Transfer of credit (masters) in Germany? Is it possible to transfer credit (masters) in Germany? I have completed half of my credits in a German university. Now I want to transfer to other university. Is it possible?

Credits must¹ be transferred if you are changing universities, this includes courses you have failed. Any course with the appropriate amount of credits that is 80 % or more equivalent to a course in the program you are transferring to will be transferred. Be prepared to do the paperwork, documenting the “Modulhandbuch” for all of the courses you have attempted.

You can only transfer, however, if there is space available in the target program. This is not always the case.

¹ This is demanded by federal law (Hochschulrahmengesetz, § 15(3)):

  Zum Nachweis von Studien- und Prüfungsleistungen soll ein Leistungspunktsystem geschaffen werden, das auch die Übertragung erbrachter Leistungen auf andere Studiengänge […] einer anderen Hochschule ermöglicht.

  (For certifying studying or examination accomplishments, a point-based system system shall be created that allows to transfer accomplishments to other degree courses of other universities.)

Specific realisations depend on the state or even the university. For example, the Berliner Hochschulgesetz states (§ 22 (2)):

  Die Hochschulen haben Studiengänge und Prüfungen so zu organisieren
  und einzurichten, dass insbesondere

  […]

  bereits erbrachte Studien- und Prüfungsleistungen bei einem Wechsel der
  Hochschule weitestgehend anerkannt werden können,

  […]

  (Universities have to organise courses and exams such that especially […] already achieved studying or examination accomplishments can be largely acknowledged when switching universities.)


Is there a standard medical fitness certificate format for applicants to European universities? I am from Southeast Asia and am applying to a university in Europe for a scholarship for a post graduate degree in management. The university is asking for a medical fitness certificate as part of this application.

The problem is that the university doesn't provide any kind of format for the medical fitness certificate. When I visited my doctor; as I am applying to a foreign university he recommended some kind of format.

I emailed the university to ask about this, but they did not respond yet.

So my question is, is there any kind of internationally recognized medical certificate format for this purpose? (If so, please provide a link.) Or can I have a simple letter on my doctor's letterhead stating my fitness of health?

I suspect that the right people to ask here are the staff at your local embassy. Certificates of good health, particularly in relation to European institutions, are more likely related to immigration requirements than university requirements. That will mean the embassy will be your best source of information about format. (In fact, there may only be specific doctors authorized to produce such certificates, and you may need to schedule an appointment with one of them, rather than obtain one from your personal primary care physician.)


How should I feel about a professor using an entire online course for his own course? I'm taking a machine learning class at a school in South Korea. I've heard some good and bad things about this professor in particular, but I didn't really know until I actually took his course.

I've noticed that my instructor is literally following the exact course of the well-known online machine learning course taught by Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng. The print-outs he uses in class are also taken from the online course, and the examples and jokes he uses are also the same to the T. There are other print-outs he takes from Youtube which I happened to find which he seems reluctant to address when I asked him about it.

Perhaps I am thinking/acting out of my place, but I just don't think that it's appropriate, and maybe I feel a bit cheated because many students (including myself) have to work several jobs to come up with tuition money, and it doesn't feel good that I'm paying a large amount of money for a potentially free online course.

How should I feel about this? Is this more commonplace than I feel?

EDIT

I haven't mentioned the quality of education I'm getting through the course.

The quality is low, which is what led to my initial frustration. I honestly couldn't care less what material instructors are using as long as they cite the source and are able to use it to everyone's benefit. This instructor is not only not citing the sources, but is reluctant to tell me where he got them when asked about it.

Regarding the class itself, I've found myself in situations where asking the instructor of this particular class a question is often either not answered in a clear manner or is answered with "Just email the TA's," which has led me to seek answers either online or elsewhere.

Perhaps this is my prejudice, but when I ask a professor from an internationally accredited institute of higher education a question on machine learning, I am hoping to get a detailed explanation on the mathematical or conceptual reasons to how certain algorithms were formed or how we can prove they are sound. Not just an answer that goes along the lines of "Hmm well when I was working on this project this algorithm worked best, and you can find the proof online."

Copying an entire course from Coursera is definitely not commonplace. Some parts of ML courses are fairly 'standard' (there are only so many ways one could define linear regression), but lifting material without proper credit can range from annoying, unethical to outright plagiarism. It's fine to take some examples and use them (with proper credit), but it's generally expected that an instructor adds some value of their own.

I don't know how you should feel about this. Sounds like you already are feeling pretty annoyed (I would!). I can answer what you can do about this.

The minimum I would do is report this in the student course evaluations. Write a detailed report of everything that went wrong. If you school's administration cares in the least about their teaching, this will get someone's attention.

The best thing you can do is rally the entire class. If it's just you - well, you're just an angry student who's not getting the material and is trying to squeeze a good grade. If a significant number of complaints come in (even 10 students is a good amount), that's going to get people's attention. Does your university have a student union? An ombudsman? If you go through them this will also get people's attention.

You can also try to (discreetly) reach out to the person in charge (professor in charge of curriculum, the department head etc.). I would not confront the lecturer directly if I were you, unless you don't mind getting a bad grade. It is very unlikely that this instructor will be removed from the class, and if they find out you reported them they may be very biased against you: reporting paints a target on your back (this is another reason to have more people complain, the instructor can't fail all of them and get away with it!).

The likeliest outcomes here are that the professor will not be teaching this class in the future, and that's about it. Alternatively, they'll be required to stop this bad practice in future iterations of the class (say, if your department is understaffed). I don't foresee them facing disciplinary action, unless this is not the first time that this has happened.

Good luck!


What to do about referral for student I would not recommend? In my field (computer science), students often get jobs through referrals, where faculty members pass on the student's resume to someone employed at the company the student wants to work at. In an annual talk and throughout the year, I advise my students to use referrals if at all possible rather than applying online. I accept LinkedIn requests from my students and encourage them to ask me for referrals.

There is currently a student in our small program who has negatively impressed all of the professors he has taken classes from, as well as many of the students. He is not the weakest CS student, but, in my opinion, he is the worst at getting along with others and behaving professionally.

I am wondering what to do when he asks me to refer him to companies (which I expect him to do). In the past, when a weak student has asked for a referral, I have said that I don't think they're ready for the job in question [due to their technical level], recommended that they ask a different professor, or refer them without an explicit recommendation (e.g., "Jane Doe asked me to refer her to SlackJaw.") I am hesitant to do the latter for this student because I don't want to hurt my or my school's reputation by putting forward a candidate who behaves inappropriately. I also dread his reaction if I decline to refer him for a job. I expect that he would get angry and allege persecution. (I'm a tenured full professor, so my job wouldn't be in danger if he complained about me, but I'd rather not get in that situation.)

In any event, I don't want to hurt his chances of getting a job. I'm happy to give him job-seeking advice and help him with his resume, but I don't want to recommend him.

What should I do if he asks me for a referral?

Why do you dread his reaction? You have no responsibility of giving anyone a referral. I doubt "this professor did not write me a referral" would stand as an excuse to allege persecution in any tribunal.  Don't get bullied by a student, just plainly refuse to do a referal if you are not up for it.


How to engage students in oral presentations? Paper-based exams are not fully representative of knowledge, and it is good to consider oral presentations of students as a factor for the final grade to some extent. This is somehow the case in graduate courses, where the number of students is lesser, but how to follow this strategy for crowded classroom of inexperienced undergraduate students. I mean a classroom of 50+ size with students who do not have experience in scientific discussion!

I would like to add to earthling's answer. If you have teaching assistants, please do make good use of them in this aspect.

As a TA, I have had excellent experiences in mentoring undergraduates to prepare research presentations, final papers, projects and proposals for these papers and project. Of course, we were generally in a class of 120-160 students so that speaks to a classroom scale higher than what you are suggesting. There were 3 graduate TA's, usually and we each had about 50 students to mentor. We found that we could devote significant amounts of time to each student when we met them on a one-on-one basis. Of course, the professor also met them one-on-one and there were a couple of rounds of iteration of their final presentations - which was very, very useful for the professors, the TA's and the students. As mentioned previously, it was a time sink, but very well worth it.


How to cite simple definitions when writing university papers? When writing any kind of paper or homework at the university I am supposed to give references for my citations. At the same time, sources like Wikipedia are not considered good for university level. Now let's say I am writing about malware, and I want to give definition about virus. Wikipedia has a good explanation, but I obviously cannot just copy without references (right?), and to give reference to Wikipedia is considered unacceptable.

So how am I supposed to give reference to such an item? Am I supposed to change the sentence in such a way that it cannot be tracked where I took it from?

Standards for papers and homework is not the same as for publications. Moreover, there is nothing fundamentally right or wrong about a definition as long as you introduce it as such ! (in University words mean what you decide they mean -- within reason, that is). You can definitely write something like

  In this paper I will use the definition of a virus as a '...' (1)

and refer to a footnote that says

  (1) definition taken from Wikipedia article Virus, retrieved on
  2014-10-04".

