work that the assumptions of the modeling approach can be relaxed when (blah blah blah)"?

(I have turned my comments into an answer).

Whether or not to discuss statistical assumptions depends largely on the nature of your work. Many authors of statistical textbooks and manuals discuss assumptions in great depth. They also highlight the importance of reporting the results of assumptions testing in your manuscripts. In my experience, this is very rarely done for several reasons. For example, results are often the same regardless of assumptions (this is not always the case), if you are reporting statistically significant results and effect sizes then perhaps the need to discuss assumptions is less important, word limits often restrict the ability to discussion assumptions, and it is often very rare these days to find discussion of statistical assumptions. Note that these points relate to applied journals and papers. If the paper is statistical in nature, or you have non-significant results and need to highlight that your statistics were appropriate, then perhaps discussion of assumptions is warranted. I very rarely run across discussion of assumptions for statistics ranging from t-tests to survival analyses and latent growth modelling etc. In statistics papers though its often important to highlight what assumptions are needed and such.

I have published in the pre-eminent journals on pain and you certainly do not need to discuss assumptions in them most of the time. If you review recent papers you will see that these assumptions are very rarely discussed. A simple "we did regression" and "here are results of regression" will suffice (with more elaboration, of course!).


Applying to Ph.D. with 5 years in Bachelors I will finish my 4 year bachelors program next year, in a total of 5 years.

I had failed many many courses in 2nd year and my cgpa was around 2.4

Then I had that enlightenment and decided to become an academic. Since then, I have increased my cgpa to over 3.5 and turned all F's to A's. For last 3 semesters I get averagely 3.9 gpa each semester

I still have some C's in few courses from 2nd year and instead of graduating this year, I will graduate next year.

I have managed to boost my cgpa amazingly after such things but I want to know if this extra year will cause me any trouble during Ph.D. applications.

This sort of thing should be explained in the cover letter. This trend is pretty common; freshmen enter college ready to party, realize halfway through that their grades are actually important, and then buckle down and do good work for the rest. You simply need to state that, despite your initial behavior, you are fully committed to your education. Given a 3.5 GPA at the end, I don't imagine you would have too much trouble.

Do note that this will vary as a function of the universities to which you apply; some may take a harsher view than others. Still, you have a good explanation for the one bad year, so it shouldn't post too much of a problem for you.


Is it problematic to use a Wikipedia article I wrote in my PhD thesis? I'm working on a specific subject, and I thought that sharing my bibliographical and synthesis work from peer-reviewed journals on Wikipedia could be a good idea. Moreover, there is no Wikipedia entry on that subject.

But as I will use that work for my PhD thesis, is this problematic because someone might think that I have plagiarised the material from Wikipedia?

Note that this question could apply to any similar collaborative encyclopedia, not just to Wikipedia, and that the article I'm writing is subject to collaborative change.

Edit : by synthesis work I do not mean :

  combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion
  not explicitly stated by any of the sources

but

  reduce the information in lengthy sources to an encyclopedic length

More information on Wikipedias SYNTH policies and here

Also the question is related to sharing my bibliographical work on a collaborative platform, regardless to the platform policy (assuming I can), and potential problems re-using it afterwards, in a PhD thesis.

No, but make sure you cite it and mention it, to avoid being accused of copying and pasting from Wikipedia.

In any case, it is great that you have contributed to Wikipedia and I wish more people considered using pieces of their introductory chapters for Wikipedia. Just make sure that people know that you copied to, not from, Wikipedia. (I mean, the order is irrelevant, i.e. whether you first wrote text for Wikipedia or your thesis, but the authorship is.)


My potential future PhD supervisor ask me to peer review a paper I have been working for two years after my Master and I am now looking for a PhD. I got a PhD offer from one university, met the person who would supervise me and told them I am very interested, while making it clear that I also applied to other PhD offers and am waiting for answers. They said that that it was not an issue for them.

But now he just sent me an anonymous paper and suggested to me peer-reviewing it to help me "get a foot on the ladder". I am really confused by this proposition since:

I am still working for my company
I am still searching for PhD offers to apply, which takes me all my free time,
I never reviewed a paper before.

So, I am not really in the mood to do this now since I have more urgent concerns. However, I do not want to upset this potential supervisor, nor make them believe that I am not motivated.

So, should I do this review or not, and if I don't, how can I refuse without upsetting this potential supervisor?

Let me precise that I am likely to do my PhD there if my other applications don't get accepted.

EDIT

The paper in question is anonymous and I am asked to peer review it for a journal publication. The paper subject is in my field of research but not really in the field of my potential supervisor.

Maybe it's a matter of question formulation, but I find this to be a very peculiar request and would be equally confused as you seem to be even if I wasn't busy with other stuff.

Specifically, you're not qualified to review a paper, yet.

If he's asking your analytical opinion on a paper, kind of like a journal club style dissection of the content, then sure I guess that's no big deal. But if you are given a manuscript, written by someone else and submitted to a journal, I find this request unrealistic and even unethical.

Also, in a way disagreeing with the previous answers here, I don't think it's a reasonable request even if you were given the article in a more relaxed, journal club-like format. Because you are supposed to learn to read and understand the scientific literature, it's part of your training as a PhD student. To use that during the recruitment process, as a test is a bit unfair in my eyes.

  that was my first feeling actually, that he was assigning me some of
  his work while I am still in the application phase. The paper is
  anonymous and I am asked to peer review it for a journal publication.

The above alone, would even deter me from considering to start there. I think it might be worth thinking about what kind of work environment you want to get yourself into for the coming 3-X years of your life.

But again, it's possible that I misunderstand something in the OP. Just my two cents...


Proper way to format computer code included in a thesis/dissertation I intend to include my computational model code(s) in its entirety as an appendix in my dissertation.  I've gone through my university's formatting guidelines and haven't seen anything on the proper way to format the code in terms of size of font, text-wrapping, spacing, and so forth.  What's the best way to do this?

When I read code, while I'd want it to be a typical font size (12 pt), I'd also want the text-wrapping to be minimal, but given the traditional margin requirements, it can be pretty tough to accomplish this.  Having code trail off one line and onto the next is generally distracting.

Also, although comments in code are prevented from execution by using a character sequence like %or // or (* many compilers color-code this text to make it more easily distinguishable from executable portions of the code.  Is there any way to easily make comments distinguishable when putting the code into the text of your thesis/dissertation?

There are a number of excellent LaTeX packages for typesetting code, made for just such occasions.  The listings package is one good example, which includes standardized formatting for a number of languages.

It does not provide a "definitive" way to typeset code (there is no such, since there are a number of competing conventions) but its defaults provide a standard and well-recognized formatting that is entirely appropriate for academic publications. Furthermore, it can be customized to follow any unusual requirements of your institutions thesis format.