Employment history and graduate admission Why do some graduate schools require an employment history for their application forms?  Additionally, is it likely that they verify said history via one's social security number?

Why do some graduate schools want to have employment history on
  graduate school application forms?

I can think of a few things:

If you're not coming directly from undergrad, they want to know what work you've been doing.  In some cases, it may be entirely irrelevant, but nonetheless, they ask.  While references are typically obtained from academic institutions, if you've been in industry for a while, one of your recommendations may come from your employer...
If you are coming directly from undergrad, you may still have been employed during school or have completed some number of internships.  Again, while they may not be relevant, there's no reason not to ask, especially if they can positively affect your application.
Either way, employment, depending on what you did, could demonstrate responsibility, leadership, potentially research ability, etc.

  Is it likely that they verify it with SSN?

This almost seems like you're trying to determine if they can catch you in a lie--they do not need a SSN to do that.  Don't fabricate anything.


Leaving a PhD Program with a Masters and Going to Another School I am currently at a top engineering program in my specific field (top 5) and I have started my program but have come to realize that the faculty that align with my research interests at this school have very different cultural environments that I can not deal with.

I was looking for advice for the following scenario:
I was wondering how I would go about applying to other universities for PhD that I know have the team environment I am looking for (specifically where I did my undergrad). I have worked there before but I originally agreed with my PI maybe its not the best place to go. So coming to my current university, I realized that either my research interests don't align, or I am absolutely miserable in the lab environment.

Yes I have tried looking at other labs. I have my labs lined up based on research interest and unfortunately no others.

Would it be okay if I applied to another PhD program in my 2nd year and also left my current institution with a Masters? It would either be to a top 20 school or another school in the top 5 below my program.

Thank you in advance for any insight and advice.

Yes, it's possible, but not easy. I did similar thing last year(left the previous program with M.S. in the end of 2nd year and applied to another Ph.D. program).

  0 . Can I leave my current department with master degree in 2nd year?

It depends on your department policy and you should look at those policies carefully. No one on the internet can answer this question accurately.

Issues to consider in your new applications:

  Do you plan on changing department?

If you plan on going to a different department (not just different university, i.e. from university of X department of A to university of Y department of B where X\neq Y and A\neq B), you should explain, in your SOP, why do you have the ability to do well in the new field given your experience and knowledge background. If not, you should explain why similar department in a different university will be a better fit for you, in terms of research interest and general academic environment.

In any case, avoid saying "I hate the department I was previously in." or equivalent, that will make your applications look bad.

  What's your relation with current advisor and other faculties(in the department you're in now)? Who will be your recommender?

Ideally, if your current advisor support you and your decision, you should obtain letters from your current advisor. That will make things a lot easier. If, unfortunately, one of the reasons you're leaving is having personal confrontation with current advisor, you had better look for someone else. Spend some time figuring out who will write you a good letter that fits your new application well. Avoid people who may write bad letters as personal revenge.

Be aware that you'll be strictly barred from applying to some programs if you don't have at least one letter from the last university you attended. That's a issue to consider if you plan on having people from your undergraduate institution be your recommender.

  Do you need to retake exams like GRE?

GRE scores(subject or general) do not expire in 5 years. However some graduate programs may require a much more recent one(for example within 2 years). If you want to apply to those programs, you'll have to retake the GRE. If the new program require a subject GRE you've not taken before, you'll have to take it.


strategy of looking for external reviewers in grant applications Some grant applications require aplicants to find external reviewers. First, we can't look for co-authors. Who else can we look for? Friends? Faculty who ever worked in the same school? Do the external reviewers need to be the immediate same field? People who don't know us at all? May I ask immediate associates to recommend their associates who don't know me at all?

For external grants that ask you to suggest reviewers (common in UKRI grants for example), you are expected to suggest someone who has the technical, theoretical, or methodological expertise to evaluate the proposal and who would have no conflicts of interest in doing so. In other words, no one that you have an active research project with, no one who you have had significant past research collaboration with, no one that you go down to the pub with as friends, and likely no one in your institution. You can and should suggest people that you know to be collegiate and who are generally friendly to your work, that's expected. The granting body will then consider your suggestions and will likely select one or two of those you suggest mixed in with someone you don't suggest just to balance things out. It is unwise to try to game this any further than suggesting someone who you know generally likes what you do as reviewers are asked to disclose any conflict of interest. For them to reveal there is a conflict that you did not reveal does not sit well.