Of course if Wikipedia's definition is taken from a printed reference, use the latter.

If you want to be extra-cautious you can have a look at the change log and discussion of the Wikipedia article.


Can publishing on arXiv create copyright issues? As an undergraduate I'm relatively new to academia. I was wondering if publishing a paper on arXiv could potentially be an issue if I were to want to get the same paper in, say, Nature, for why would Nature be okay with their material being openly available online? Isn't there a copyright issue here?

Nature especially states how pre-prints should be handled:

  Preprints

  Nature Research journals support posting of primary research manuscripts on community preprint servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv.  Preprint posting is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at Nature Research journals.  [...] Authors posting preprints are asked to respect our policy on communications with the media (http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/embargo.html).

  [...]

  The original submitted version of the manuscript (the version that has not undergone peer review) may be posted at any time.  Authors should disclose details of preprint posting, including DOI, upon submission of the manuscript to a Nature Research journal.

Taken from Nature's webside about Publishing licences and compliance with open access mandates.

TL;DR You can post your pre-print on arXiv prior to its submission to Nature.

Important: These condition may not only vary by publisher but by journal/conference.


Is my career over if thesis went bad? I wrote a master thesis which went quite bad, due to communication problems with advisor, and my advisor said he is not willing to continue guiding me for PhD studies.

Specifically, I was asked to prove that the elementary theory of finite field is decidable, and I had no background on model theory. I had difficulty understanding, for example, the proofs of Riemann hypothesis for curves and Chebotarev's theorem. As such, I made mistakes when I wrote the thesis. It felt like the subject is too large for one thesis so I was unable to fill some details in some proofs. When I asked for guidance for some of the proofs, he did provide assistance, but only after six months time.

However, I have studied math on my own and I know that I am able to understand math by working on my own. Is there any hope for my math career if my thesis advisor said so? I have done couple of small new proofs for some old results, but they are so small that I guess I won't get a publication to any journal.

It's very hard to switch to a different advisor or even a comparable school when your thesis goes bad.  This is because the first question a potential advisor would ask is what happened with your old advisor ... if both you and the advisor don't have a reasonable answer to that, you will have a very hard time.

That said, there are alternatives:

You could try working for a year or two and then returning to PhD studies.
You could try switching to a different area.  There are lots of areas where a student with good mathematics abilities could find interesting problems (economics, computer science, physics, ...)
Switch to a less respectable school that might be willing to take a gamble on an unknown student with a good background.

In short, one of the most important decisions a student can make in his/her graduate career is an advisor.


Disagreement over how much IP to put in paper Apologies if this is not the correct site for this- I work in a research lab that is in a kind of grey zone between academia and industry and I can't tell from the help centre if this would be considered off-topic here.
I'm a fairly junior researcher in my field, and I'm writing my first paper that I will be the lead author of. My paper is based on work that I did on a relatively niche process in my field that has little previously published on it.
However, I'm being told by my manager to not include any potential IP in the paper, and instead just report on the results. My issue with this is that work was fundamentally about creating a framework for this process- without the underlying technical description allowing the reader to recreate the process there is not a great deal of note I can say other than we did it and it worked.
The reasoning behind my managers argument is to ensure that the lab (which is kind of a corporate entity while also being a research lab) can exploit the work for products and services later down the line. I would be fine with this except that the company is quite poor when it comes to actually exploiting IP, and instead just prefers to sit on it. On top of that, the work performed doesn't really meet the level of being patentable, so it's not possible to protect the IP and then give a thorough description in the paper.
The likely outcome as I see it is then that I publish a paper with little technical information or impact and does nothing to further the field, the IP is not patented and the company does nothing with the outcomes of this work, meaning that the work might as well have not happened. As this is an area I am very enthusiastic about and have sunk quite a bit of my spare time in to (not to mention I am somewhat proud of it) I am rather disheartened by this.
My reasoning for wanting to publish the underlying technical content is that
(a) it has a much better chance of being cited, having a greater impact and increasing awareness of the work
(b) advances the field by allowing other groups to implement this process
(c) does not stop the company from engaging in commercial work with industry in this area as we are really the only group with expertise in this area.
So my question is how should I approach this issue?
Am I being overly pessimistic, and should I just accept what my manager wants?
Or should I try and argue my position (and if so, how?)
Edit: to clarify, this is a publicly owned institution, that has dual aims of both generating impact from science and also making a profit to provide a greater value for taxpayer money. It doesn't really have 'competitors' per se, and can be either commercially or research focused depending on the issue.

You are probably just stuck. "Trade Secret" is a valid concern of any profit making organization. And the fact that what you have done isn't patentable now doesn't mean that it can't later be combined with other things to result in products and patents in the future. Large organizations hold quite a bit of IP in reserve hoping for future breakthroughs. And even if the company can't think of a way to exploit the work, they would hesitate to provide a boost to any competitor.
So, your manager is probably telling you true. Your employment contract probably says something about that.


How to build my CV if I have two MS degrees in the same field (and quit a PhD)? I got a MS degree in Statistics in University A, then I got admitted in the  Statistic PhD program in University B. However, I couldn't finish my PhD study, and I have to transfer to the MS program so that I can apply for OPT. Now I have two MS degrees in Statistics in both A and B, how can I list them on CV? And actually A is better than B... Should I write ABD on B? Thanks.

If there is any difference whatsoever in what you were working on during the two programs, I would do something like this depending on the job you are applying to and how the focus of you program matches with the job:

Master of Science in Probabilistic Models (discontinued PhD in Statistics), University of Second-place, 2017
Master of Science in Randomized Algorithms (Statistics), University of First-place, 2013

In short, you want to put honest information that doesn't making it look like you are hiding something or leave unexplained gaps, but at the same time you want to put things in the most positive light and prevent people from assuming something negative. If you just put two "MS in Statistics", one line after the other, that will indeed make most interviewers likely think, "huh, what's this about?" I fully expect they will ask about why you are leaving the PhD program and/or why you have two masters in a closely related field, so just have a good explanation for this that fits the job, or answer it proactively in a cover letter.

You could also list one as just a generic MS in Statistics and be more specific on the other one, etc - so long as you provide accurate information, you are free to add more specific and useful information.

This also serves the purpose of making it clear that you didn't learn exactly the same thing in both degree programs. Employers care about the skills you've developed and how you can use your knowledge to benefit them, so make that easier on them (they are rarely ever going to spend half an hour trying to decipher academic transcripts to see what courses you took).


What to do with teachers who think their subject is "extra special" and gives students too heavy a load? I've had my fair share of teachers who give so much more load than the previous teachers of the same subject. A whole extra project, much more papers, or exercises, etc.

The bigger problem is that there comes a time where in a single semester, several of the teachers think this way, and MOST of them give an extra project/exercise EACH, on top of the current curriculum projects.

This strains the students too much.

How should a student approach these types of situations?

This is just what you should be expecting from your postgraduate degree. Each module is special. It should push you further than any undergraduate module would.

You are also now assumed to be a grown-up, and to learn how to manage your own workload, and to balance competing demands on your time and energy. Part of what a Masters or Doctorate course does, is to teach you research skills, and project management. These are (at least, in the courses I've been involved with), an important part of the process.

If you are having trouble balancing your workload, talk to your personal tutor, the graduate tutor or whoever else it is who's been assigned to you by the department to manage these cross-module issues.


Good books/resource on mathematical writing I am a freshly graduated Ph.D. I want to improve further my mathematical writing (in English, if this matters).

I am looking for books/resource that address good mathematical writing. I can find some books, for example, A Primer of Mathematical Writing by the AMS. But I wonder if there are any other new books or resources.

I recommend the paper (series of class notes) Mathematical Writing, 1989, written by Donald Knuth ("Art of Programming" author, among other things), Tracy Larrabee and Paul M. Roberts.
Here is a description from Stanford:

This booklet records the class on Mathematical Writing led by Don Knuth at Stanford in 1987. Among the 31 lectures are guest appearances by Herb Wilf, Jeff Ullman, Leslie Lamport, Nils Nilsson, Mary-Claire van Leunen, Rosalie Stemer, and Paul Halmos.

We saw many examples of "before" and "after" from manuscripts in progress. We learned how to avoid excessive subscripts and superscripts. We discussed the documentation of algorithms, computer programs, and user manuals. We considered the process of refereeing and editing. We studied how to make effective diagrams and tables, and how to find appropriate quotations to spice up a text. Some of the material duplicated topics that would be discussed in writing classes offered by the English department, but the vast majority of the lectures were devoted to issues that are specific to mathematics and/or computer science.

It is helpful not just for mathematicians but scientists and technical communicators of all sorts.


