Can an unsuccessful grade appeal hurt an academic career? Background:
After an academic dismissal from an undergraduate program, I have been working towards improving my GPA (as well as my own academic habits) at a community college, in hopes that after receiving an associates degree, I can move forward with to earn a bachelors and hopefully enter a graduate program. I know that I still have a ways to go before I am prepared enough to re-enter a university, but I feel that it's something within my grasp.

Grades for the fall semester were posted today, and in two out of the three classes I took this semester, I got an 'A'. This is a pleasant surprise, since I have had to miss a few classes and was worried about my performance on assignments overall. However, I got an 'F' in my third class. This makes me a little distraught as well as confused. I know my shortcomings, and I believe that I should receive the grade I deserve, regardless of the extenuating circumstances that tend to pop up in my life. I've earned my fair share of poor grades - 'F's included, and I have never disagreed with it because it reflected the work (or lack thereof) I put in.

That being said, I am uncertain that my performance deserves an 'F'. I don't think that I should be getting an 'A' or a 'B,' and even a 'C' seems excessive if I did not meet what is required, but the failing grade doesn't sit right with me. I am considering emailing my professor, and if it comes to it, following the procedures for a grade appeal, but that makes me more worried than another 'F' on my transcript.

The Question:
Is going through a grade appeal, or even just emailing the professor to inquire about how the score was reached, worth it? I'm worried that the mere mention of being incorrectly graded will hurt my future. If I try for an appealed grade and fail, will that be reflected on my transcript? Given my already rocky academic history, I'm worried that I will come off as indignant and that I do not possess the skills required of me.

In the broadest terms and applying to students of any level (ranging from undergraduate to graduate to everything else): Can a grade appeal that is not granted affect a person's transcript, reputation and/or perception throughout their academic career?

Can a grade appeal that is not granted affect a person's transcript,
  reputation and/or perception throughout their academic career?

I have never heard of a school that lists grade appeals on a student's transcript, and to me that sounds about as logical as listing on your transcript that you wore the wrong shirt color. But that doesn't prove that such a school doesn't exist, so only a professor or staff member at your school can give an authoritative answer to that question. Why don't you ask them?

As for affecting your reputation or people's perception of you: well, any interaction we have with other people has some potential to affect our reputation or people's perception of us, so the literal answer to your question is "yes." It's reasonable to worry about that a little bit, but on the other hand if we all spent too much time worrying about such things, we'd never get very much done. In your case, what I suggest is that you go to your professor (or email him) and explain that you are surprised by your grade and would like to understand why you got an F, among other reasons so that you can learn from the experience and do better next time. Ask if you can review your final exam and possibly go over it with him to understand what you got wrong. Don't sound like you are assuming that you deserve a better grade or that the F grade couldn't possibly be correct, since that could come across as entitled, arrogant, and possibly delusional. If you ask the question in such a way, I don't see how you can possibly leave a bad impression with the professor -- this is a reasonable request that most professors hear all the time and are usually happy to help with.


what is Matching Funding in grant application? I am filling my project Grant Application
There is one section in that application that i do not know what is it and what to write there.
14. Matching Funding
What is it? and what to write there?

Matching funds (money) are

Funds not provided by the funding agency and
Funds that will will be provided to the project if the grant is awarded by the funding agency

Usually they come from your university's research office, but they might come from any other unit of your organization or any third party.
Read your funding agency's rules about matching funds and ask the program officer if you are not sure.  Rules vary widely, even within an agency.


Is it good for the speaker to read notes during a presentation? I am wondering whether it looks odd if a speaker reads notes during a presentation? I am asking this because, I noticed that a few presenters can’t present their work or research well due to nervousness and other factors such as language, pronunciation etc.

So if a speaker makes notes and just reads them properly along with the slides, how will it look? Will audiences accept or criticize such presentations?

How will it be if the speaker speaks by him/herself, but he/she will look into the notes at necessary?

Twenty years ago it was not at all uncommon at international conferences in physics and electrical engineering to attend at "read" presentations, especially from old researchers from Asian countries who were not used to speak English.

How was it? Boring, utterly boring, and audiences drifted away. Please don't do or suggest it: if you feel uncomfortable speaking, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.


In what countries is it possible to enter a life science PhD program directly after a Bachelor's? I would like to know which countries allow admission to a PhD program directly after finishing a Bachelor's (Life Science), without requiring an intervening Master's degree?

And if you go directly into a PhD after the B.S., which countries support it? In India(my country), it is nearly impossible other than you join a integrated course.

Is it same everywhere?

In general, applying for a Ph.D. program in life sciences with just a bachelor's degree is possible in at least some of the US universities (I do not know, however, to which extent this affects your chances at acceptance).

E.g. the Harvard medical school web site says "Minimal requirements include a bachelor’s degree and undergraduate preparation in the sciences."


Quitting after 5 years - miserable and depressed I'm a fifth year graduate student in the life sciences. To cut to the chase, I hate this PhD, I hate research and I hate academia. It didn't used to be this way.

I have been juggling three different projects and none of them are at the stage where something can be published. One of them was a pilot project, something that my lab or even my advisor has no expertise or basic knowledge for that matter. I have pretty much figured things on my own until we got a collaborator who really helped train me and has gotten this project off the ground. But now my advisor has decided to give this project that now has all the resources, grants etc to a new student.

I'm left with two other projects that are about 3/4th complete but there are quite a bit of holes to fill in.
I could probably finish it in the next one year or so and that's what I thought i will do.

But my advisor is not an advisor at all. She thinks I have wasted my time and now I'm left with a lot of work to do. She has told me that several times - that I'm not a hard worker and I am not like X or Y in the lab who pretty much live in the lab and have no life outside. I work 10-6 pm everyday and I know that's not a lot in the PhD world, but I feel like I am not productive beyond that. I also work on most weekends. In the past year, I have really tried to motivate myself and get as much work done as possible. Everyone around me says I'm so close and I should just stick it out for another year.

But my advisor keeps telling me that I will never graduate if I don't pick up my pace. No matter how much data I give her, she says this is not fast enough. Also she makes me re-do a lot of it if the data suggests something she doesn't agree with. She has a very narrow mindset and hates being wrong. She always chooses, seminars or committee meetings to tell me that my data is shit and my interpretations are meaningless. And of course, that I am a slacker and I'm useless.

My self-confidence is at an all-time low. I'm depressed and anxious all the time. The thought of lab or my advisor makes me want to run away from all this. To make things worse, my husband just got a job across the country and I see him once a month at the most. Ours has always been a long distance marriage so I'm not a rookie but I think I'm at a point where I really need a support system outside of lab. I have no family around as I'm an international student.

I'm so miserable all the time and I just want this agony to end. I finally gathered the courage to tell my advisor I want to quit with a masters. She is furious - she told me she is disappointed in me (no surprise there) and she has spent a lot of grant money on my stipend and I owe it to her to publish. My department requires advisors to pay a stipend to every student. And it's not like I have not worked at all. She has added guilt and shame to the wide range of negative emotions I'm already feeling. She says I have wasted her money and done no work.

Anyway, I'm trying to negotiate a masters so I can get out and try to find a job. I need to do something that makes me happy and regain my confidence. I don't even care what I do anymore, I just don't want to feel this way anymore. She is making it hard for me to leave. There is no one in the department that I trust will really help me out. My advisor is powerful and i don't know if anyone can change her mind.

I can't take a break, that is not an option. What do I do? I just want to be told it's okay to leave. People leave jobs all the time but there is so much shame associated with leaving a phd. I also want to know if I can still find jobs in the industry. Please help.
Thanks

"I work 10-6 pm everyday and I know that's not a lot in the PhD world, but I feel like I am not productive beyond that."
This is a particularly important insight.
When I had successfully defended my prospectus and was officially "all but dissertation" (with the privilege of working on my own self-selected and self-directed topic, with input from my committee) I discovered pretty quickly that for this research—about which I was both intellectually and emotionally passionate—I had about 4 to 5 hours of productive work to give to my dissertation each day. Moreover, simply sitting at my office desk not being productive did not actually measure up as "productivity".
So I adjusted my expectations to 4 to 5 hours of productive work, and gave myself license for other pursuits for the other hours of my day. Some of these other pursuits were academic: that software I wanted to write; the syllabi for those courses that I wished I could have taken, but they didn't exist, so I wanted to teach them some day; reading to learn new theories, methods, and substantive research; taking courses and attending intensive workshops. All of these "extra" activities have parlayed directly into my subsequent academic work and hires.
Some of the other pursuits were not academic: I walked in the park, went to museums, engaged in art, sport and activism, maintained interpersonal relationships. All of these extra "extra" activities have indirectly parlayed into my subsequent academic work by supporting my mental and physical health, and my development into a well-rounded individual who brings a good deal of experience to the classroom, to the research team, and to my work-fellows. These activities have also sometimes parlayed directly into subsequent academic work through the development of what would become collaborative relationships, introductions to professional networks, and by planting the seeds of research or pedagogical substance.
The idea that you must be a soulless drudge in the academy is certainly a perspective that has its exponents. Academic and activist David Graeber has an interesting perspective on labor time that I think is apt here (and I think it is important that we not forget that we are also labor):

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the great divisions between anarcho- syndicalist unions, and socialist unions, was that the latter were always asking for higher wages, and the anarchists were asking for less hours. That’s why the anarchists were so entangled in struggles for the eight-hour day. It’s as if the socialists were essentially buying into the notion that work is a virtue, and consumerism is good, but it should all be managed democratically, while the anarchists were saying, no, the whole deal—that we work more and more for more and more stuff—is rotten from the get-go.
—Frank, T. (2014). David Graeber: “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded”: David Graeber explains why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid. Salon.com, Sunday, June 1st.