For an internal grant, that will likely be a bit different and it is best if you get clarity from your institution as to what they expect. They may expect reviewers to be internal.


How to deal with favoritism in the lab? I've observed that many PIs are especially prone to having favorite students in their research group, and will treat these students differently than others. Most of the time, this isn't so obvious and doesn't cause problems. However, from time to time, this will be made extremely clear as the time spent on the "favorites" are orders of magnitude more than other students in the lab. This also includes assignments of better projects etc. Of course, I realize that as humans, everyone has favorites, and it is unrealistic to expect manager figures to treat everyone equally. However, I have noticed that in the few groups I've worked in, some PIs will make it embarrassingly clear. For instance, it will often lead to hurt feelings and lost productivity when something essential is not done for one student's project (i.e. read over drafts, provide necessary components of experiments) while the advisor runs to help another student with mundane aspects of their experiment (i.e. actually helping them do the experiments, or spending a lot of time talking with them while telling others they are busy). This is of course common in all workplaces, but I do feel that the advisor/trainee relationship is different in that in many ways the success of the student is very much dependent on the advisor.

An anecdote: my advisor was extremely hands-off for me; we met pretty infrequently and when we met, it was mostly spent on talking about small side issues that came up in my projects. Another student of my advisor had a very different experience. He met extensively with my advisor, he found projects for him to work on (I proposed my own, and my advisor didn't know much of my project until I wrote my thesis). The tension for me reached its climax when my defense date drew near; he told me that he was busy with the other student's thesis and that he will sign mine after he is finished with editing the other student's thesis. He ended up reading my thesis only a couple of days before my defense.

Although this seemed like favoritism, in the end it wasn't. He must have judged me to be an independent and competent researcher, because I got more and better job offers afterwards.

So, there really isn't anything you can do. You should just focus on your own projects, and hopefully your advisor is there when you really can't solve the problem on your own. But if you treat each time that your advisor isn't there as an opportunity to show your competence (whether you think your advisor noticed it or not... it does accumulate!) you'll walk out having become independent, which is an important quality to possess in academia.


Applied/Pure Math PhD Coursework For the purpose of curiosity, I was wondering what set of courses undergraduate math students take if they're on the track to apply for a PhD in Pure Mathematics vs. Applied Mathematics? Let me try to elaborate as best as I can. I mean at my current university, I've known several people who have gone through the track of going for a PhD in Pure Math and they have taken lots of Grad level Math courses and gotten into top US universities for a PhD in Pure Math where research experience in relevant fields is a plus (I think).

But my question is for undergraduate students trying to prepare for a PhD in Applied Math. What sort of coursework do they go through? I mean research experience (I believe) becomes important and taking graduate courses in Pure Mathematics is not so. I do not know much people who went for a PhD in applied math at my school.

I would appreciate it if anyone who can comment on the relevance of pure math grad courses for such students who aspire or strive in applying for a PhD in applied math. Any other comments pertaining to this is welcomed ;)

It might be somewhat controversial for some here, but I don't think there is any one course that you should take in order to get in a particular graduate program. The reason behind my statement is that I believe the logic presented in the OP is rather backwards; one usually pursues graduate studies in a particular field that s/he is knowledgeable and interested in. In other words, you get your undergrad and Masters, and based on what you know and like, you apply to PhD programs in fields where you are competent. The other way around (deciding on a PhD program without have the undergrad and masters done, and choosing courses based on the desired PhD program) does not make much sense, in my humble opinion.

Also consider that "a PhD in pure/applied maths" is really ill-defined. I can think of a hundred different projects that would have different requirements, with regards to previous courses. I would recommend deciding on a specific subject that you find interesting e.g. "elliptic curve cryptography" or "convex optimization" etc (not just pure/applied math).. then look for announced PhD programs based on projects focused on these subjects of interest.