Cannot attend CS conference but coauthor isn't registering The deadline to register for a peer-reviewed computer science conference with proceedings is in three days and I cannot attend despite being the main author of a paper there since I am leaving the current institution for non-academic employment. I cannot afford to lose this job and losing it will have catastrophic consequences. I have discussed this issue with the coauthor for many months, and they kept saying "I'm pretty sure that I can go, but if not we'll find a solution". At least one author of the paper must be registered and at least that person must present it at the conference or else the paper will not be published.

There has been still no tangible proof of the coauthor either definitely going to the conference or registering, and I do not know this person well enough to trust them. The publication is critical as it is the only proof of me producing anything in quite a long time, so I cannot afford to lose this publication. I cannot take the stress any more. How do I ensure that someone registers for my paper so that it appears in the proceedings?

Another possibility is that your "non-academic employment" obviously values your skills - have you considered asking them if they will give you leave (paid or unpaid) to let you present - and it has been known that some people say in their intro "I am here thanks to the grace of X...".


Is there a conflict of interest when the supervisor and co-supervisor are husband and wife? I have been co-supervised by my primary supervisor's wife. Suffice to say that this has been problematic where both have different research interests. Each asks me to do different jobs and they often bring their home fights to work. My primary supervisor is always submissive to her will whenever she is around. Though he supports me in every decision I do and my research behind her back. It is been a nightmare and was wondering if there are some written rules that such scenario is a conflict of interest.

Your supervisors are problematic in several ways, from what you describe:

Pushing their own research interests over what's most beneficial to you
Exposing you to unpleasant interpersonal issues between themselves that affect your working environment
Not coordinating and communicating effectively with each other to co-supervise you

However, none of these things are necessarily the result of them being married. The same issues can arise (and I have seen them) with unrelated co-supervisors who do not get along.

In general, co-supervision by a married couple is not universally disallowed.  (In my university it is allowed, and there is a husband-wife pair in my department that successfully co-supervises PhD students on occasion.)

Some universities do recognize this as a conflict of interest. This from the University of Western Australia (emphasis mine):

  Supervision must be free of actual or perceived conflicts of interest.  Supervision by, or co-supervision with, close relatives or those in close personal relationships is generally not appropriate.  All such cases must be declared at the time that supervisors are nominated.  In cases where approval is given on academic grounds for supervision by, or co-supervision with, close relatives or those in close personal relationships, additional supervisors who are free of an actual or perceived conflict of interest must be appointed.


Should I add the names or skip them altogether? I am making a presentation on the topic Coral Reefs and their Conservation. I have included much of the information with reference to National Geographic channel's blog reports and United Foundations' reports. I have referred four websites, all of which were inter-related in some way (apart from the topic, of  course). They included the research work of a certain someone named Dr. Emma Camp and Associate Professor  David Sugget. These two were the leaders/mentors of the program which included many other PhD students and a few MSc students as well.
I have mentioned about two recent significant programs carried out for the recovery of coral reefs, Coral Nurture Program and Future Reefs Program. Both of the two programs have these two people in common along with a few others. So I was thinking of including a brief summary of both of them. But then I thought that wouldn't be just, because there were many other students and researchers as well.
Hence my question, should I include their summaries in my presentations or should I mention everyone's name as per this site or should I avoid this notion altogether?

For many different reasons, you should always give credit/citation to those who have earned it. One type of reason is that your work depends on their work. Another type of reason is to recognize their prior work, even if your work does not necessarily depend on it. Another reason is to give indications to your audience about sources for further information...
EDIT: for situations where some people are doing critical work (such as diving...) but maybe not literally writing, although traditional "citation" does not quite work, I'd still want to make a point of saying something like "the work of <divers, by name> was critical to this study".


Students who did poorly on the final exam There are a handful of students in my course who came to class, did acceptably well on the midterm, and contributed to the (group) assignments, but did poorly on the final exam. The exam was a combination of multiple choice and long-answer "problem solving" questions. The class is heavily applied and has a strong emphasis on team project work but there was also a 50% exam component.

These students were surprised that they did so poorly in the course.

Is this an indication of a poor exam or poor instruction on my part? Is there something that I can do throughout my course to avoid this situation in the future?

Some articles (ex: http://chronicle.com/article/Stop-Telling-Students-to-Study/131622) advocate moving away from summative evaluations altogether for example.

Apart from the natural response of blaming someone else for one's shortcomings (as students often do), it is difficult to see where the problem may lie. I have studied under a summative system and always found my grades were very clear and understandable to me, particularly if I understood why answers were graded as they were. Now I usually did not question someone's judgement unless I felt it was absolutely necessary.

Now, many years later, I am teaching in a system where courses are set up with learning objectives. At first I found this quite strenuous since each objective must be underpinned by clear grading criteria for each of the grades A-E and F. Note that the major difference is that the learning objectives means you do not grade on a curve but in terms of how students fulfill the goals.

Working with goal oriented criteria demands a lot from the teacher in first setting up the appropriate goals and then to make sensible criteria for how to judge fulfilling them. At first it seems tempting to describe the fulfillment as good, better, much better and outstandingly good or something of that sort but the point is to pinpoint what characterizes the standard for the specific grade. Since many criteria make up a final grade one must also explain the ways in which the different criteria are weighted together but that is a only a minor problem reminiscent of the summative system.

What I have found in the end is that not only should the criteria give the students better ways to understand where they stand but they actually provide me with more fuel to explain why they got the result they did. I now have a thought-through list of arguments for a specific grade which is not relative to others but relating to a set of goals and how to fulfill them.

If this is manageable everywhere is beyond my horizon to speculate on but I must say that after battling with the system (after it was imposed on us) I have found that it actually works in my favour—and hopefully also the students'). It makes the grading transparent. It is also possible to stake out issues that may reduce grades such as spelling errors in essays or missing labels in graphs or whatever details may matter.

Now so far this concerned the setup of the course in terms of grading. It is of course necessary to also add structure to a class that forces students to work with the new knowledge during the course. This could of course be any activity that makes students read the literature and reflect on its content. As an undergraduate I was in a system where studying was mainly done during a few 24-hour days before the exam. Once it was passed most was forgotten. As a graduate student I was in a system with lots of homework and other activities and I found that I really did not have to study that hard for the exam. So activities may play a role to help students reflect on the material. Exactly what activities can and should be used depends on the subject but the main objective should be to have students digest and reflect on the material.

A final issue concerns examination. Does the examination reflect the type of knowledge in the course? This is a big question and one which needs thought. There are many alternative ways of examining apart from written exams and since I hate correcting exams I try to test other ways. Again, what works depends on the type of course but look into other ways of examining the course to see if that will help.

I do not know if this is helpful as an attempt to answer your question but the topic of learning outcomes is difficult and whereas the learning at university level really IS the student's responsibility, it is the learning activities and assessments we make that can help them reach results.


What to do if my undergrad hasn't prepared me well for grad school? I will soon graduate with a data science MSc and am specializing in AI/machine learning, in which I would like to do research. I can read, understand and apply research papers pretty well, but I don't feel like I have the background to actually do research. When an author derives something, I sometimes need a few minutes to make sure that the math is sound. This comes from the fact that my undergrad school is only really good at teaching software development, and most of the courses I could take ended up being linked to that, neglecting the mathematical side of things.

The most worrying thing is that I don't feel completely sure about my choice of fields, since I have not been exposed to serious courses in most subjects that interest me. My bad results in math years ago were not from lack of interest, and I would have liked to take some serious courses in math and related areas, and give myself some time to decide what to do. This will probably become harder when I enter the job market. I may also have good PhD opportunities in machine learning through my job, which makes it even riskier to leave and start another degree without being sure I will like the field and do well in it.

I have started working through textbooks in various areas (linear and abstract algebra, statistics, machine learning), but without a clear plan, it's hard to prioritize self-study and focus effectively. There are too many interesting areas and not enough time and energy to learn all of them. Finally, I can't be sure that I am learning well or just getting the illusion of progress, since a set of textbooks can't replace a structured degree program.

How can I make sure that I'm ready and in the right field when I start applying for grad school? I'm not afraid of "losing" a few years to get another degree, if that's part of the answer.

Just a guess, but the guess is that you are uniformly underestimating your own skills and the quality of your education. You say "When an author derives something, I sometimes need a few minutes to make sure that the math is sound." Well, it might take me hours or days.

You are undecided about field and find a lot of interesting things that you might study. This is natural, but could be a block, since doctoral study is all about specialization. So, pick something that seems the most interesting to you and that seems to have some future possibilities. Apply to a program that is good in that field and find an advisor. You will be led toward specialization over a year or so and your research will lead you deeper.

There are two hard parts to research (well, maybe three). You need to find a suitable problem and you need to find a way to resolve it. (The third is, in some fields, coming up with a methodology for the resolution). An advisor can be helpful, especially, in coming up with a problem - or at least suggesting several, or pointing you at places that might be hiding problems.

But you won't know until you get into the thick of it.

And, for all of the "other" cool things that you leave behind by specializing, they aren't closed off from you forever. But first, get a doctorate so that you again have freedom to pursue whatever interests you.