To situate my response: my doctorate, completed in 6 years (about median for my cohort) was from Harvard, I readily obtained a post doc, and just as readily obtained a tenure-track faculty appointment in which my "extra" activities alluded to above have contributed in recognized ways to my evaluation and tenure process.
So this answer is not telling you to leave or to stay. Neither is it telling you how to proceed should you stay. But it is attempting to give you license to both value your academic and researcher self as part of a richer and more whole human being, and to reject value systems that tell you otherwise.


Has anyone heard of the "Central Library of Medicine Foundation"? I recently got a request for an article I'm a coauthor on, which reads:

  Dear Dr. NAME REMOVED:

  My name is Victoria Hornos and I am contacting you on behalf of the
  Central Library of Medicine Foundation.  Dr. SANTIAGO ATEHORTUA has
  contacted us asking for a reprint that you wrote. He is a Terapia
  Intensiva and Dr. is in need of your article as Dr. is making a
  research on this subjet .

  JOURNAL NAME 2013;XX(YY):ZZZZ-ZZ On the Reasons Why This Is Clearly A
  Paper That Needs To Be Read, Cited, And Manifest Itself In Fame And
  Fortune For the Authors.

  If my request is possible, please send it to the following e-mail
  address or by fax so I can send him or another doctor on the same
  situation the article.

  Thanks very much in advance for your response.

  E-mail: victoria.hornos@fbcm.md Fax: (+34 91) 133 30 81 Post Address:
  B1638 CAA Central Library of Medicine Foundation. Zufriategui 627 8º
  (D4D7) - Vicente Lopez Buenos Aires Argentina

  Sincerely yours,  Victoria Hornos

I'm not really clear on the legality of this request. I know many people are fine with sending PDFs to particular people, but this sounds like sending it to a clearing house, and that makes me a little nervous. Beyond that, I'm not the corresponding author, 'fbcm.md' doesn't resolve to a webpage, and well...this feels like many, many scam journal requests, but this time as a paper request.

Has anyone encountered this? Thoughts?

After googling for the Central Library of Medicine Foundation, I found the following post on the University of Muenster site (note I used Google Translate to translate the piece from German to English):

  Recently, faculty members have received many article requests from a
  "Central Library of Medicine Foundation", which was apparently
  acting on behalf of South American doctors.

  While researchers are usually happy to accommodate private, direct inquiries
  from colleagues, there is naturally some skepticism, since we do not
  know if this service costs the requesting physician or how much
  the "Central Library of Medicine Foundation" receives.

  After some inquiries with South American and Spanish-speaking
  colleagues the following picture emerges: the website www.rima.org (The
  "Central Library of Medicine Foundation" aka "Fundación Biblioteca
  Central de Medicina" aka "Red Informática de Medicina Avanzada" (RIMA))
  is a non-library organization based in Buenos Aires that offers physicians
  and researchers to get an article for a given fee (the exact amount is unknown). RIMA neither
  buys the article from the publisher nor copies it from a local library (which
  presumably cannot afford journals), but services the requests by directly
  forwarding them to the authors, in many cases, Münster faculty members.
  This probably the name "Central Library of Medicine Foundation" is
  used to simulate the unselfish non-profit library.

  Everyone must of course know how to handle it themselves. To send a
  reprint by email costs only a push of a button and it helps indeed
  ultimately a colleague who is certainly not as well supplied with
  magazines as oneself. On the other hand, you will be benefiting a commercial (?)
  intermediary organization, which may not help you,
  either. But maybe it is just a clever business idea of 10 unemployed
  Argentine doctors, to help them earn a living. . . .

So it seems that this Central Library of Medicine Foundation is a business that charges a fee to its clients for obtaining a paper, via you. Although this is probably not really legal or moral, this fee is probably lower than what, say, Elsevier is asking for the same paper. I think this situation makes a good argument for open-access journals.


How do search engines calculate citations when both a preprint and a published journal/conference version of a paper exists? Let's say that I wrote my research paper and then I published it as a preprint on the ArXiv, and I got citations for this preprint. Afterwards, my same paper has been peer reviewed by a journal then published, so, how will search engines count the citations? Will they do a sum or union or consider them as two different papers?

This obviously depends on the indexing service used. Typically, the records for different versions of the same paper are merged, and the service will provide the sum of the references.
For example, on google scholar, you can click on "all versions" to see all versions of a paper included in their record. For example here are the 222 versions of the LIGO GW150914 discovery paper, included in Google's record.
(I am not sure how the extremely rare case that a single work references multiple versions of the same paper is handled. But this should indeed be very rare.)


Asking a colleague for his submitted paper A colleague just told me about a paper he submitted to a conference, I'd love to have a look at his work out of curiosity.

How can I ask without him thinking I'm off to steal his ideas or something?

If he is a colleague, he is unlikely to think that. Just express your interest and ask for an early look. If something in it seems interesting to you contact him again and see if you have the possibility of collaboration on an extension or similar work.

It is how collaborative relationships get formed. Just do it.


Is it alright to be out of academia for a while before applying for academic or research-only positions? I am 15 now. If I quit high school now and start a BSc around age 35 and finish my PhD around age 45, is it possible to find a job in some university after being out of academia for so long?

In modern dynamic society it is next to impossible to predict what happens with education systems, universities, and job market in 20 years time. Also, the success in finding an academic job depends highly on the skill of a candidate, and we do not know what your skills are now, and will be after 20 years. It is unlikely that you find the precise answer to your question here.

However, it is very likely that a proper education, and a "badge" which confirms it, will be still of some value. Therefore, quitting the high school may really be not the wisest choice.

Of course, there are stories of prominent success of people without any degree, and it is tempting to revolt the system and prove yourself a hero. Just bear in mind that a great amount of people without any degree achieve nothing and remain unknown to most. A real genius may (and hopefully will) rise no matter what, but in the long run and on average people with the structured education and degrees are more successful in getting themselves high-skilled jobs.


Caregiver of disabled teenager returning to study, but can't find funding. (UK) Any thoughts? I am a parent of disabled teenager. My career has been interrupted, as has my academic path. My son is in and out of hospital and school. But now I am doing a PhD at a top UK university and am winning awards for my projects and am devising and teaching courses. Only problem, I can't get funding. I keep missing out on Studentships as they go to people half my age with straight A academic results.
Well, this is what I am told.
I think this is discrimination. Someone with my background - even with a brilliant, original research project - is never ever going to get a studentship if the decisive criteria is your undergraduate and MA results.
Studentships are lucrative (16K a year in London) and people like me, in the, um, diversity and inclusion basket - are told to search through the Alternative Funding Guide and 'write lots of letters'. It would take a professional fundraiser a year at least to raise the same amount as a studentship!
Does anyone have any experience of seeking funding as a carer doing a PhD, or even some good practice from their institution to share? I'm in the UK so UK examples would be most helpful to me.

Edit 9/22:

My first years part time were funded by my part-time work in a related industry, but due to my teaching and PhD commitments, and Carer commitments, I haven't had time to seek more clients. So that's dried up. I also received a discretionary fund fee waiver for the fees - this wasn't an advertised hardship fund, this was a result of asking and asking until finally finding something was available. You are only supposed to apply to this once during your degree, but I have applied once again because there just is nothing else. Awaiting outcome.

I've had success with small funding for trips abroad to conferences and considerable success with funding for public engagement projects - but I can't pay my living costs or wages with that.

My supervisor thinks that my identity as a carer is something that we can't seem to escape from, so we it is something that will be addressed in my thesis (that's ok with me, and it sits nicely with my ambition to teach creative writing and to explore under-represented groups in film and tv).

I never intended to campaign on this issue, but since posting this question, I have been successful in getting the student union to take up the issue of Carers at our university as one of their priority vulnerable groups, and the first thing we will ask for is for Student Records to include Carers in the equality and diversity questions (not a statutory requirement for this data to be collected, but why not). Our university is behind others in offering support and recognition for carers. Secondly, within the graduate school, the student advisor I was talking to has recommended Carers be considered under the university's Widening Participation policy. And just the other day, I got to explain to the Vice Dean of the Faculty what a Carer is -- it's someone who looks after someone else who has a life limiting condition such as a disability or illness -- for more than 35 hours per week (that's the statuory number of hours in order to apply for Carer's Allowance, a means tested benefit).