All that being said; I would think  advanced level courses in matrix theory (decompositions etc), functional and complex analysis, as well as  optimization theory would be useful in many different graduate programs at most maths departments.


Grade changes with auto grader If I use an auto-grading script and allow students to see their would-be grade based on the auto-grader, is it wrong to change their grades after the due date if I decide to change the auto-grader? I'm curious what others think because on the one hand students could go back and change their submissions as many times as they liked prior to the deadline, and many students took advantage of this to do as well as possible. Now that I've changed the script many students now have a zero (including a few who previously scored perfectly). On the other hand, the issue that these students had was a result of not following an instruction I gave out, which I overlooked while writing the original auto-grader. So is it wrong to change the grades or am I justified?

If any student feels disadvantaged by this, then you will have an uproar and complaints to administration. You describe a system in which they depended on the actual thing you built not some "instruction" you gave.

I would guess that you are stuck with the thing for this group of students, both practically and ethically. Otherwise grading will seem chaotic and unfair to them. Your reputation might suffer both with them and with your boss.

This sounds more to me like a case of releasing untested or insufficiently tested software.

One way out would be to void the results of the autogravder for anyone disadvantaged and give them one additional attempt to submit. But that could also be a problem because of time constraints on other things in your course and in their other courses.

Live and learn. But first, be fair.


Are all math majors expected to get a perfect score on quantitative reasoning? I just took the revised GRE general test. As a math major preparing to apply to math PhD programs, it was kind of surprising to see that my quantitative reasoning score was just 167, whereas my verbal reasoning score was 169. I attribute this to the fact that my anxiety about the exam prevented me from finishing all of the quantitative questions, which required a moderate amount of concentration; I finished the verbal portion quickly since it was just a matter of being able to read carefully and know fancy words. Should I retake the test and try to get a 169 or 170 in the quantitative portion? Or is my score good enough that it doesn't really matter?

At Texas A&M, we typically admit graduate student applicants with quantitative GRE scores down to somewhere between 160 and 165. So your 167 is totally fine, in fact I would say it's in the top 1/2 of those we accept. No need to worry.


What should I do as a TA if the instructor is not teaching properly? Some background: I’m a TA for a low-level course at a major university on the US east coast. This is my second time TAing this course: the first time, I did it under a professor who has taught this a ton of times and knows his way around very well. This time around, the instructor is a second-year grad student who’s teaching anything at all for the first time.

(I’m a second-year graduate student as well. I was actually offered this course to teach this semester, but I said no and so they dropped me in as a TA, which is fine. I have a great deal of sympathy for the current instructor since in another universe that would definitely have been me.)

I’m seeing a noticeable difference between the two. As a TA, I’m getting a lot of feedback from students that they don't understand what’s going on, that the instructor doesn’t relay concepts clearly, that they’re leaving the class more confused than before. The difference is also clear in the homeworks: we’re reusing the old homeworks with minor detail changes, but they’re struggling a lot more in even basic concepts compared to last year.

My responsibilities in this course are grading, homework fixing, and office hours. I don’t have to teach in this course at all, and I do help those who come in during office hours. Even from my relatively isolated position from the students, though, I’m still getting a ton of pushback regarding the instructor. Should I do more beyond the scope of my duties? If so, what?

Edit regarding those who advised me to tell the instructor: they definitely know about their performance reviews. They pointed out their RMP link to me, and while RMP isn’t the end-all be-all of academic measurement, the feedback there is unusually negative and corresponds with what I’ve been hearing from students. I don’t want to kick the instructor while they’re down, because they already know pretty definitively, and they’re a good person to work with. Just not a good teacher, I guess.

I'd bet that the grad student teaching the course knows very well that his or her teaching competences are lacking, and that the students struggle to follow. After all, even if this person has little experience teaching, he or she has a lot of experience being a student, and is thus likely to recognize poor teaching, but unable to do something about it.

But alas, such is life sometimes. The grad student cannot suddenly, by magic, become a teacher with 20+ years of experience. Nor should they be expected to. The department, who already made the decision of putting an untried grad student in charge of a course, is also unlikely to suddenly allocate more resources.