Some people (myself) have changed fields quite drastically for many reasons. Some because of the academic economy at the time, but others (not me) have actually invented new fields. Some just followed their thoughts and branched off into a new area.

As a researcher you are currently unformed. The forming will come through practice and with the (hopefully good) guidance of an advisor.

Narrow your focus a bit. Apply to a good school. Find a good advisor. Work hard. Hopefully success will come, but satisfaction probably will in any case.


Is there a way to search specifically for literature reviews which have been written by others on a certain topic? Is there a way to search specifically for literature reviews which have been written by others on a certain topic?

I’d like the search to either return literature reviews on their own or contained within articles. At present, when I do a Google Scholar search for literature reviews it returns a list of articles containing the term “literature review” which clearly isn’t what I want.

The reason I’m asking is because I’m looking to get an overview of the research that has taken place in a certain area.

You can do this in Web of Science. After you've searched for the topic, look on the left and refine by article type -> review.

Less effectively, but still workable, include the word "review" in your Google Scholar search. Many review articles will use that word in either the title or the abstract ("In this paper we review ...").


Grad school hasn't responded to me two months after the results are supposed to be out I applied to a few grad schools and my top choice school hasn't responded to me. They confirmed they received my application and all my documents. I even got in touch with a professor who said she would be happy to take me into her lab. On the website, it says we should receive their decisions by the end of March, and right now, it's almost the end of May. I've tried contacting the admissions coordinator, left him a vm and email, contacting the professor, and also the people I was in touch with regarding my documents. No answer from anyone.

Did they forget my application? What do I do? I don't think I'll be accepted at this point and I'll go to my second choice school. Can I ask for my application fee back?

It seems like a long time beyond their own deadline, but things driven by committee in universities get delayed. It is possible, though unlikely, that your application has been lost. And, it is usually the case that you hear earlier about a rejection than you will about acceptance.

It is also possible that some communication has gone astray somehow.

Don't despair yet about acceptance, but you are due some sort of explanation. If you are close enough to visit you can do that and talk to the head of the department or an admissions officer. If you can't visit, but can make a phone call, do that. You will be hard to ignore. Call any of the people with whom you communicated, but the professor would probably be a good choice.

If you have to resort to email, let them know that you have other decisions pending and need feedback.

But if they truly have lost your application, you should be able to request your application fees. But that seems the least likely scenario to me. The most likely is just the slow turning of the academic wheels.


How to effectively e-mail a professor I met briefly about collaborative work? Recently in a conference, I met a professor from an esteemed university and head of a research group I have been following. I told him about my research and he gave me his email address (though I could easily find it over the web, he personally wrote it down for me). He told me to write to him and he will direct me to his post-doc and see how we can collaborate. His research group has some testing facilities I would love to work with.

The following is the email I am aiming to write to him. Any corrections and/or suggestions will be highly appreciated.

  Dear Professor XYZ,

  Hope you are doing fine. We met at ABC conference, in TTT a couple of
  days ago. I introduced myself as the PHD student at 123 University and
  expressed my willingness to work on a collaborative project with your
  research group (utilizing your practical testbed for DDD project).

  First of all, I appreciate the time you spent with me, and the opportunity
  to introduce myself, my research, and my interest in utilizing your
  testing facilities. Second, I would like your advice on how I can further proceed to initiate a collaboration between your research facilities and our RRR research group.

  I will wait for your reply.

  Thanks again,

  Kashan

I always suggest being a bit more succinct, and mentioning (but not delving into!) the technical aspects of your work. How about this:

Dear Professor XYZ,
This is [name]; we met at AAA conference in TTT a couple of days ago. As you may recall, I am working on [xxx] and you suggested that your post-doc could get me started in your testbed for my [yyy] project.
I'm very eager to pursue this. Could you please introduce me to your post-doc? I'd be happy to set up a call or provide any information you might need.
Thanks in advance; I really appreciate the opportunity,
Kashan


A working paper or a discussion paper or something else? I have some papers from google which I don't know to what type they belong: a working paper or a discussion paper or something else? I need this for my bibliography

Below are some examples of such cases.

The first one has an abbreviation JEL Classifications, but is this enough to refer this to Journal of Economic Literature?

The second one has nothing at all.

Can someone give me a hint? Any help would be appreciated!

JEL classifications are just that: classifications. Anyone can put such a classification on his paper, and it doesn't have anything to do with publishing in the JEL - it's more like a keyword.

To your question: I don't think there really is such a big difference between a working paper (which is work in progress, typically distributed to be discussed) and a discussion paper (which is work in progress, typically distributed to be discussed). All of these are essentially manuscripts under preparation for submission to a refereed journal (in CS, a conference). So I would file all of these under "non-reviewed papers".


Getting a reference from a PhD student I am getting ready to apply to mathematics graduate programs this semester. As far as I know most school require 3 letters of reference. I've secured two letters but for my third letter I have a couple of options. I can simply ask another professor whose class I have done well in, but I am not confident in the strength of the letter. As for my other option, I have just finished a summer research program under the supervision of a grad student and I feel as if he has more helpful things to say. However, it seems like in general it is not the best idea to get references from people who do not have PhD's. I was wondering what the best course of action would be.

There are a couple of major dangers in asking a graduate student for a letter:

A typical grad student has never actually read a letter of recommendation and has very little idea of how they are written or what the standard of comparison is.  It's easy to completely misjudge the style or miscalibrate the letter, in which case a letter that's intended to be helpful can turn out to be useless, or even counterproductive.  No inexperienced letter writer should ever send a letter without first running it by a mentor, so you would need to make sure the grad student plans to do that.
Graduate students automatically write from a position of somewhat less credibility, just because they lack experience.  Someone with more experience can compare a student to past students whose later career trajectories are known, but grad students generally can't do that.

One possibility is for the grad student to write a letter jointly with his/her advisor.  That may or may not be feasible, but it's worth checking.


What open indexing services compete with Web of Science As far as  I know, the only indexing services which track citation across journals and data repositories are accessed for a fee. Are there any free-to-use databases of article or data citation indices ?

I work for a biomedical literature database - Europe PMC, which makes citation data freely available. You can access it programmatically, via the articles API (https://europepmc.org/RestfulWebService#cites). This resource also tracks data citations for over 20 different public resources: https://europepmc.org/Help#trackdatacit


Advice for first time TA in mathematics I recently committed to taking a mathematics TA position which begins in a couple of months and entails a weekly exercise class and the correction of problem sets handed in by students.

This is my first teaching experience and admittedly I am rather anxious about it.

My question to those who already have teaching experience is the following:

What piece of advice (with respect to teaching) would you give your younger self before their first teaching experience?

Make sure you are thoroughly on top of the material before every student interaction.

This sounds obvious.  Moreover, it sounds like it could be condescending: if you're, say, a PhD student and you're teaching, say, freshman calculus, haven't you known the material cold for most or all of your adult life?  Probably yes...in some sense.  But the sense in which you need to know the material cold in order to answer students' questions effectively is much stronger.

Imagine that when you were a calculus student you were assigned to do ten applied optimization problems.  Let's say that you knock out eight of them immediately, spending no more than 5-10 minutes on each.  There's a ninth one that you keep doing the algebra wrong and it takes you 20 minutes instead, but no problem: you get it.  There's a tenth one which has some weird thing inscribed in some other weird thing and the first time you think about it you just get a bit confused.  No problem: you put it down for a while, go about your business, and you come back to it later when it's the one thing occupying your attention and you solve it correctly.  How good at applied optimization are you?  The answer is you're excellent: an A student with room to spare.  This level of skill more than qualifies you to be a TA for this material...but you had better do some advance preparation before the session itself.  As a TA, the students are very likely to ask you about the two hardest problems.  If you make more than one or two algebra mistakes in front of a large group, it's not great for them or for you.  If you try to solve a problem and fail, then -- even though you know you'll get it later, and even though "getting it later" is absolutely what matters in the world of actual mathematical work!! -- then the session itself is probably a failure, the course instructor is going to get some "How am I supposed to solve this problem when even the TA couldn't..." questions, and she is perhaps going to be less than thrilled with you.  When I was a TA it seemed to me that my on-the-spot problem solving skills actually had to be at a higher level than if I were actually teaching the course: if you are teaching the course, then you are controlling the pace of the information flow and choosing the problems. (In particular, if one of 50 problems from some section of a textbook is slightly confusing to you, you'll probably just not pick that problem!)  I haven't had to deal with course TA's for a while -- in my current job, graduate students do grading but rarely TAing -- but upon reflection I still find some truth to that.

(By the way, I have picked what was and maybe still is for me one of the shakiest topics from freshman calculus.  Of course there are lot of calculus problems that I really have always known cold...and after many years of TAing and teaching I really know which is which.  But there is something in the psychology of math students which makes you think that you should know everything cold or there's something wrong with you, so why don't you proceed under the assumption that there's nothing wrong with you and see how that works out.  What I'm saying is that there is likely to be something that you will screw up if you wing it...and that doesn't make you a bad math student, it just means you shouldn't wing it.)