So, no studentship yet but I have delegated my campaigning tendencies! I will keep this trail updated and hope others continue to contribute.

But now I am doing a PhD at a top UK university and am winning awards for my projects and am devising and teaching courses.

In my experience, once you start a PhD in the UK, it is extremely difficult to get a studentship. It is not clear if you are looking for a full time studentship or a part time studentship. UK studentships tend to come from four sources of funding: university/school level funding, doctoral training center (DTC) grants, individual grants from charities and research councils given to a supervisor, and individual studentships awarded to the student.

As UK PhDs generally last 3 years of full time work, asking for less than 3 years of funding will result in odd gaps on any type of grant. While funding directly from the university or school is more flexible, unfortunately, if they did not offer you funding when they accepted you, they likely are not going to offer you funding now.

That leaves you with "special interest" funding, but again, having already started, will put you at a disadvantage.


Relevance of computer science degree to pursue a career in cognitive science This forum looks like the perfect place to ask a question that is being bothering me for a long time.

I'm 22 and a college dropout for numerous reasons (economic and mostly because I didn't like the major that I was studying, which led to depression, etc.)
Anyway, I recently discovered MOOCs (coursera, edx, udacity, OCW-MIT, etc.) and khanAcademy and I immediately fell in love with science and more precisely computer science. I also fall in love with the brain and love to think about thinking, decision making, logic, critical thinking, neuroplasticity, etc...
I also appreciated cognitive psychology and the philosophy of the mind but I haven't gone any deeper to those two.
So, you can say MOOCs changed my life because I'm able to learn things that I never would have consider ever studying.

I'm thinking of pursuing a Cognitive Science degree which can expose me into computer science and some kind of neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology.

The only thing is that here in Greece, Cognitive Science is only a postgraduate degree so I have first to finish an undergraduate degree in Computer Science or in Philosophy and History of Technology (those are the only two majors from which students are accepted for the Cognitive Science degree).

My question is, should I spend the next year of my life into studying for a test that will get me to the University (in order to get to a University you need to give exams in May, I'm not ready to give it this May so I have to give it on the May of 2015)?

Is it worth it to study Computer Science for four years to pursue the Cognitive Science degree which is my primary goal ?

PS: The possibility of studying abroad is out of question given the economic situation of my family, unless a scholarship for studying abroad is available.

Think further ahead: what do you want to do after you finish the Cognitive Science degree?

Do want to go into academia and work as a professor (probably after some research postdocs) in the field? If that's your ultimate goal, then that's the most straightforward career path.

If it's something else, figure out what the prerequisites for that thing are. There are too many people who got into grad school pursuing a degree in something because they thought was cool only to discover that after they graduate, they have nowhere to apply their degree.

Whether it's worth it depends on you. Weigh the costs to you against the benefits to you.


How does the salary system for faculty in Canadian universities work? How does the salary system for faculty members in Canadian universities work? Is it usually 8- or 9-monthly based same as in the USA Or 12-monthly?

Also, what do they mean by Taxable Benefits in their salary database (e.g., Ontario, Ministry of Finance; Public Sector Salary Disclosure for 2013: Universities)?

It's actually very straightforward: the salary they list is the salary you get. No 8- or 9-month shenanigans, just what they quote. You might get extra money for teaching (extra) courses, but you don't have to find a way to pay yourself over the summer (indeed, research grant money never goes into the PI's pocket).

Other Taxable Benefits means non-monetary benefits, which might include free or subsidized stuff like memberships (e.g., to a University fitness centre). Senior administrative types (also appointed as professors in some department or other) might get all kinds of non-monetary benefits like a place to live or the use of a car.


When is it okay to update other search committees? I'm on the academic job market this season for a position in a STEM field. I've had one on-campus interview and may receive an offer from this school within the next week or so. I've also had Skype interviews with a few other schools, but haven't received any on-campus invites from them. (The Skype interviews occurred about 3 weeks ago.)

At this point, should I let these schools know that I've had an on-campus interview? Or is it safe to assume that I've been rejected by them if I haven't received a campus invite already?

Don't make assumptions. Nearly everywhere will let you know when you are no longer under consideration. You may or may not be high on their list. You could be high and they are just dithering. But they would rather make it definite, just to avoid fruitless communication.

But it is probably a mistake to tell them you've had an interview, as it may confuse them about your interest. Wait until you have an acceptable offer before you notify them.

Trying to "nudge" them in your favor could work either way, if it has any effect at all. It is a risky thing to do. Nudging might be worthwhile if you are juggling multiple offers.


How can I write a paper that will convince the reviewers that the results are non-trivial? I submitted a paper in math/cs/economics to a top-level journal. The paper involves a new variant of a well-known problem. All reviewers agreed that the results are interesting and non-trivial, but they rejected the paper as not being general enough for their journal.

Encouraged by the positive feedback, I submitted an improved version of the paper to a medium-level conference. The improvements include simplifications of some of the proofs and additions of stronger results about the same problem. Now the reviewers rejected the paper claiming that the results are too weak and unsurprising!

What should I do in the next time I submit (to a different journal), in order to make the reviewers believe that the results are indeed surprising and non-trivial? I don't want to write the proofs in their more complicated version, as in the first revision, because this is unscientific. But writing it in a simple way seems that doing so creates a false impression that the results are too simple. What do you suggest?

In the end, the significance of a scientific advance is determined not by how complicated it is or how much hard work was put in, but by comparison with what was known / possible before.

It sounds to me like you need to have a much clearer and stronger comparison with the prior state of the art, particularly emphasizing why the new result makes a difference to larger or deeper issues.  Depending on the nature of your work, this might mean anything from a little improvement on the prior work section to introducing new sections with explicit comparisons.

For example, if you were able to mathematically compute the Nash equilibrium for preference of donuts vs. muffins, that's a nifty little result, but it might seem obvious or insignificant.  If you can explain that this was something impossible with prior methods, because nobody had previously been able to deal with the breakfast uncertainty principle, then that is surprising and interesting.  If you can show that your result accurately predicts sales in major chain stores, then that is also surprising and interesting.  In either case, you are showing how your result has implications outside of just being a result.

Now, you could probably also make your work appear harder and more significant by obfuscating the mathematics, and that might "work" for purposes of getting this paper accepted.  I personally, however, consider that to be scientifically dishonest, and would strongly recommend against that.  Remember, that your colleagues are not stupid, and sooner or later, people will realize that you are fluffing up your results, to your detriment.


When doing comparative evaluation among different research tools should we debug others research tool? Researchers propose software tools as part of their research work to gather some metrics about application performance. I intend to propose a tool with better features and capabilities. For comparison I am using publicly available tools of other researchers.

The difficulty I am facing is that other researcher tool crash for some applications of benchmarks. Different tool crash for different applications. So when reporting the comparison what should I do? List applications for which other researcher tool did not worked or try to debug other researcher tool and then report the comparison?

The benchmark applications used for testing the tools are large scientific applications. The tools are written using complex software frameworks. In short, debugging either of them will require substantial effort. Before committing I would like to have some advise.

You could do that, but then you wouldn't be doing a comparative study anymore. You would, in effect, be comparing one thing you created with something else that you modified. It would bring your comparison into doubt even if it didn't invalidate it.

Report that your tool produces X and tool A produces no result for such cases. That is a valid comparison.

But improvement of the tools of others can also be a valuable contribution, though of a different sort. Decide what it is you are after.

You could also point out the flaws to the developers of the other tools and see if they wish to update. If so, you can compare with their new versions.

You can also, perhaps, enter into a tool-building collaboration with some of the others.


Can it hurt to put my GRE score on my resume? If my score is good and if I'm applying for an MS program in Europe, can it give me any kind of edge? The university I'm applying to requires GRE scores for certain programs but not the one I'm applying for. And if it won't be advantageous, can it hurt my prospects in anyway?

Generally speaking it's okay to add whatever to your CV as long as it does not distract the reader from more important points/experiences.

For a GRE score, I highly doubt it would hurt to put it in, even if it is not required. Not to mention that some may perceive this as a plus.


Does it make sense for the professor to write a recommendation letter that is directly readable by the student? It seems that US universities usually provide a link to the professor of the applicant, and let him/her directly upload the recommendation letter to that link, meaning that the student would have no access to it. However, when applying to Masters programs offered by German universities, I am surprised to see that they all ask the student to upload the recommendation letter in PDF format/to a text area directly, by his/her own, which seems to make little sense to me.

I'm afraid that some professors will just outright reject writing a letter which is to be handed to and viewed by the student. Or are such worries unnecessary? Is this a cultural difference between continental European and British/American system (My current university mostly follows the British/American system)? What should I do in this case. Should I ask the professors to write and hand me recommendation letters directly, or should I try to communicate with the university and let the professors email them the letter/give me a physical letter sealed within an envelop, which I will send to the university by mail later on?