It would be perfectly fine if you did nothing. Nothing is expected of you, you will not be paid for doing more than you are asked, and if you just do it, no one will thank you.

If you feel compelled to do something anyway, here's a suggestion. Go to the grad student and say that it is your impression that the students struggle way more with the material than last time you TAed the course, and ask if there is anything you can do. Prepare a couple of suggestions, stuff that you know could be improved by going over it a couple of times more in lectures. Don't pass any blame, but try to be as constructive as possible.


What are appropriate questions for a closed-door (non-public) part of a PhD (or master's) defense? There is a related question about questions to expect for PhD defenses here: What questions to prepare for PhD defense?, but the question (and answers) are referring to the public oral defense.
Generally, at least in Biology in the U.S., there is a "closed-door" or "non-public" part of the defense where the committee "grills" the student about all types of things. I am wondering what types of things are appropriate. It seems that sometimes questions are not related to the thesis or dissertation specifically, but general questions in a large field / body of knowledge. If committee members do not provide you with reading material or potential questions, how would one even go about knowing what to expect? Is it appropriate to fail someone for not answering seemingly random questions - as if they are to have encyclopedic knowledge?

Generally speaking anything and everything is on the table unless you are told otherwise. There are no limits. It is up to individuals what is asked and up to those and other individuals to evaluate the answers. The candidate may not be able to answer everything.
But it probably isn't required to answer everything. What is required is to say sensible things, including "I never studied that".
But for the foundational knowledge of your field, you'd better be able to give pretty good if not absolutely ideal answers.
The (second) worst story I ever heard, though it may be apocryphal, is one in which the candidate in biology or chemistry gave his dissertation presentation in which he repeatedly mentioned pH. There was an outside member of the English department on the committee who said she didn't have any real questions, not understanding the subject, but would like some layperson's explanation of pH from the candidate. The person, who had long ago studied it formally and was able to use, froze up and gave no answer. He failed.
But maybe that was just a horror story told around grad students to scare them into working harder, something like a campfire ghost story.
In a private oral exam of my own I was asked a question and started to develop an answer (math - algebraic topology) and it went nowhere. I stopped and admitted that I wouldn't be able to finish it, but was able to say exactly what the flaw in my argument was. This actually impressed the examiners more than if I'd given the correct answer immediately, as they told me later.
So, you don't have to be perfect, but you do have to make sense. Do that and you will probably be fine, subject to the vagaries of personality.


What are the steps and resources I can use to publish a math paper? I've spent years writing a math paper I call "A study of Pythagorean Triples" and I would like to publish. I've written and re-written for accuracy and clarity and I ported it from Word to TexShop after having found that most publications require that format.  My paper is currently 14 pages long including 8 [ small ] graphic Exhibits in .png format.

How do I begin to get peer review as a total amateur and how do I proceed from there?

Update: My work was original to me but comments have led me to links showing that some of it has been done by others. The only distinction my work still has is in showing how this or that function was developed and how it works. I should rename my paper something along those lines and reflect that in my abstract.

A partial answer: Every piece of scientific work builds on other people's publications (remember Newton's "standing on the shoulder of giants" quote), and so one can surmise that your paper also cites other publications -- and if it doesn't, it probably should.

So let me assume that you are already doing that, then a good approach is to see where these other references were published. Look up these journals: Every journal has a charter on their website that explains (i) what kinds of papers they publish, and (ii) how one can submit a paper to them.


"Designated emphasis" on a doctorate My university is offering a "designated emphasis" in a topic area, that grad students can add to their transcript.  I think that the idea is that it can provide some sort of signal that the student has a competency in this area, like a minor for an undergrad.

Has anyone else ever heard of such a thing?  What possible practical use could it be to the students getting it?  Why might the idea have been conceived of?

Something like this is actually very common in some fields. Economics programs usually have a requirement called "Specialization Fields," "Major Fields," "Field Certification," or something like that (some example requirements).