How do you make sure you are thoroughly on top of the material?  As a first time TA, I would actually work every problem in advance.  Maybe this sounds obvious or most TA's know to do this...but I don't think everyone does.  Even as an experienced instructor -- say, at 10 years past my PhD -- I have had the experience of teaching a new course, thinking I knew exactly how something was going to work out, but because I hadn't written it down in as much detail as I was going to cover it in class, encountering unexpected challenges -- more often expository, but sometimes actually mathematical -- when it came to the lecture.  In fact this happened to me about two years ago when I taught a first course in linear algebra.  I really know linear algebra: like most mathematicians, it comes up in my work, and unlike many mathematicians I have a published paper in the area.  But there are certain things that I didn't have to worry about as a research mathematician and did have to worry about as a linear algebra lecturer.  I was actually rather embarrassed at the shakiness of my lectures.  I compensated for this by being more attentive to the students' concerns and writing more straightforward exams ("How are they supposed to solve problems when even I couldn't..."), and in the end I was surprised that the teaching evaluations were as satisfactory as they were: not great, but no worse than certain calculus classes where my lectures were pulled off exactly as I wanted to but the students were not as thrilled.

By the way, I well know that a lot of people will be tempted to roll their eyes a bit at an answer which is entirely focused on the content of the subject and says nothing about pedagogy, is focused on the mentality of the TA rather than that of the students, and so forth.  But this is where you have to start.  A first-time TA who knows how to solve all the problems and is just starting to learn about everything else is doing okay...and in fact better than some.  The next most important thing is learning to present mathematics in a clear, orderly way and the best and onliest way to do that is to get a lot of practice doing so.  The next time you teach the same course is when you really get to concentrate on the "higher aspects" of teaching.

Good luck, and good luck to your students.


How to find out the terms used for a topic, so that I can find the appropriate literature on it? My English is not perfect, moreover I am not familiar with the exact phrases for a topic of research or a technical term in the literature

I have some ideas or projects done, if I knew the exact word for the topic to which my idea belongs I could search better and find more appropriate resources and write better papers

For example suppose I have done an image processing projects which detects damages of an equipment in a manufacture, I thought its belong to the fault detection area but then I found the fault detection could be something more general or a different area ..... and defect detection is more close to the topic

As you see I need a website where I can mention what I have done or what is my idea and get the research area where I can find the proper resources

As Aleksandar says, you do need to learn the terminology in order to search effectively for articles. And in fact, you'll need to know the terminology in order to understand those articles. When I'm exploring a new subject area, I don't start with the journal articles; I start with books, web tutorials, etc., to get the basics.

For learning the terminology, I also suggest reading the relevant articles in Wikipedia or Scholarpedia. They will also have links to journal articles; get hold of those articles and see what keywords they use. Anytime you find a useful article, note the keywords, and what journal it's in. This will help you find other useful articles, and places where you might submit your own articles in future.

Also, your college librarian may be able to help you figure out some of the keywords to use. They usually know a little about a wide variety of topics, at least enough to have some ideas of what search terms might be useful. If you set up an appointment, they may be able to spend some time with you, helping you find some sample articles and working with you to figure out a good search strategy.


Should I include challenges I faced on account of my caste in my diversity statement? Some of the graduate programs in US schools require you to submit a diversity statement as a part of the application. I have looked at some resources on writing it, like these ones.
I happen to be from a lower caste in India. Hence there are specific challenges I had to overcome to make it to college. I am not sure if I should talk about it in my diversity statement because
there are quite a few professors from upper caste community in the departments I'm applying to and I'm afraid if mentioning my struggle will rub them up the wrong way. Is it a good idea to talk about my background in a diversity statement or is it better to leave it out?

Your diversity statement is not about who you are.  It is about why you should be admitted to the degree program.  In particular, it is about your ability to work with other people in the degree program and your later career, and how this ability will advance the goals of the degree program.
If your experiences relating to your caste has prepared you to work with other people, including perhaps disadvantaged people, then yes, write about that in your diversity statement.
The fact that there are upper caste faculty in the department is not very relevant.  Faculty overwhelmingly come from a higher status background than applicants.  There will be many applicants discussing experiences that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable to faculty.  Avoid stereotypes and personal attacks.


Should academic CVs include reviewing, non-academic service, hobbies and languages? Do you suggest adding these to an academic CV?

Review journals/conferences. Can adding such information creates negative issues or it would only have positive impression?
Non-academic service: example, Unesco volunteer
Hobbies. Many sites suggest to remove them http://www.academiccareer.manchester.ac.uk/applications/cvs/content/ , but isn't it important to show that the applicant is not a robot? Some suggest to include them wisely http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/how-to-get-tenure-at-a-major-research-university
Languages. Can knowing a certain language be used as a discriminate against an applicant?!

An academic CV is not intended to describe you as a whole person, but rather to describe your qualifications and accomplishments as an academic.  The assumption is that of course you lead an ordinary human life (with hobbies, friends, family, religious beliefs or the lack thereof, etc.), but the people reading your CV are not trying to evaluate you as a human being and aren't interested in reading about the rest of your life.

Anything academic is fair game for an academic CV, including reviewing.  How much to emphasize it depends on how many more important things you have to list.

Language skills are relevant to academia because they can assist with research, teaching, and public communication.  You are right that this information could be used to discriminate, but I doubt this particular form of discrimination occurs often enough to be worth much worry.

Hobbies and non-academic service are generally not relevant (although there could be exceptions).  It's not necessary to discuss them at all, and nobody will assume you have no hobbies or service activities if you don't mention any.  It's OK to mention them in a very short section at the end of the CV if you feel it's important, but you should definitely not emphasize them.  There are at least two reasons for this:

It could come across as cluelessness, like you think they are an important factor in hiring/tenure decisions.  This certainly won't ruin your chances, but it could look silly.
It could be viewed as a defiant statement, along the lines of "I'm letting you know that my hobbies are particularly important to me and I intend to spend more time on them than you would like."  If your CV is great otherwise you might be able to get away with this, but it will work against you.  (I've seen this happen with graduate admissions, where someone devoted part of their personal statement to a favorite hobby and the committee worried that this hobby could be a distraction from research.)

Hiring committees do care about hiring reasonable colleagues who aren't going to be jerks, so human qualities are relevant (and not just academic accomplishments).  Interviews shed light on this issue, as do letters of recommendation, and the CV is not so relevant.

Note that academic evaluation criteria are entirely different from undergraduate admissions in the United States.  In that case, colleges are trying to assemble a self-contained community, and they really care about breadth, well-roundedness, leadership, personality, etc.  Showing something about yourself as a human being is absolutely crucial.  However, this is an anomaly of U.S. undergraduate admissions, and graduate admissions, faculty hiring, etc. are done completely differently.  [I know your question never mentioned this comparison, but I decided to mention it for completeness since it's a common cause of confusion.]


Logic behind masters programs admissions I'm 2 years out of undergrad and thinking about applying to some math graduate schools, specifically operations research and maybe financial engineering. I was a math major, with middling grades, and now I work in IT.

My question is this: it seems that even for not top-tier schools, a high GPA is crucial, as are great letters of recommendation, wonderful GRE scores etc. Why? If I'm willing to shell out 50k for grad school, and I've met the prerequisites, and I show an interest in the subject, why wouldn't a school want to have me? Is it purely so that they can claim they have a low acceptance rate?

In other words, if a grad school (again, not top 10 let's say) has a surplus of people who want to take that program, in a field like math, why not just hire as many professors as it would take to teach them?

I guess I don't get all this pressure to be perfect.

Thanks!

EDIT: I am referring to masters programs in particular, where stipends are not as common.

EDIT: Ok, Pete and Paul's answers make sense, given the current set up of grad school. I can imagine a different set up, however, that would make it less competitive for students, more profitable for professors and more about learning than prestige.

You should not pay tuition to attend grad school, excepting possibly certain "professional" schools like medicine, business, law.

That is, grad programs admit a number of students for which they have funding, and have faculty/mentoring support.

Programs do not get tuition money back directly (as counter-intuitive as this might seem), but have to calibrate grad admissions to match the faculty they have ... the numbers of which are determined by essentially unrelated issues. But, approximately, programs will not admit you if they are not confident that you can succeed in their program. So you should not begrugde that judgement. And, srsly, such judgements are made with much experience.

Yes, there is the issue of prediction of success, which is an element that did not enter in undergrad studies. That is, programs do not "admit everyone" and then allow people to fail. Nor is it just a matter of "trying hard". Beyond a certain point, there is an issue of natural ability. It is true that this is highly non-trivial to understand/detect/encourage.

Yes, there is a considerable amount of disingenuousness in how we describe graduate programs...

Perhaps reaction-comments from the OP could help refine useful answers.