Is this a cultural difference between continental European and British/American system

I cannot surely speak for all continental Europe, not even for a small portion of it and not for all fields, but speaking with a few European colleagues of mine, it appears that the expectations that we have on recommendation letters are completely different from the typical US expectations.

In particular:

We mostly consider recommendation letters as a mean to discriminate between those that are not able to provide any recommendation letter and those that can provide at least a couple. That is, we expect most of the people not to be able to get one (in a distant past, I wouldn't have considered one who just attended one or two classes with me eligible for a recommendation letter).
We don't expect recommendation letters to be more than one page long, and half a page is ok (you just have to tell me that you had worked with this person and that they are not that bad).
We don't expect the recommendation letters to be sent directly from the reference to the application board.
We consider the writing of recommendation letters as a favour to the applicant, and not as a duty of our profession.

Actually, all the recommendation letters I wrote but one were handed directly to the student (or former student). For the exception, I've received a direct request from a university to submit the recommendation through their online system: the uploading procedure, with questions to answer too, was such a hassle that I've decided that in the future I will probably decline any request for recommendation letters to be uploaded anywhere.

To answer your main question:

  Should I ask the professors to write and hand me recommendation letters directly, or should I try to communicate with the university and let the professors email them the letter/give me a physical letter sealed within an envelop, which I will send to the university by mail later on?

I understand your reasons, but I'd consider this an odd thing to do. I'd simply ask the student to provide the recommendation letters.

In case the professors were reluctant to hand the letters directly to the student, I'd write an email explaining the different traditions.


Is there an optimum time to leave between writing and self-proofreading? Having read a number of guides on tips to do when proofreading as well as some questions on this website. They all refer to leaving some time between writing and proofreading. This time can vary from 5 minutes as per Purdue online writing lab

  Even a five-minute break is productive because it will help you get some distance from what you have written.

to

  Put the paper aside for a few hours, days, or weeks. The writing centre-UNC

My question is has there been any scientific work/papers done that gives a result on an optimum time to leave between writing and self-proofreading?

It appears a number of factors come into this, such as what point proofreading should be done, familiarity with the text and length of time away from it.

According to Jane Cogie, Kim Strain and Sharon Lorinskas

  It is important also that editing [proofreading] be done at the appropriate stage of the writing process, that is, as the last step, after issues of organization, coherence, and flow have been addressed.

In a study, The generation effect in reading and proofreading, the authors Meredyth Daneman and Murray Stainton conducted the following experiments in which;

  Subjects spent 30 minutes composing an essay on student life; after a 20 minute interval (Experiment 1) or a two week interval (Experiment 2) they proofread their own essay, another subject's essay after being familiarized on an error-free version of it, or another subject's essay without the benefit of a preview. Experiment 1 showed that subjects were less able to detect errors (e.g., The best part of student like is socializing.) in self-generated essays than in unfamiliar other-generated essays; on the other hand, they were better able to detect errors in familiar other-generated essays that in unfamiliar ones. Experiment 2 showed that the disadvantage for proofreading self-generated text is likely a by-product of extreme familiarity rather than any special quality of self-generated knowledge per se

Commenting on the above study, Maura Pilotti, and Martin Chodorow (doi:10.1007/s11145-007-9110-x) state that;

  The difficulty experienced by proofreaders with their own writing occurred even though the proofreaders were warned that errors had been added to their writing prior to proofreading. Interestingly, the impairment uncovered by Daneman and Stainton turned into an advantage after a delay of 2 weeks between writing and proofreading. The researchers argued that the ‘‘excessive’’ familiarity afforded by one’s own text, which is likely to decline over time, is detrimental to proofreading because it promotes a less thorough processing of written material.

It would appear from the above that 20 minutes is too short a period, and that something like two weeks is more optimum, but if possible leave it as long as possible.


Would you recommend internship, or more courses, for preparing for a PhD in Applied Math? For a math student, does an industrial internship, where you use the applications of the mathematics you learned in courses, give a better preparation for a PhD in Applied Math, or taking more advanced courses? How about taking courses on other topics (not math), which are skill-based or otherwise practical with a lot of applications in applied math, such as high-performance computing, statistical learning, numerical modeling, etc.?

Having been on the grad student selection committee of the departments I was in for the past 4 or 5 years, and having read hundreds of applications, here are the things that really make an application stick out (in roughly this order):

Having research experience
Doing well in senior-level and graduate-level courses in the area you
are applying for
Experience applying your knowledge outside an academic setting.

So, if you have the opportunity to do an industrial internship, then you're satisfying the last point and, if you get the internship in the right environment, then also the first point. If that means dropping one of 5 senior/graduate-level math courses (or a non-math course) you were going to take before applying for grad school, then that's a worthwhile trade off. On the other hand, if that means that you're not going to take any advanced courses, then that's not a worthwhile trade off.


Including my institution in a research paper Consider this scenario:

I am a student. I ask my professor about possible research grants. He suggests applying for a research grant with 3D printing. He helps me brainstorm and incubate in idea.
I start doing research, get a proof-of-concept, submit the proposal. While waiting for the decision, he suggests I present at my university's research conference.
I register for the conference, include my professor as the advisor and give the presentation.
Get a good amount of my research done. My proposal was rejected unfortunately. I still did a tremendous amount of work, so I am going to write up a formal paper on my findings.

So the question: Is it appropriate to include my university as my affiliation in the paper? This is my first research paper, so I don't quite know the best practices on this. I should credit my professor. He really helped me to shape my idea and gave me a lot of advice. However, he did not have a formal role in the research.

I did do my work in the school's hardware lab. My professor did help me a lot in giving me advice. However, the tools, materials and 3D printer were all mine and it was all done on my own time.

So I'm writing this paper up, and wondering whether I should include my title using something like the following template:

3D Printing Stuff Title
John Smith
Advisor: Hubert Farnsworth
Department of Quantum Neutrino Fields
Mars University
fry@mars.edu

As a student, your research affiliation is the university --- the professor is beside the point.  You should list your affiliation as:

  Your Name
  [optional: your department]
  University Name
  [optional: university street address]
  City, Region, Nation
  email address and/or other contact information

The degree of detail requested depends on the requirements of the venue where you are publishing: the critical part is name, institution, city/nation, and durable contact information for you (since people may try to find you five or 10 years later).

Credit to your professor will likely be as a co-author: talk to your professor,
as the answer will depend on the degree of involvement and the conventions of the community you are submitting to---computer science 3D printing and biology 3D printing are very different.  If your professor is not a co-author, they should be recognized in your acknowledgements section instead.


How does it look if I finish my PhD in five years instead of four? I’m doing my PhD in computer science in Germany and next year would be my 4th (last) year. I can wrap it up until then, but I really like to have an extension to the 5th year. There are still 2–3 ideas that I have investigated but couldn’t finish because of the time frame, so I would like to do a bit more.

I have two publications so far and hopefully can have one more during the coming year, but I would like to have more publications, especially in better conferences. Also I think that I do not have yet enough expertise on the topic I’m working on.

Anyway, my supervisor prefers that I finish my PhD in four years, although I haven’t talked to him seriously about it yet. Also the funding would be available outside of his grant budget so he won’t be worried about it.

I’ve heard of many other students who finished in five or even six years, but I’m not sure in practice how important it could be especially if I can have good publications by extending my PhD.

The quality of your thesis overshadows the length/duration of your PhD.

Having said that, it depends on your goals. If you clearly think (and your adviser as well) that another year would make a big impact on the quality of your thesis and, consequently, on your CV, and is not too risky to pursue extra work (i.e., the questions you want to tackle are not too ambitious and you have a good possibility of enhancing your CV) then go for it. Otherwise, I am not sure you would want to stay at PhD while you could be looking for your next (PostDoc or industry) jobs.


The right way to do academic writing I am doing PhD in IT
I have Bsc in Math (there wasn't writing in my study)
and my masters was course based not research.

Today I got my paper returned with many comments

some of these comments are (boring, need more focus)

There are papers that I enjoy reading, as they have nice flow, they take me from one sentence to another smoothly.

When I write I put what I want to write in bullet points and then struggle connecting sentenses and have the flow from one sentence to the other.

I wonder if there is right way to do academic writing.

Shall I read many papers about the topic I am writing about then squeeze my brain to put that in a paper format.

or shall I take notes from each sentence in the papers I read and then connect them together.

or is there any other way to do the writing?

There must be a way most people use.

I appreciate any help here.

There are no "tricks", and everybody has a way that works best for them. This often involves revising the text many times. A few tips many people agree on are:

Start with the easier parts (often the methods section if there is one).
Put the paper away for a few days, then read it as if you were a reader instead of the author.
Don't make complex or long sentences, unless you are really skilled at doing so.
Get help from co-workers: let them read your paper and take their comments into account. Iterate until convergence is reached.
People often refer to the text by Vernon Booth about academic writing. It is old but still full of great advice (just ignore the bits about typewriters).