They usually consist of a couple courses in the same area, as well as often an additional field exam covering topics from those courses. Glancing over some requirements, most programs require you to finish ~2 or these as a requirement for getting your PhD, either equally or as a major/minor setup. As you might expect, almost all students do these in fields that they are interested in and will eventually do research in.

As for purpose, I believe that they are mostly used as a signaling and filtering device for the job market. If you look at any department's list of job market candidates, you can see that the specialization fields are very prominently displayed. I think the importance of these is probably linked to some of the idiosyncrasies of the econ job market, such as its degree of centralization, but that's just my speculation.


Appeal the grade in oral exam in Germany I just received the grade of an oral exam and I do not satisfied with it. I want to appeal, but I am not sure if this is appropriate. Since I am in Germany, I heard that professors can give any grades they wanted to students. I worried that the act of appeal will worsen my mark(or even fail). And I also don't know who to make an appeal to. I don't even know how to review an non-recorded oral exam. Can someone give some advice about how this should be done in Germany university?

Here's my experience with oral exams in Germany:

Ask the professor to explain to you how they arrived at the grade, and what they'd expected you to say for a better grade.
Maybe more important about this than the grade you got now is what you can learn for future oral exams.
(When I asked the "lemon squeezing professor" below, he explained that from the grades I got in the labwork exam he was examining "for a top mark", and would not waste time asking me easy questions about the lecture but that he examined my ability to draw field-specific conclusions on the basis but outside what was explicitly discussed in the lecture... wow...)

The burocratic trail corresponds to the importance of the exam. Oral exams with only 1 student + 1 examiner and no paper trail typically end up contributing low percentages to the final grade for the semester and even lower percentages to your Bachelor/Master grades. The next more important ones already had a 2nd observer (usually PhD student or postdoc) though still without protocol.
Everything of higher importance (including legally relevant exams) is done with someone writing a protocol, and in some cases even audio records are taken. This is done exactly in case there is dispute about the grading.

Rather than complaining about the grade in order to get a better grade, I've only met students who asked to have their grade lowered to "failed" so they could re-take the exam.

For the "low importance" oral exams I've been involved with, a complaint would usually have resulted in the offer to have another exam which for sure would have someone writing a protocol.

Back when I was studying, for the low-importance exams in many cases it would have been possible to retake them the next semester/year (sometimes even the high-importance ones, under certain conditions). However, I've never met anyone who did care sufficiently to do so.

As always, the exam regulations of your department are what matters. You need to look them up and/or ask at the exam office.

Grades are submitted to the exam office, and the professor thus cannot easily change the grade. Thus, the risk of getting your grade lowered if you complain to the professor is small. But so is your chance to get it raised: both will likely need a (very) formal procedure with you, the professor and the exam office.

A professor "can give any grades they want[ed]" only in the sense any public servant in government administration can do anything they want to an application/procedure you filed there: professors in Germany are public servants  and exams are one of their public servant duties. Violations of these duties are considered quite serious in general (they took an oath to fulfil these duties).
(Which does not mean that unfair grading does not happen - but it does mean that if you file a complaint about unfair treatment in an exam, that is a serious accusation)

One thing you may consider for future exams: as students, we were allowed to "bring a friend", who would then automatically be a potential witness. If there's a problem with the professor's grading, such a potential witness may make the whole procedure more fair already by just being there.
This happened very rarely, but I remember a professor recommending this for an entirely different reason: so that the friend can find out what kind of exam to expect. I.e., they recommended that we look for someone who'd be comfortable taking us along before doing the exam ourselves.

A last thing is to bear in mind that the perceived difficulty of question and your difficulty of answers may not predict well even a rather objectively justified grade. There are (legitimate) differences in the style how different professors approach the task of examining. Some will ask everyone questions on a similar level of difficulty and then consider the answers, others adjust the difficulty of the question according to preliminary grades and previous answers (I found it extremely hard to judge as a student how such an exam went - but I do know since how a lemon must feel after sqeezing. Got 1,3 btw.)