How to identify a research question as artificial I recently go through an interview on the basis of my research proposal and the person evaluating me said my research questions are artificial. I want to ask which characteristics make the research question not artificial?

While it's hard to know without knowing all of the specifics, it seems likely to me that this criticism is similar to saying that the questions are poorly motivated.

There are an unlimited number of research questions that might be asked. Why are these the ones that are interesting?  Consider that in many cases, a specific research question may be seen as a "natural" consequence of the underlying motivation.

For example, if one was studying cancer and noticed that a particular group of people got cancer much less than expected, the "natural" research questions might include whether they have different genetics or different habits or whether this is related to other known modulators of cancer frequency, or whether other groups of people with related characteristics can be predicted to have different cancer rates.  All of these might have obvious interesting consequences for the understanding and management of cancer.

An "artificial" question, by contrast, would be any question for which no such clear narrative is available.  It will be at least partially a matter of perspective, but rather than debating whether a question is artificial, it would be good to examine whether it is really well motivated. If so, explain the motivation better.  If not, get a more interesting question.


Is the math jobs wiki around this year (2013)? For the past few years there has been a math jobs wiki with lists of posted jobs together with "rumors" about shortlists, interviews and offers. This year the website hasn't been working. Does anyone know if the website will be available this year?

Here's the reply from Greg Kuperberg to this exact question asked a month ago on MathOverflow.

  I will put it back up soon. –  Greg Kuperberg, Sep 24 at 10:56

It'll be up soon unless he has changed his mind. Upvoting the comment there might help... hopefully.


What is a research student? I’ve red that some universities in Japan offer a non-degree program called research student. I want to know:

Why do students usually apply as a research student?
Do research students work on things that haven’t been done before? Or do they work on anything that interests them (of course) but that is not necessarily new?
How does a research student differ from a master student? What does a research student presents in his/her last year?

I've only encountered the term "research student" in Japan (研究生), most (all ?) graduate schools in Japan offer it (see for example the Graduate School of Information Sciences of Tohoku University). As I understand it

A student will apply as a research student if they wish to conduct research at the university under the supervision of a faculty member, but are not interested in taking classes or obtaining a degree. You could want to do this for example as a "gap year" between undergrad and Master's (or Master's and Ph.D.), this could be a way to get some research experience under your belt, and perhaps improve your application for Masters or Ph.D.
Anything goes, as long as it is agreed between the student and supervisor.
You are not required to present anything. Since there is no degree to be obtained, there are no requirements to be fulfilled.
is subjective.


Can one determine whether somebody's work may have been plagiarized? Background

A friend of mine submitted a very original presentation proposal to the largest academic association in her field for their annual conference about 10 months ago. About 7 months ago, she heard back that her topic was rejected (according to her, it was probably because her proposal was about a project that didn't have data yet, which is nonstandard but sometimes acceptable in her field if certain other criteria are satisfied).

She is now attending a similar conference in ~2 months. She was looking over the list of topics and found one researcher's abstract that was almost identical to the idea she had proposed.

A little digging told us that this researcher had been one of the anonymous reviewers for the proposal-call my friend submitted to, and that the researcher has a publication-in-progress for this project. This researcher's previous work is not in line with this new project at all.

My question

Obviously scientists independently come up with good ideas and perform similar research all the time. In many fields, research groups working independently on similar projects can even mutually support each other if they come to similar conclusions. Still, it's not always innocent.

Are there any ways to determine whether an anonymous reviewer may have stolen ideas from one of the submitted proposals and published them -- as opposed to two researchers coming up with the same ideas independently?

If so, how serious is this?

It depends on how identical their abstracts are. If nearly every sentence has the same concept with the same ideas, you should do further research on the details of the other person's abstract...like when it was published.


Should I quit Master's after 2 months into the program? Please help! I completed my Bachelor's in Electrical engineering last year in a foreign country. I already had a job pending in that country when I finished but due to visa concerns, I would only be able to start working after 7 months. To keep myself busy and use my time productively, I decided to enrol into a 1-year Master's program in Statistics and Data Science in the same country.

Two months into the program, I realize that I have not been putting my heart and mind into studies. I am only going to lectures for the sake of it, and I will probably not use most of the knowledge gained in my courses in the career path I want to pursue.

I was just able to obtain my work visa from within the country, so I can start working after one month in the position I had secured last year. However, if I push it through for the next 5 months, I will be done with my coursework and I can start working while I complete my thesis on the side. On the other hand, if I decide to quit now, I will lose 50% of the fees I paid (on a loan).

So, basically, if I do not quit now and start work after 5 months, I will have a Master's degree by the end of next year, more career options and make some use of the fees I have already paid. But if I decide to quit now, I will have a month off to rejuvenate (the past few months have been very stressful for me), get an extra income of 5 months which I can use to start paying off my debt and save the other 50% of the fees. In addition, I may save myself the struggle of pushing through an intensive degree I am not too interested in or the risk of failing a few courses. The same knowledge can be gained online via a ton of resources available on the subject.

Could someone please guide me on what would be the right approach to my situation? I feel like I had made a hasty decision to enrol into the Master's program, but I do not want to make a hasty decision to drop out. Any advice and guidance would be greatly appreciated!

There is no right answer for this question but I can explain what my approach would be.

Question I would ask:

Does the content of the master study interest you?
Is the gained knowledge/degree useful for potential career paths?
How much money do you waste by quitting?
How much money can you make by working instead of studying?
How would quitting/continuing affect your mental health?
If you do already have a pending job offer how does quitting/continuing affect the offer?
Do you really want to write your thesis on the side will practicing a full time job? (stressful, long time)
Can you work half time at the job?
Will your potential employer support/endorse your expanded study?
What is the future intend of pursuing an academic career?(Quitting a Master's program can place barriers for acceptance into other master programs and PhDs in the future (suggested by@Mefitico))
How will quitting affect your CV?

For a "sober" look at all those question a decision matrix would be useful.

If the financial calculations are to complicated asking a question here may help.


How do I sign my papers? My name is Jorge Fernández de Cossío Díaz. In my country, we have two last names: the first (Fernández de Cossío) comes from the father side, and the second (Díaz) comes from the mother side.

I have been suggested various signatures:

"J. Fernandez-de-Cossio Diaz", without the accents, since I've been
told that this helps search engines locate my paper. The hyphens supposedly help the        search engines to not mistake Fernandez-de-Cossio with two or three last names.
"J. Fernández-de-Cossío Díaz" (with the accents, since that's how my
is actually name spelled)
"J. Fernández de Cossío Díaz"
"Jorge Fernández de Cossío Díaz"

You can suggest new ones. I want to make sure that the search engines and citation indexes, etc, do not get confused. Also, if in my CV I write my name as "Jorge Fernández de Cossío Díaz", will it be ok if the papers are signed as "J. Fernandez-de-Cossio Diaz"?

In principle, you can use any professional name you like to sign your papers.  I have a few colleagues whose nom de plume (or perhaps nom de LaTeX?) is not the same as their legal name.

But by default, I would recommend signing your papers precisely as you sign anything else, including spaces and accents:

  Jorge Fernández de Cossío Díaz

It would be helpful for people citing your papers to state, somewhere in your CV and on your professional web page, that your last name contains three spaces.  And you'll have to correct copy-editors who incessantly abbreviate it as "J. F. C. Díaz", but you'd have to do that with the other suggested variants anyway.   Modern search engines have no trouble with accents.


Second PhD or postdoc and their effects on tenure track position I am going to finish my PhD in the Netherlands within one year. Ideally I would like to get a postdoc here. However, due to competition or other factors I might not find a postdoc position. Then, there are two options:

1- Searching for a postdoc outside of the Netherlands which is not the best option for me currently.

2- Doing a second PhD here.

I want to know if doing a second PhD makes it harder to get a tenure track position later.

Edit

I am asking about the effect of doing a second PhD after I finished my first PhD regardless if I extend it for some period of time or not. Will people see it as a failure? To me it does feel like failure!

One good point in the Netherlands is that PhD students are employed as research assistants. Thus, I think when I am able to search for postdocs in other countries it might not look as bad as I think.

Nobody will care how many Ph.D. do you have when they consider you for a tenure track position. What will matter is number and quality of your papers/conference presentations after your PhD. If you want to change a field of your studies then it makes sense to do a second PhD. But if not, then it is a waste of time. It makes sense to delay your PhD defence rather than go for a second degree and use this time to focus on research.


Representing independent rediscoveries of a result in a survey paper How to deal with multiple rediscoveries of the same result in a survey paper? The authors are seemingly unaware of each other. The first discovery is more than a decade old, yet people keep reproducing it. Do I only mention the first discovery, or do I also list subsequent ones? I do not want to cross anyone. The survey is part of an effort to build connections within the community.

As you said, the goal of a survey paper is to make people aware of what other groups / communities are doing and bringing them together. It would be useful to present the full history of discovery and following re-discoveries, development, alternative approaches, etc.