Writing well often takes many years of practice as well as lots of reading. It helps to read both well-written scientific articles (and identify why they are so well-witten), badly written ones (and identify why they are not so nice to read), and also literature (books): the latter are written by the real experts: writers.

Writing is also a talent that is not given to everybody. Don't take this the wrong way, but it is very well possible to be an excellent mathematician or computer scientist without being a good writer. A possible solution could be to focus on your research and ask for help to write or revise your papers before sending them in: you don't have to do everything on your own, and there is no shame in asking for help from your colleagues or supervisor in writing the paper. Some universities even have dedicated "scientific writers" to help researchers write their papers.


What to do when I think a published paper displays academic misconduct? In a paper published recently in a math journal, the main result is presented as being new, but in fact it is not new, and I'm sure that the authors knew this before submitting the paper.  I have informed the journal editor who handled this paper, who told me he would forward my message to the managing editor.  I have not heard anything since then.  What else can (or should) I do?

For what it's worth, I am a tenured professor.

In more detail, there was a previous paper [A] which proved a certain result (1).  The proof given in [A] actually proves a stronger result (2) which has a messy statement, and notes that (2) implies (1) (where (1) has a simple statement).  The main result (3) of the recent paper [B] implies (1), but is implied by (2).  Moreover, the proof in [B] is identical to the proof in [A] (and the authors of [B] say this in their paper), except that the proof in [B] uses a stronger auxiliary result at one step.  So the authors of [B] must have been aware of the stronger result (2) proved in [A], but they do not mention (2) in their paper, and certainly do not mention that their main result follows immediately from (2).  To me, this shows that the authors of [B] published their paper under false pretenses, by intentionally misrepresenting prior work.  In addition, the auxiliary result mentioned above is presented as a new result in [B], even though it has been published several times and also the authors of [B] were fully aware of this fact, since they had written previous papers citing an essentially identical result from a paper [C].  Even beyond this, the paper [C] contains a result which is stronger than (1), (2), or (3), although the authors of [B] do not mention this.

If people think I am overreacting, I would be happy to hear this.  It's possible that my views of proper academic behavior are not standard ones.  I don't have a fully articulated philosophy about these things, I just feel like the authors did something wrong and should not benefit from doing it.

Added later: The situation has been resolved.  The journal's editor informed me that, after inspecting the documentation I sent him, he has decided to require the authors to withdraw their paper from the journal.  I don't know the logistics of this, but to me it seems like the appropriate outcome.

Let me congratulate you for seeing a publication practice that you suspect is fishy and taking the trouble to inquire about it.  This is something that contemporary academia really needs: we are self-policing, so when we let these things slide it is as though we are sitting back and watching a robbery take place from the comfort of our squad car.

Here are my reactions to your story.

You make a very compelling argument that the authors of [B] should have known better than to try to publish their paper.  The details you provided do not yet compel me to believe that the authors did so deliberately or with malicious intent.  Math papers are hard to read: just because you cite one theorem from a paper does not necessarily mean that you are aware of the other theorems in the paper (you "should be", whatever that means, but that's not the same thing at all) and just because you come across an equivalent version of a theorem does not necessarily mean that you see that it's equivalent.  Rather recently I got sent a draft of a paper that contained three theorems.  They looked interesting, so I read more deeply.  It turned out that two of the three theorems were not new.  How did I find that out?  By reading the papers cited in the bibliography!  But one of the papers was written in a manner where it was a little puzzle to decode every single result (and the author did not shy away from stating more general theorems with more complicated statements; I can't argue with that, but it certainly does make the paper harder to read).  The point of the story is that the people who sent me this paper were not bozos: the third result was very nice, and I have just written a paper with them that builds on it.  Or here is an even more personal example: in my PhD thesis I combined work of Ogg with more recent work (of Ribet and others) in order to determine whether certain Shimura curves had points over Q_p.  I didn't write these results up right away, and when I looked back at them a couple of years later I had to reread the paper of Ogg to refresh myself on what he had done.  I was surprised to see that one of the theorems from my thesis was already proven in Ogg's paper!  My proof was not the same as Ogg's, but neither was it "better" in any clear way.  This may not be that different from what you're describing.  These things do happen.
Divining the authors' true motivations does not seem to be your job as a self-deputized academic policeman (if it is, you have an awfully hard job).  What matters is that a paper got published that doesn't do anything new and that in fact cites the paper that majorizes it.  That's bad no matter what the authors were thinking...but when you look at it that way, doesn't a lot of the blame rest with the journal's handling of the paper?  It seems like a referee who was a true expert in the literature or honest and conscientious enough to track down the citation should certainly have caught this issue and prevented the publication of the paper.  The journal looks bad just as the authors do.  If they are really not being responsive to this, they look even worse.

It seems more likely that the journal is looking into this but doing so slowly (this involves a lot of delicate conversations, including with the authors of the paper), and in the meantime they are not doing a good job of assuring you that they are actually doing something.  You say that the matter got referred to the managing editor.  If you have waited what you think is a reasonable amount of time and not gotten any further response, by all means take it up directly with the managing editor.  It would be pretty surprising if you didn't get at least an acknowledgment of the issue from him/her within a few days.  If you really hear nothing back, then waiting a week or so and sending a followup email conveying the fact that a total lack of response is only going to make you have to do more yourself to deal with the situation seems in order.

That "more" would involve talking publicly about the situation: e.g. bringing it up to other mathematicians you know and, depending upon the importance, raising the issue on a site like MathOverflow, putting something about this on your own webpage, writing a letter to the editor to some other journal, and so forth.

Finally, let me say that proper police work here may require giving up your anonymity.  I think you should be willing to do so if it comes to that.  In your comment you say that you are "[s]eriously" worried about getting a mailbomb from the authors.  Seriously seriously?  You think that some ethically questionable mathematicians are likely to commit a violent felony??  I find that hard to believe, but if it's really true you need to contact the actual police.


Is work experience necessary for tenure-track positions? In India, a minimum of 3 years of work experience is necessary to be appointed as an assistant professor in any of the IITs. (Years during the PhD or master's are not counted, but any year spent outside university after bachelor's will count.)

Is such a work experience a necessity even in US universities? If yes, how much will this weigh towards selection? If the candidate has only a post-bachelor's experience, what should be highlighted from that so as to enhance this application?

There are no universal rules regarding employment status and being hired at US universities. In some fields, such as engineering, graduate students may be hired before they have completed any post-graduate professional experience. In contrast, in departments such as physics, it may be required to complete several post-doctoral appointments before being considered for faculty positions.

There are some general guidelines, however:

In less "applied" STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, more time is generally required in academic positions before earning a full-time faculty position.
In more "applied" fields, the time spent is reduced. Unfortunately, in some cases, although industrial experience is often seen as a good thing, it also has a tendency to make it difficult to jump back into a research field—unless one has been employed in an industrial research capacity.
In humanities fields, it's very difficult of to be able to continue to a faculty position after leaving academia.


How often to meet for successful supervision of Master theses? Currently, I am in the process of finishing my PhD and starting a PostDoc position. Part of this position will be the supervision of Master theses.

I have little teaching experience, and no supervising experience except for "passive" experiences of being supervised myself when writing a Master's thesis myself. An added difficulty is that my workplace and the university where the students are studying are 150 km / 2 hour train ride apart, so I can't just have "open office doors" and meetings have to be pre-arranged.

What frequencies of meetings with students under supervision do you find helpful or too much? This will surely depend on the student, but how do I figure out what is right for a student I have never met before?

My supervision is (in Computer Science, although I think that this is likely not particularly field-dependent) in the beginning usually quite tight (meaning meetings once a week for about one hour each, although for other fields "tight supervision" may mean something different). At the beginning of the project, the student is usually not yet fully caught up on the literature in his field and does not yet fully understand her/his topic. Hence (s)he is still unsure about where the project is going, and often has a hard time deciding on tactical issues, such as what to try and work on next. In this phase I usually have a weekly jour fixe.

As the project progresses, I more and more retreat to the background and give the student the freedom to decide more individually how to conduct her/his research. This naturally also means that meetings become less frequent, and the jour fixe becomes more an on-demand meeting. I still try to catch up with the student approximately every three weeks (again, concrete frequency may vary for you), mostly to check that the student is progressing and that her/his research is not completely derailing into a track that I consider dangerous or wrong (I will let the student make smaller, tactical mistakes, such as wasting some time on an approach that I suspect may fail, but I will step in if the student embarks on a detour that I consider bad enough that it may seriously threaten the success of her/his thesis).

Towards the end, meetings tend to become more frequent again, mostly because I like to give students quick feedback on individual sections of their thesis while they are writing. No point in letting them make the same 15 standard mistakes through their entire document before I get to suggest improvements. In this phase, and especially if time is already running out, I sometimes have quick feedback meetings almost every other day.


Why is it called an "abstract" if it is 10 pages long? A conference I have submitted to asks for an "extended abstract" of up to 10 pages, which amounts to pretty much a full paper. Why is it then called "abstract"?