Asking about funding when you've already been told you'll be funded Disclaimer : Please consider I'm in Europe, and this is for European funding
I've been accepted to do my PhD. I've been told in writing something along the lines of "You'll work for Prof. A doing project X for T years". My professor sent me his proposal and told me that even though it was done in 2016 he still has money for a PhD student.
However if I look for the project online, the funding agency stops giving funding on 2022.
So I'm worried about this divergent information (what my professor says vs what the funding agencies say) and I'm wondering whether I should ask my professor by email if he indeed has money for me to work on that project and also about how funding agencies really interpret their end date. I see this as possibly inappropriate because he already told me in writing that he can fund me for that project, and I don't want to sound like I'm questioning his word especially at this early stage.
How do funding agencies interpret their end dates? I mean, is a professor only meant to hire PhD's several years before the end date? This seems odd because one doesn't know exactly how long it'll take for a student to graduate.

It's common for funding to end during a prospective PhD student's expected stay, especially in places where a PhD takes 5 or more years. If grants are for about 3-5 years then this is almost a certainty. It's not unusual to get a student late in a funding cycle - maybe there wasn't an appropriate student for the role until now, maybe a prior candidate went someplace else or left early.
However, yes, it's a bit of a short window to have this funding already expiring within the next year. Sometimes there are other funding streams for a lab, sometimes there are possibilities for non-competitive extensions. You don't have enough information to know this is a problem.
All these uncertainties make it an uncomfortable but also necessary conversation to have. A PI should be comfortable talking about funding plans and contingencies and you should definitely ask about it. PhD programs should also have information about what they do when there are funding issues. For example, is there some department funding that can help cover a student if there is a gap?
Definitely ask your professor about funding. Avoid being accusatory and alleging any sort of misrepresentation, and just go in with questions you have: how long is funding actually secured for? What are the plans when it runs out? What happens if those plans fail?


Responsing to "How do you intend to fund your studies for the entire duration of your stay in ...?" I am filling in an application form for a PhD program and I am supposed to answer the following question:

"How do you intend to fund your studies for the entire duration of your stay in ...?"

Actually, I cannot afford any part of the living costs and university fees but I don't know how to mention it in a academic, polite and well-structured fashion.

Maybe I'm missing something. But if this is a US Ph.D program, this question is really "Do you want us to fund you" and the answer is always yes. As JeffE says, you should not consider entering a Ph.D program unless you're being funded. Apart from the financial constraints this puts on you, the funding creates a commitment (by the department or advisor) to look after you. If the funding is from a research project, then you're even more sure that your work will be linked to something fruitful.

While there are many caveats to what I just said (and they're ringing in my head right now), they're not relevant at the time of applying to grad school.

So please always answer "I expect you to fund me".


Can a cat be a co-author in academic paper? One of the most famous cat physicians must be F. D. Willard, who co-authored many physical papers.

My question is simple:

Is it academically correct to have a cat/dog as a co-author of a paper, in principle?
Does it correspond to the academic code of ethics?
Does the author has to be a natural human?

Regarding whether or not all authors must be human, the answer seems to be no.

Combinatorist Doron Zeilberger, for example, has published many papers jointly with Salosh B. Ekhad (his name for his computer).


Universities offering PHD in Economics or CS without requiring a masters degree I am an Information Management and Systems student just about to graduate in three years from college. Due to financial constrains I would like to pursue a PHD degree directly without having to go through Master degree which is extremely costly. I am determined to get a PHD either way. I have a 3.7 GPA and I got 730 in GMAT. I am looking for a good university (top 50) who offers Phd programs in economics, eCommerce, or something that is economics or computer science related without having a master degree. Any suggestion will be highly appreciated.

Generally you can get a place for a Ph.D. in the UK or US after your Bs.c.; however it is a time consuming process.

For this I would suggest the following steps:

Ask one of your lecturers about this. They might give you recommendations based on their knowledge. For example if you want to do a Ph.D. in E-commerce try to ask this from a lecturer who teaches this.
Ask your personal student advisor or your last year supervisor. You need their recommendation letter more than anything to get a Ph.D. position besides your marks.
Look for lecturers in the top 50 universities yourself, and try to communicate with them through your university email.
Repeat till you get there! It might take up to a year to find a place; so meanwhile you could get a job so there will be no gap year in your CV.