Is there any difference between theoretical and mathematical? In computer science, is there any difference in usage of the terms: theoretical, mathematical?
If yes, which is more broader?
Context: If my supervisor says focus on theoretical aspects of the paper  and focus on mathematical aspects of the paper. Should I interpret as same?

Theoretical and mathematical: They're different. Mathematical aspects are the mathematical parts, whereas theoretical aspects are the fundamental computer science parts. E.g., computational complexity is theoretical computer science, whereas statistical analysis is mathematical.
That said, it may depend on the context. Ask your advisor for clarity.
Ask your advisor for clarity whenever you don't understand, or, at least, mention that you don't understand and that you'll look into the details later, possibly asking for direction on where to look.


Postdoctoral job search: mixed applications As I'm currently pursuing an academic job search (in parallel to the industry one), which includes potential postdoctoral positions, I would appreciate some clarifications on the following aspect.

Mixed applications. At some institutions/departments (usually, large), I see multiple positions that I think I would fit well. Perhaps, one is the best, but, considering the tight competition, I consider it as a luxury to apply to a single position per institution. Important: unlike that question, this particular one is concerned with a situation, where multiple positions, which I consider, constitute a mixture of postdoctoral and staff [with some teaching- and/or research-related support component] positions.

Question: 1) assuming that the other positions are also quite interesting (and they are), is it a good idea to apply to all of them or apply to several in groups (of one or more) of decreasing excitement or stick to the most interesting or valuable? 2) do applications for teaching- or research-related staff positions jeopardize the ones for postdoctoral positions (or junior faculty ones, for that matter)?

Note: My field is Information Systems, a discipline, which can be considered as a sub-domain of Management Science, which, in turn, is a social sciences discipline.

UPDATE (clarification). This question is not an exact duplicate of the suggested question, even though they are very close. The question you're referring to, covers only a subset of my question's scenarios. For example, it doesn't cover one of my real cases, where there are several postdoc positions within the same department (lab) - no junior faculty positions there.

I rarely find people applying to one job and moving on. Doing so involves a lot of risks. In applying to the one job you believe is best, and getting rejected, you keep delaying the hire date of the job you may get. In waiting for a response from your perfect job,the alternative positions may be filled or closed due to lack of appropriate candidates. Point is, the norm is for people to apply to multiple positions, across universities or departments, or even within the same department or doctoral college.

One person in their search applied for two positions within the same department, both of which he was well suited for; both positions will from here on out be referred to as positions A & B, respectively. The person preferred job A, but for reasons like the ones mentioned above, he applied to both. He was contacted for both positions and was deemed fit for both positions. The supervisors then realized that they had the same candidate; enter inter-departmental politics. Eventually, the supervisor of position A yielded and the person was assigned to position B. The point here being, there exists a possibility that it is no longer your choice which position you take once you apply to multiple positions in the same department/university, less so within the same field.

Also, if you receive an offer for a position less preferred and you accept, do not renege if you receive one for a position you prefer more. Aside from the ethical and moral issues, the person you just harmed will be your colleague in your field for many years to come; i.e. this may also harm you professionally.

As for the last part of your question, you'll find plenty of examples of people that occupy any number of roles as a PhD, lecturer, researcher or post-doc. People also tend to move fluidly between these positions. It's also worth mentioning that it is irregular for a post-doc or researcher to not lecture. This is as the post-doc/researcher requires students to fulfill certain portions of their research. To do so, the post-doc holds a lecture, at least, the moment they begin their work in order to attract students that are interested in his/her work while ensuring that they would research their part of the work while having the necessary foundation in place. This covers a post-doc that wants to lecture.

In the case of a lecturer that wants to apply for a post-doc position, you're directly in contact with the supervisors and have an insider's insight into their work. If anything, you could create your own post-doc position by attaining approval for supervision from a professor, and then securing your own funding from a funding institution (DARPA, etc.). In short, as far as I've seen, no, it doesn't harm your chances, but rather improves them.

Sorry for the long post. Hope it helps.


Reasons for not releasing bottom-line answers to old exam questions? By bottom-line answers, I literally mean the answers on the bottom line of a solution.

So if the question requires two pages of math with the final answer that x=5, all I'm interested in is the x=5 part.

In other words, I just want to know whether I've got the correct numerical answer. I'm not asking for a marking rubric or 'model answer', just a verification.

I completely appreciate the arguments against releasing worked solutions. Students can easily be robbed of learning if solutions are readily available to look at. "Oh yeah I'd have done that".
I don't think the arguments about re-using past questions quite apply here - a numerical answer isn't much help and numbers can be changed to screw people who memorise numerical answers.

Are there any other good reasons for not releasing bottom-line answers? It just seems strange to not be able to verify your own work.

EDIT re Dan Romik's comment: My issue here is just one of feedback. If you told me that I'd receive feedback from a lecturer or tutor (or in the real world, client or boss), I'd agree answers are moot. But the reality in university is that a lot of the learning is independent (some lecturers just say "no time" to any request), and answers are a useful feedback mechanism for students to independently spot and diagnose their own flaws.

One, it's extra work, as pointed out by @NoName.

Two, the answer may not be as helpful as you think. Just a month ago, I was grading a stats and probability exam and for one of the questions students who made two very common errors (out of 200 exams, about 40 students made those mistakes) in their work got the right answer, because the errors 'cancelled'. If bottom line answers to that exam were released for the students next year, those making those two mistakes would mistakenly think they knew the correct solution.


I want to know a little about everything, not everything about a very specific topic. Is this a good/bad mindset for a career in research? Lately I've been wondering if I should drop out of a PhD program (in economics).

After graduating with a bachelor's degree, I desperately wanted to know more about the field, and I enrolled in a PhD program. I passed qualifying exams without any problems, and it's time to do research.

The problem is, as I am beginning to realize, I am not at all sure if I want to do research. I believe what I really like is learning new things and applying that knowledge in e.g. conversations, real world problems, etc. I'm generally very happy and excited when I finish reading a paper, a book chapter, or solve a mathematical problem.

But the fun stops there. I have no interest in thinking up my own problems because the way I see it, there are already so many papers or books I haven't read, that I'd much rather spend my time studying the material than going really deep in one particular subject and focusing on it for the next few years (and probably even longer if staying in academia after graduating).

Is this a common way to think at this stage? I've talked about this to a friend in the same program, and he doesn't seem to understand. He is the very opposite of me: he did quite poorly in the exams, but seems to have quite a few ideas (of which most are flat out bad and have been shot down by his supervisor). Whereas I haven't even presented any ideas yet because I don't have any good ones, and would rather study more.

I've realized that perhaps I am just an information sponge, and not a researcher? Can anyone relate to that? I feel like I want to know a little (well, a lot actually) about everything, and not everything about a very specific topic.

Instead of thinking about research as 'thinking up my own problems' - is there something that you read that your immediate reaction was 'that seems weird, I wonder why that it is?' and then not been able to find the answer? While it is true that research is about finding problems that other people haven't investigated yet, it is more true that research is about finding answers to those problems.

Reading widely is a good thing as it exposes you to different approaches and different potential sources of the question that sparks your interest. However, you are probably getting to the point that you should be focussing on a specific problem (since you have passed exams you must be some way through). I don't know what your program allows, but you might consider an interdisciplinary area where the balance between breadth and depth is different.


Are reviewers chosen from among the editorial board of a journal? If, in a certain international journal where I have submitted, the journal webpage lists the editorial board, should I expect that the possible reviewers of my paper are selected from among the members of this board?

Or is it possible that the Editor in Chief may choose an "outsider" to review my submission?

I didn't indicate any preferred reviewers in submission.

Generally, when a paper is submitted to a journal it is first assigned an editor. The editor then identifies a qualified outside reviewer for that particular manuscript, and invites him/her to review the paper.

So the answer is: No, you should not expect that the possible reviewers of a paper are selected from among the members of the editorial board.


Giving a Professor a Gift After They Inadvertently Suggested I Do So I know it has been asked several times on here whether giving a professor a gift is appropriate or not. The general consensus seems to be that it is unethical to both give and receive the gift [1] [2] [3]. However, I have a bit of a nuance that I would like to inquire about.

This past fall semester I requested to meet with a professor who I both enjoyed and respected and ask them for advice about the graduate admissions process.

I asked, out of curiosity, if letter writers minded submitting ~8 letters or if the work would bother them. They answered (roughly), "No. We enjoy helping students. If you want to be nice, you can get them a starbucks gift card or something after they've submitted the letters."

At the time I had no intention of asking this professor for a letter of recommendation. However, it ended up that they were one of my 3 letter writers. I want to write each of my letter writers a thank you note, but now I am faced with the predicament of whether to follow their advice or not.

I have been thinking of reasons for either getting or not getting the gift.

Reasons to get gift:

I will never have this professor again for classes, so there would not be any thoughts of favoritism.
Buying a $10 gift card would not be a significant financial burden on me.
I would be going along with their advice.