The conference is in the crossing between computer science, biology, and mathematics, so it may be following any of their traditions.

I am guessing you are talking about RECOMB, one of the most important computational biology conferences. The story behind this is a little complicated and can show you some of the difficulties faced by a relatively new interdisciplinary field.

Since computational biology has both computer scientists and biologists, it needs to answer the needs of both cultures. For computer scientists, presentation and publication in the proceedings of an important conference is considered excellent. In biology, however, publication is mainly in journals. A second difference between cultures is that in computer science it is standard to publish extended versions of conference papers in journals. In biology, this is usually not acceptable unless it is a low-tier journal.

So what do you do if you want to get submissions of great work from computational biologists of both sides? This is a challenge that computational biologists have been dealing with not just in this conference but also in other conferences. There have been all kinds of proposed solutions - I will not list them here.

RECOMB organizers have tried different solutions and decided to call the accepted manuscripts "extended abstracts", and these are published only in the conference proceedings (which are not freely available). This way, computer scientists consider it published in the conference and biologists consider it unpublished so they can still submit it to a high-tier journal.

Actually they usually also have other "submission tracks" such as coordinated submission to a specific journal in parallel with the conference.


Deciding whether to study abroad or continue at my current university for my PhD, what factors to consider? I'm currently doing a master's degree near my home state and have been offered to continue at the same grad school with a PhD. The funding side of things has yet to be confirmed, but is almost secure. I also have another offer from a grad school in Switzerland for which the funding is definitely secured.

Regarding the position in Switzerland, (i) living abroad for a few years is an advantage and (ii) the research topic is more closely aligned to what I ultimately would like to focus.
My current place has the advantage of (i) continuity and knowing the research group environment and (ii) research collaborations and publications that would probably exceed - in terms of both quantity and quality - that of the position in Switzerland.

What other considerations should I factor in to my decision and any advice as to which option I should choose?

One big advantage of changing schools is that you meet new people.  Most people have a few things they're really good at.  By meeting new people, you get to learn the new things that they are really good at.  More generally, you get to experience the culture of a different place and group of people (both academically and socially).  This helps to give you a more developed sense of what is normal (reasonable to expect), and likely will expose you to new insights.  All else being (close to) equal, I suggest that you move.


Experience with DeepDyve group plan? I am currently looking for alternatives / provisional solutions to traditional journal subscriptions. The research institute (200+ researchers) I am working at has contracts with all the big players but they do not move in the currently ongoing negotiations. We consider cancelling one big subscription completely but the scientists would go berserk on us. So, we need an interim solution to supply them quickly with the articles they want and DeepDyve is one possibility. Unfortunately, I got no reply to the inquiries I sent via their online form.

Has anyone experience with DeepDyve group plans? What are the costs and is the access reliable?

I've no experience with DeepDyve specifically, but there are a few things that stand out as issues from a quick look -

a) Coverage. They seem fairly broad, but it would be worth double-checking they include, say, the top-fifty most used journals by your researchers. (It's a little fiddly to produce such a list, but quite an interesting thing to have available.)

b) Access rights. In my experience, people get quite frustrated by read-online-only access models with no print/save capability, and this seems to be the DeepDyve approach. Downloading is apparently an additional cost (the plan gives you "20% off" without saying how much the basic price is)

c) Accessibility/usability. Requiring users to go to a specific service to read the paper (rather than the websites they're used to) will cause friction and probably a bit of confusion.

None of these are insurmountable, but they're all things that are worth considering. On the plus side, their basic prices seem competitive to standard document-delivery services, assuming some kind of a bulk-purchase discount, and access seems to be immediate rather than delayed.


What does it mean when a conference submission system asks if the first author is a student? When I recently submitted a paper to a conference, there was a checkbox asking whether the first author is a student. Did you encounter anything like that? Does this means the reviewers will consider this and will be less strict?

It can mean lots of things and only the conference organizers can tell you the reason. There could be student paper awards, travel awards, or student presentation sessions. There could be research speed dating or a desire to have more student presentations in each section.

Likely the peer review will not change, but the selection process might chnage. Paper selection is not just about the best paper, but about the best fit given the goals of the conference.


Is an interest in the Philosophy of Biology a good reason to pursue grad studies in Evolutionary Biology? I have always leaned more towards questions surrounding psychology, sociology, and philosophy but fate has me graduating with a BSc in Biology this year. Would it be smart to pursue it further more for the aesthetic beauty I find in its ability to shed light on questions beyond itself than for the science purely in itself?

My understanding is that taught MSc in evolutionary biology will likely differ in course content from university to university. So whether its a good idea / is going to interest you is hard to predict.

Secondly, what would be looking to do after the masters? That's another way to frame whether masters study is a good choice.


Is it offensive to ask my PhD advisor for permission to record our research/technical discussions? I will be joining a graduate program in the US this fall. To keep track of important technical/research discussions with my advisor, I think it would be a good idea to record conversations with my advisor on a voice recorder/camera. It would be very helpful as I (and my advisor) will not forget/miss anything important. Also, I could listen to my advisor's comments again if I do not understand something in the first go. So I would like to know (from an advisor's perspective) if it is bad etiquette to request my advisor to have our research discussions recorded on my voice recorder/camera. I do not wish to breach anyone's privacy but only wish to keep track of my own research. And I only want to record if my advisor is happy with it.

Update: As mentioned in one of the answers below, sometimes it is hard to keep up with the advisor as my field is highly technical and mathematical (theoretical physics). It has happened to me before that some things my earlier project advisor discussed went completely over my head. I found it hard to even jot down such things since I did not understand what he was trying to say (like lots of mathematics jargon). An example:  If I am just starting as a PhD student in US and I see my prospective advisor (and his collaborators) discussing about something I feel to be very interesting, I do not think I will be able to pick up all the "deep and subtle ideas" that come up during such discussions (being only a beginner). And if I do not pickup what is deep and what is not, I might miss those important ideas and consequently not jot down. It is very important for me to understand those ideas. I do not think my advisor will be able to clear doubts in such situations as I would not be familiar with such advanced stuff at the time of those discussions. This is why I think it is very helpful in such situations to have a record so that I could go back to it later on when I understand all that jargon. It would save a lot of our time as well if my advisor does not have to repeat things multiple times.

You need to ask first, and you need to ask without the recording device in your hand.

But sure, why not ask?  If I were asked, I would find it a little strange at first, and then I would think about the fact that this shows a real commitment and diligence to keeping track of what is said during our meetings.  One of the biggest issues with student/advisor meetings is that it feels like they should happen very informally, but information is often being provided in a way which the student cannot easily or perfectly understand or even take in.  So there is often a lot of repetition over a period of weeks, months or years.  (Not just between students and advisors, come to think of it.)  With that in mind I would be inclined to say yes.

I also strongly disagree with another answer which suggests that an advisor might drop a student for making such a request.  This seems to contribute to a sentiment that students should be afraid to discuss things with their advisors, which I see so much of on this site and think is very unfortunate.  It would be incredibly unreasonable behavior to drop a student for making this request or really any request which has anything to do with the student's academic or professional life.

Added: My response is not meant to apply to interactions with other people aside from the OP and the advisor.


How will the topic of my Master's thesis affect my PhD? Main question:

Will the admission committee care about specific research topics or do they only care if I can/cannot do research irrespective of the topic? Will an off-topic thesis be looked as sign of inconsistent interests?

It would be great if answers focus mainly on US schools, however answers for european schools are also welcome.

Related questions : Will an off-topic Masters hurt my chances of a PhD place? . My question is very very similar to this but with two main differences - 1) The author of that question had no option and was at liberty give this as a reason if it was brought up in the admission proces. But I cannot do this and thus, will it be looked at as sign of irregular intersts? 2) I want answers for US and not UK

Why I ask this question:

I am a Physics Master's student from India and will be starting my Master's thesis around 3-4 months from now.

Until this point (and even right now) my projects were in Cosmology-Dark Matter. I enjoyed them and I want to apply for PhD in Theoretical Cosmology/HEP/AstroPhysics groups. This decision is based on my chances to get a PhD position in a good place and how much I liked the topics.

I always wanted to study/work on "pure theoretical" topics such as Quantum Gravity. But after I started my Bachelor's I realized that it is impractical to pursue these topics, at least not for PhD (lack of positions and funding - from what I heard from seniors). However, I really want to research on these topics at least once, and I know for sure it will be next to impossible once I start my PhD. That's why I want to work on this for my Master's Thesis. I have read an interesting paper on semi-classical gravity and have even approached a professor in my department who is willing to guide me on a project related to the paper. However, I am not sure if this is a sensible choice. How will such a thesis affect my PhD application? I do not even know if I'll produce any new results but I really want to try this but at the same time I am worried if this would reduce my chances of getting PhD in a good place i.e will a thesis on Cosmology give a higher boost than this? My previous research projects on Cosmology were quite extensive, with one first author paper, so I can show that I have some experience in the topic. But I do not know if the admission committee compares specific research topics or do they only care if I can/cannot do research irrespective of the field.

Thanks in advance!

In the US it should matter very little. Having a closely related area in mind might be an advantage, but changing might not be much of any disadvantage, within limits. In fact, having too narrow an interest might make it difficult to find an advisor in the US. Some flexibility is suggested.

Note that most beginning doctoral students in the US don't come with an MS or with much research experience. The first task is to pass qualifying examinations and some coursework is provided for that. Along the way you choose an advisor and a topic. But the topic has to be mutually agreed on.

It isn't quite correct to say that all they care about is your ability to do research. But it is fairly correct provided that the fields you previously studied and the new one is fairly close. But expect to have to do some background work at least.

And, even having a wildly different MS topic might not hurt your chances for admission. It would just add to the time to completion as it would for someone entering with a BS instead of an MS. But a lot of things will be looked at in any application: courses taken, grades, test results, letters of recommendation...


Is it common for prestigious universities to contact you after you dropped out to see whether you wish to enroll again? Many months ago, I had to drop out from a prestigious university.

Lately, the university contacted me and asked me if I were considering enrolling once again, and said that if yes, I should do so before a certain deadline.

Is it common for universities to contact drop outs?

The answer may depend on why you had to drop out, but many universities simply consider you to still be their student even if your studentship is disrupted by events beyond your control, and will assume you are likely to wish to continue your education there.

You do not say why you had to drop out, but common reasons for somebody to withdraw or fail include: mental health issues, financial crisis, physical illness, death or serious illness of a close family member, visa problems, etc.  None of these indicate anything negative about your potential as a student even if they caused you to fail all of your classes.  I have known people who dropped out for a wide variety of such reasons, many of whom then returned to finish at the same prestigious institution after their life circumstances had improved.

Many universities thus make it easy for a student who left for such circumstances to return and complete their studies, and that is likely what is going on with your university as well.


PhD application, low Master's GPA I am wrapping up the first year of my Master's degree at an R1 university (social sciences program). I really want to apply for my PhD, but I am concerned that my master's GPA is prohibitively low. I am ending the first year with a 3.6 (primarily due to text anxiety, which was new to me this year). I love learning and feel that I've gained a lot from my classes, but it's not reflected in my test scores.

My undergraduate GPA was a 3.9 I do not yet have publications, but I've joined multiple labs and connected with professors who know my research interests and motivations.

Will my GPA be too low for admission into a PhD program? I will be completing my thesis next year. At this point, I think I've gained a good perspective on how I need to approach my studies in grad school, and I've developed strategies to improve my academics in my last year. Can anyone recommend strategies to help me improve?
Thanks!

I have been affiliated with two doctoral programs in the social sciences and a GPA of 3.6 would be sufficient for the requirements of both programs. Have you looked at some prospective PhD programs that you would like to apply to? Check what the minimum GPA is - many will probably be between 3.0 and 3.5 minimum, which would mean that you should be fine.


Risk register for 'office-based' research I'm writing a grant application for a 1.5-year research project in which

I'm the only member
a systematic literature review (some papers may be pay-walled) will be performed
the main study data (de-identified) have been already collected in a previous study
the only required logistics are an average computer (already provided by the University) and open source software.

Of course, the application includes conference presentations, travel to meet collaborators, and open-access publications, etc.

From the funders' perspective, what kind of risks that should be addressed in such a research project?

I guess there could be many, but:

The existing data might not be good quality or sufficient quantity.
Reliance on a single person may lead to failure if they have health problems, or get a new job.


Did a masters in order to make up for my BA marks. But I did worse. What now? A second MA? The title says it all. One thing to mention though, is that I am not too bad - I have B+ marks. Another thing to mention is that a lot of my doing bad had to do with mental health and family in war.

I am not sure what to do now, I wanted to apply to top universities, but fear I am not competitive anymore, and explaining the circumstances also won't make my marks better, so I am still a less attractive candidate than others who have better grades and no such history.

What do you think about doing a second master in this situation? (I know this is not possible in the US, but would be possible for me in the UK)?

Your explanation of being in the humanities with no 'industry' for you begs the question... why are you pursuing advanced degrees or maybe asked another way... what do you hope to do with your life once all degrees have been attained? If you can focus on that instead of focusing on attaining the grades to get into the prestigious university vs. a lesser known one; and how it will be perceived by the respective schools you may come up with the answer on your own.  A PhD at any respectable university is an accomplishment in and of itself, and one that you would/should be proud of. Inevitably, whether you get into a top tier university or a lower tier one, what you get out of it depends on what YOU put into it. Whether it is an 'industry' or a career or a profession or a job, that is what will await you when schooling is done.  Try to focus on what you want to be doing after school then pursue any school that can give you a credible education towards that end, and then move forward and don't look back! So in answer to your original question... don't waste another two or three years on an additional Masters degree, move forward, and take what is available to you.  Good luck!


Doctorate with no affiliation submitting to a publication with an undergrad co-author I am working on a paper to submit for publication. I hold a doctorate degree but I do not teach at a college or university and the paper has nothing to do with my current employer or job function.
My co-author has a bachelor's degree, is not in school, and is not my student however the paper is based on work she is doing for her job. Her company has approved the paper for publication as it contains no property information.
My question is how would I list the affiliation? Would I leave mine blank and her's as her company? also for bachelor's degree do you list the degree? (I have never seen that)
Would this be correct:
Philip D. Noah, D.Sc.
Jane Smith
XYZ Company

Your affiliation could be "Independent Researcher" or similar, though blank might be allowed.
The other person may require permission from the company to name them, even though permission to publish has been given. It is best to check.
But your listing seems to imply that you both are affiliated with XYZ, which is not the case. You probably need to clarify that.
And yes, her degree can, and probably should, be listed. Use whatever the diploma shows: BS, BSc, ...


How many research interests should be included in a statement of purpose/objective I am wondering how many research interest should be included in a statement of purpose. Is it better to include just one core interest or to include up to three as in my case?

Be as specific as possible.  Do not bluff.

Remember that admissions committees are looking for strong evidence of research potential.  One of the markers of that potential is a deep interest in your intended research area.  For that reason, it's important to describe your potential research interests in specific and credible detail.  Why are you interested in field X?  What specific problems are you interested in working on?  What projects have you done?  What papers have you read (or written)?

It doesn't matter all that much what you write about.  We know that your interests will change over time.  Nobody is going to limit you to the specific research topics you describe in your statement.  Your statement is at least as much a demonstration of intellectual maturity as it is a description of research interests.

Eykanal's observations are correct.  Most graduate school applicants "barely know what's being researched".  A list of buzzwords mined from faculty web pages is not credible.  You can't effectively describe what your interests are when you aren't familiar with the field.  But I disagree with his conclusion; just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.  Don't be most applicants.  Know what's being researched.  Don't be vague, and don't just list buzzwords.  Make yourself familiar with the field.

After you've done that, writing about your research interests is easy, because you actually have some.


Repository for funding opportunities I'm aware of many mailing-list and RSS feeds advertising about calls for papers/participation, available positions, events, etc, but I find it much harder to know about funding opportunities, such as calls for proposal, grant applications, etc. I'm based in the UK, and there are many funding agencies, including of course EPSRC and the EU, but also many smaller ones, and I'm pretty sure I'm missing interesting opportunities.

So my question: are there some website/systems where I can register my interest, and get to know about existing or soon to come opportunities?

In case it matters, I'm in Computer Science.

The biggest problem with such repositories is that someone has to maintain them. All the small funding agencies/foundations are usually obscure and will be hard to find on such a webpage.

Anyways, are you familiar with Research Professional? I use it from time to time, set up alerts for funding possibilities in my fields, so I get mails when someone new comes up. Might be worth a try...


What to write in the followup email to a professor for a graduate teaching assistantship I will be pursuing masters from UT Austin this fall.I have mailed professors for the position of  a teaching assistant. Some of them replied and some did not.
What should I write in the followup email to the professors who did not respond.

Thanks!

In such situations, it is always beneficial to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have either (1) not seen your email or (2) seen it, but forgot to reply. Seeing that many academics are busy, let's assume that with such schedules any of the above two options are viable.

You can perhaps write something to the effect of "...I am writing to you once again, because I don't think you have received my earlier email...".

Good luck!


Cite Formal Definitions of Standard Problem in Thesis Should I cite the definition of a standard problem that is widely know by the community in my thesis? For example the travelling salesman problem (TSP) is a very well known problem in computer science (dating back to the 1800s). To ensure accuracy I would refer to other sources for the formal definition, but these sources are very far removed from the original formulation of the problem.

Not sure if it makes a difference but I would potentially using different symbols as some of them could conflict with other uses throughout the document.

It is probably best to err on the side of completeness as long as you don't get so pedantic that you can't be understood. Some people who later read your work will appreciate those citations, even if your committee doesn't need them. Appendices/annexes are good for including some of that sort of thing.