Reasons to not get gift:

There is a slight chance I may ask this professor for another letter, so giving them something of monetary value could call into question any future letters they write for me.
It could still be seen in a negative light given some stigma around giving faculty gifts as a student.

I understand I am probably overthinking this. I would like to show my gratitude to this professor in an ethical and professional manner without burning any bridges in my young career at the same time. Should I still refrain from giving gifts to professors? If so, should I address their previous suggestion, or just ignore it?

You are probably overthinking it. I guess the intent of the professor's comment was really, "It isn't necessary, but at the outer limits, something of inconsequential monetary value".

Would you consider giving a gift to the professor in other circumstances, not related to academia? If not, then it isn't needed here. Express thanks in an email or with a greeting card (again, the outside limits).

There is one sort of gift, however, that is appreciated in some circumstances. If the student comes from a different country, especially one with a different culture, then a small token from that place might be treasured. Something that might be picked up at a tourist kiosk, say. I've accepted and retained a few of these. They have almost no monetary value, but represent a connection that the student values. I can see one of them, now, from where I sit.

I once went out for lunch with a bunch of students from a foreign land. They wanted to buy my lunch. I thought it more appropriate that I pay for their lunch. But sometimes you have to accept something because the gift is heartfelt and it would be insulting to refuse it. That isn't the case as you describe it.


Why does the Chicago referencing guide use colons for page numbers in some cases, and commas in others? I love the Chicago Manual of Style notes-bibliography referencing style, although I treat it as the lesser of many evils. For instance, this has always bugged me: why is it that in footnotes, the page numbers of books are preceded by a comma:

  Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), 99–100.

But the page numbers of journal articles are preceded by a colon?

  Joshua I. Weinstein, “The Market in Plato’s Republic,” Classical Philology 104 (2009): 440.

I like the colon, since it clearly shows that the next section of the reference is from within the reference (i.e. it is a specific page number). But I'm going to get raised eyebrows if I use colons everywhere in my footnotes. So why the discrepancy in the first place?

The difference in the format helps differentiate articles from books.

Each citation format (Chicago, MLA, IEEE, APA, etc.) have their own way of differentiating articles and journals. This is just the way it is done in the Chicago style.


Could number of years in Phd affect your chances to get employed in academia? Say a Phd student spent 3 years doing systems, somewhat unsuccessfully (no publications since projects were not well picked..). Now this student switches to theory and ML (within its own department), so he pretty much begins his Phd from the beginning (e.g needs 5-6 or so years to graduate).
Assuming this student will do well in his new area, will his initial Phd "history" affect his employability? E.g if student will graduate in 8 years or even 9 years, having 3 or so years of work in irrelevant field (although without any publications...), will he have equal chances to get employed in academia e.g tenure-track as his first year peers that joined when he decided to switch areas?

I understand it might be highly subjective. If person gets to publish some field changing work in those years then I understand it will not matter, but let's assume nothing extra special happens during these years and his number and quality of pubs is average among his peers.

It would be great to hear this opinion from professors or postdocs or anyone who participated in hiring tenure tracks.

Thanks!

If you want to do the doctorate, then just do it. Never mind about the rest. While a few people might question the time, I think most realize that there are a lot of reasons that it can take longer than expected. Everything from funding to supervisor issues, to health reasons. Changing universities or programs.

It is what it is. There are so many more things that can effect "employability" that it shouldn't be a consideration. The general state of the economy in the years after you graduate has a much bigger effect, I think.


Are there any industry related jobs for a Discrete Mathematics (Combinatorics, Graph theory) PhD? Apart from being an academic, what can a Discrete Math PhD do?

Short answer: Everything.

Long answer:
Mathematicians are often not (solely) hired for the graphs and algorithms they know, but for the skill to logically dissect a problem, come up with a solution, consider all possible cases, etc.

With discrete math, a career in software development would be possible for example. Look for R&D departments or positions and they might prefer a PhD with strong background and some coding skills over someone who has developed for years but is not able to turn a Wiki article on some algorithm into proper code because the math is lacking to understand it.

If you don't mind extending into statistics a little bit, data science and machine learning would open up, where also a lot of mathematicians are wanted currently.

The problem solving skills I mentioned above are also often liked by consultant agencies, where they care not so much about what you know (as you will need to learn and use their products either way mostly) but rather that you can take a client's problem and solve it. Also these guys really like PhDs, as that looks cool and they can bill you out higher than someone without one (even if your PhD is not that relevant to the client).

So, medium long answer: There are a lot of options, you simply need to get out there and look for them. You will need to do some convincing of the form "yes, I am missing these two skills you require, but I can more than make up for it by ...", but then you should be able to get into many fields.


Author Ambiguity in PubMed Search Given a (rather large) list of authors, what is the best way to find the number of publications by each author?  The big problem here is author ambiguity (which John Smith, etc.) - the author list we have doesn't even include middle initials!  What we do have is the full name of a FDA Committee on which they have sat, which has some useful key terms (e.g., arthritis).

Ideally, some sort of API/automated search could be used given the large number of authors!  I've heard about some databases (eRA Commons, for example) but these don't seem to have a visible search page.

What is the best way to figure out publication number given these constraints?

This is a little bit shaky, but let's give it a try. Apart from a programmatic solution where you would have to write your own web-scraping scripts which would construct appropriate URLs for each authors and extract their publication statistics, there might be another, though still quite tedious and technically involved approach.

Harzing's Publish or Perish program (PoP) has a feature called "Multi-query center". It allows you to create a set of queries and then generate publication/citation statistics for each of them in bulk. It is meant to periodically re-generate the citation statistics for a set of queries so that you do not have to laboriously write the queries again and again. Now the technical steps towards your solutions would be the following:

produce a set of queries corresponding to the list of authors you are interested in;
update all these queries at once by a single button click;
save the statistics for all the queries e.g., into a CSV file; and
extract the numbers you are interested in in your favorite spreadsheet program.

The most technically involved step is to produce a set of queries corresponding to the list of authors you have. If the list is not too long (e.g., up to 50), the easiest method would be to enter the queries manually. In the case you have a very long list of authors (several hundreds), then I would try to generate the set of queries programatically. The PoP program stores the queries you enter in it in a file Queries3.xml in the corresponding Program Files folder. The queries are organised into folders, the XML is easy to read. Producing a correct XML file with the queries is a little bit try-error process, but you can easily succeed when you create an empty query with an authors and then using a small script (or you favourite text editor/spreadsheet) copy the query entry and only change the Author attribute of the PoPQuery element.

Good Luck!


Using et al. for a last / senior author rather than for a first author Suppose a paper has authors A, B, C, and D. The first author, A, isn't in academia anymore, and much of my work is inspired by the senior author, D. I've also only communicated with author D.

Can I say/write "author D et al."?

When I looked this up, "first author et al." is the recommended version, but I would rather prefer to say "author D et al."

This isn't for a formal paper submission, but rather for something like a blog post describing my recent findings, which I hope will be published in the near future.

I think in an informal medium like a blog post, you could convey that author D is the main character in the “story” you are trying to tell while still maintaining proper citation standards by saying something like, “Author D and his/her colleagues (Author A, et al., 2018) have shown that...”


How do journals improve their impact factor? I would like to know how journals improve their impact score? It seems that great journals have almost always been great and second tier journals have always been second tier. How does a journal go from obscurity to highly respected?

I am an Associate Editor with a journal that has improved its IF from a little over 1 to more than 4.5 over the past decade. Some of the things that we have done to achieve this have been:

Better defining our unique niche within the field. Part of this has been placing an emphasis on publishing papers with finding that are generalisable across sub-fields, not specific only to a narrowly defined group of specialists.
Publishing Position Papers that help set the standards within the field. These Position Papers are designed to help scientists in our field improve their procedures, practises and assessment of their own work. They quickly become standard references, so they receive a lot of citations themselves, but are also something we can point authors to for guidance if their work needs improving to meet the standards of our journal.
When asking for revisions, working hard to make sure the feedback is as useful as possible and designed to help authors improve the impact of their papers. We try to get four reviews of each paper, usually including some comments from an editor about how to make the paper more impactful. The feedback that we have from authors is that, although our review process is longer than they'd like, they do find the extra feedback helps to make their papers better.
Inviting contributions from scientists who we feel can help us to improve the profile of our journal.
Changing the way we handle special issues. Like many journals, we used to let guest editors handle the review and acceptance of papers for special issues alone, with candidate papers taken from a group of invited authors after a workshop or major project. Now, guest editors must work with regular editors who know our standards and what we are looking for, and the opportunity to submit to the issue must be advertised generally, not just to workshop participants. We also make sure the special issue topics are broad enough to be of wide interest.

There are right ways and wrong ways to go about increasing a journal's IF. I think the above points are the right way. Some "wrong ways" that I have heard of include asking authors to cite more of the journal's previously published papers, and coming to agreements with related journals to encourage cross-citations between the two.