But if you rely on a different formulation than the standard it might be especially useful to be complete. You don't, likely, need to chase the full history back (though it might help situate your work), but at least the immediate ancestors to your work.

Complete, but not pedantic. A balance.

And of course, your dissertation advisor has the best and most relevant advice on this. He or she needs to be happy.


What do search committees really read in a CV during initial screening for a faculty position? Faculty positions are very competitive, and each advertisement should roughly receive hundreds of applications.

I think search committees cannot spend more than 1 min reading each CV during the initial screening (correct me if I'm wrong).

CVs are usually 10-20 pages documented in different formats, and it is not easy to capture potentials of a person in 1 min.

Owing to the fact that not all committee members are fully familiar with the journals in which applicant has published, his/her research impact, his/her universities of education, or the importance of his unusual achievements.

Then, how does a search committee shortlist the candidates during the initial screening? What do they quickly look for in a CV to keep the candidate?

NOTE: My assumption for 1 min for each CV was based on a simple math. If a job ad receives 400 applications, each member should spend almost 7 hours to review only CVs (not looking at other documents). If my assumption was somehow wrong, please forgive me. Your answer can clarify the issue anyway.

I'm serving on a hiring committee this year that received roughly 180 applications for a tenure track position in mathematics.  All of the members of the committee reviewed all of the applications.  Most could be very easily eliminated from consideration (PhD not completed yet, PhD in a field other than mathematics, wrong area, etc.)  Although I got through some of these easy applications in a minute, the better applications took considerably more time to review, and I ended up spending about 15 hours reviewing applications for the first round or an average of about 5 minutes per application.

When the committee met, we wrote down our top 20 lists, and it was relatively easy to select phone interview candidates, since only 18 candidates were on the top 20 lists of at least two of the committee members.  We offered phone interviews to 18 candidates and had 14 candidates who agreed to phone interview.

I don't blame applicants for submitting to lots of places, but the reality in mathematics today is that nearly all institutions will be able to find enough applicants to phone interview that meet all of their requirements, are in the preferred area of specialization, and have some post PhD experience (post-doc, VAP, or both.)    If you don't have these qualities, then you're not likely to get through the first round of screening.


Will the prestige of my masters program affect my phd application choices? I am in the last few semesters of my bachelors, and I have been preparing myself for  applying to PhD programs in mathematics. However, as I was sitting with my research mentor today, he informally offered me a graduate assistance-ship for the masters program at my current university. He mentioned I would still need to go through application process but that I am a pure shoe-in for the GA position. I am unsure whether to chase after this offer on a more serious tone or apply for PhD programs, and as such I am seeking information. The real rub stands that I am attending a not too prestigious school for math and this worries me that I may be limiting myself. However, for personal reasons I am considering this potential offer greatly. Would the masters from a low/middle-tier prestige/ranking hinder my chances for getting accepted into top-tier PhD programs?

If you need some information about me. GPA 3.7, Major GPA 3.8, I will have some published works, I will have finished 3 Graduate courses before applications (Order Theory, Analysis, Graph Theory), GRE general in the upper crust, No Math Subject yet (Still studying for this). Two very strong recommendations from current and accomplished researchers, and two standard recommendations.

There is a note that I should include my location before posting. I am attending MTSU for an Advanced Mathematics Bachelors.

I would recommend that you apply directly to doctoral programs and use this offer as a backup if nothing materializes. In mathematics and some other fields acceptance into doctoral programs with only a BS or BA is more or less the norm. Your vita looks pretty good and I think that many doctoral programs would be happy to have you.

Most likely you would also be offered some sort of funding, though it would be as a TA or similar, though funded research isn't impossible. Places with doctoral programs in math in the US need a lot of TAs.

Apply first and then consider your options. You might even be able to get some indication about the likelihood of your acceptance from a faculty member at a proposed university.

Also, in many doctoral programs in the US, you will have the chance to get a Master's along the way. Sometimes just by filling out a request after a certain amount of coursework. In my case a small thesis was also needed.


Describing a still working self developed software system in a research paper. Which tense to use? Hello,

Ive developed a Software system, consisting of different parts for research purpose. And need to write a research thesis about this. Which will be my first scientific work in english ( iam not a native speaker, obviously).
However i'am not sure which tense i should use.

I developed the system for a research purpose(lets assume a red button which activates an alarm whenever someone is pushing it with a stress level than usual for this person, so the system needs to determine between usual and non usual stress level which is individual for every person)

After this step, i used this system in different setups and evaluated how the system performs in different setups ( IS the system able to track the higher stress level and activate the alarm. ( or do not acitvate the alarm if the stress level is usual for this person today [f.e. the person has a higher stress level the whole day, due to a fight with his girl friend in the morning, but the alarm should not ring as the persons stress level is higher than last week, but this level is usual for the todays condition])

Anyway, i know i should write the methodology part in simple present, because the experiment is finished whenever someone read this paper. ( the half of the participates watched a horror movie for 10 minute before they pressed the red button, while the other half watched the same movie for 1 minute before they pressed the button)

But what is about the part in the methodology chapter where i describe the system? The system is still there Anyone could plug it in, and hit the red button, and the red button would scan for the heartbeat rate and send the information to the controlling unit, the controlling unit would do some math and if the value x is above 2 and the value y is above 12 the controlling unit would send a query to the server which would do some math and send back a value z. If the revived value z is above 2*(x+y) the controlling unit would activate the alarm.
the system is still working the same way as it worked when i did the experiments.

QUESTION:
Which tense should i use to describe the developed system in the methodology part?

Question: should I use anything other than the present indicative active tense to describe a system's behaviour.

Question: is there any reason to write in another tense? Will it help a reader to understand the system better if they think of it as functioning at some time in the past?

Answers: if you are describing a mis-behaving or erroneous system ("when I pressed button 'B' the system gave off a cloud of smoke") then it would be useful in that it would distinguish the mal-functioning instance. But you are trying to describe a properly-functioning system and so the present indicative active tense is preferable: "Press button B, The green light illuminates ...". It reads like a manual and so your write-up will be useful.


What is the meaning of "To appear" for submitted papers In some C.V. I see the statement "To appear in X Journal" in front of some papers. What is the exact meaning of that? Does it mean that the paper has been submitted to X journal?

Based upon the context, I would treat to appear as a synonym to accepted or in press. This article means has been accepted, but not yet published. Most journals have a lag between acceptance and online publication (conversely, others journals now post the accepted manuscript almost immediately after acceptance). This lag can be due to a backlog of other articles ahead of yours, copy editing, formatting, or other procedural delays. Before online early access, articles could spend months or longer in this status (e.g., an article was accepted for quarterly publication and had to wait multiple quarters to be published).

Another question asks about how article status is evaluated by search committees.
I would also add that you likely have no way of verifying to appear other than waiting. I have heard about search committees and tenure/promotion committees asking for copies of acceptance letters, however.


Grounds for an ethics complaint? UK math prof. publicly misrepresenting results from an unrelated discipline I'm a Ph.D. candidate in social sciences and last month I presented and defended my thesis in an Eastern European university. The full text of my thesis is available to the public. A couple of weeks after my defense, a math professor from the U.K. wrote a blog post in which he utterly misrepresents my results and suggests that my work is pseudo-science. His opinion does not deal with statistics or any other parts that may be a common ground for mathematics and social sciences. When I tried to publicly defend my work on his blog and to point out that his claims are malicious and untenable, he accused me of homophobia, implied that I am a psychopath, and said that the methods I'm using have driven people to suicide (none of which is true, but rather nonsensical - I had a serious WTF experience when reading these claims).

All of the above happened on a niche blog that is widely read among my colleagues, and I fear that it will affect my career as a researcher. Some signs show that this may have already happened. I want to file an ethics complaint against this professor at his university and I would like to hear whether the above are sufficient ground for such a complaint. Do university ethics committees dealing with other cases beside research misconduct and harassment? Should I present this as a research misconduct case or as something else? I feel that this belongs to presenting flawed interpretation of data and misrepresentation of qualifications or experience which is not held (a math professor thrashing social science research), but I do not think that a blog post would qualify as 'research' at all.

First, and foremost, be very cautious about taking this issue outside of the scientific realm of argument.  If you start to file ethics charges or libel lawsuits, then you are likely to be casting yourself in the role of censorious scientific villain, and it is likely to not go well for you.

Instead, if you feel that your work really is scientifically defensible, I recommend that you stick entirely to the evidence to defend it.  If you cannot do so, then that is a serious problem --- having not read your thesis, I have no idea whether you or your critic has a better case.  Do note, however, that being in a different discipline does not immunize you from a person's criticism: a critic need not have any credential at all to point out a potential flaw in your work, and the nature of science is that if you cannot defend against criticism, your work cannot stand.

Finally, I would strongly recommend talking to your advisor before you take any further steps and strongly heeding their advice.  Your advisor is likely to know better than you whether to take your critic seriously, given the state of your work and the field, as well as what types of response are likely to be wise or foolish.