Track conference deadlines Say I have a list of conferences I'm interested in. How can I track the submission deadlines in a single platform?

I'm aware of wikicfp, but there you need to track individual events. If you are interested in conference X, you need to manually add X-2018, X-2019 and so on. In particular, it's really up to the user to have an updated list and thus error-prone.

It would be incredible if the webpage helped me create my list of conferences, providing rankings and filters by field for example. This may be too much to ask though.

In case it's essential for the answer, my fields are Operations Research / Theory of Computer Science.

While it does not send you reminders of upcoming deadlines or anything, I find that this site provides a very nice overview of the deadlines of a number of CS conferences:

http://confsearch.ethz.ch

You can get all conferences from a certain field, for example:
http://confsearch.ethz.ch/confsearch/faces/pages/topic.jsp?topic=Theory&sortMode=1&graphicView=1
gives an overview of theory conferences (I do not see Operations Research mentioned, and I am not sure whether it falls in any of the other categories they have).

It looks like you can also customize the overview to include a specific set of conferences (see their help page for more info).

According to the website, they obtain their info from DBLP and from user input (you can indeed modify information about a conference manually, thereby I am not completely sure how reliable the information on this site is).


Comeback advice: how to return a decade after dropping out, when job schedule makes formal study difficult? What helpful advice would you give an age 30-something woman to reach her dream with the following background? She dropped out from college a decade ago despite many hard years of dedicated trying, had to take on a low income, shift work job to earn a living, but never stopped to want to make a comeback in the demanding major where she dropped out and participate in science where her heart belongs?

The shift work prevents her a lot to get up to date again and prepare for college and nobody supplies support against her worries of failing again.

Get connected with a support system.  Places to look: organizations with names like "women's opportunity center", campus women's organization, etc.  Community colleges are a great initial re-entry point, even if you are going to re-enter as a junior or senior.  Just take a class or two at a good community college to get your feet wet again, and because they are much better at integrating "returning students" like you than most 4-year schools.

If you have any specific questions please ask so I can give you more specific answers.

Note: my Calculus I teacher went back to school in middle age.  She was one of the best teachers I ever had.  And this was at a community college!


Regarding changes in the accepted manuscript My paper got accepted before 13 days back in AEU journal. But I want to make several changes (only word change) to the accepted manuscript. How do I request the editor to send my corrected manuscript. Will they allow several changes in the accepted manuscript.

Changes are not in the result, tables, graphs.
Changes means reedit some words...

Need help urgently.

Typically, journals will send you page proofs after your manuscript is accepted and before it's published.  A limited number of changes for clarity is usually fine at that stage (especially if it would have to be printed as errata later).

If the journal is not intending to generate page proofs (e.g. it's a rapid electronic publication format), or if there are more than a handful of changes (six or so), or if they are large enough so they might change the layout of the whole paper, simply contact the editor as soon as possible explaining exactly what you wish to change and why.  Assuming all the changes are minor and make the paper better, the answer is usually that it's fine.


Post-doc applications I am having terrible experiences with my PhD program. I have no feedback and no supervision on anything. I have been working with other people in other departments so that I can get proper training before I graduate. Recently, I realize that if I apply for a post-doc fellowship and stay here, I can actually learn more about these techniques. But I heard from many people that staying in the same university or with the same people that you worked with is not possible. Does anyone have any opinions on this? I have been travelling around throughout my entire university journey. This will be first time that I will be staying in a place for two different positions. Is it still a no?

One of the biggest reasons for moving around is so that you learn, over time, a variety of techniques and viewpoints. If you stay in a place too long as a student, you may already know whatever it is that they are able to teach you.

But that isn't your situation. You are moving to a new situation within the university, broadening your horizons with these other people. My guess is that it would be good to take advantage of the situation. You also, as you say, seen a variety of different faculties already, so it is less important to move on than if your education had all been in one place.

Don't stay forever, of course, but learn what you can from the people able to give it.


How to find the ISI-indexed papers for a specific institution? I am interested in finding the ISI-indexed papers for a given institition X. This would be any ISI-indexed paper where one or more authors are affiliated with X. Is this doable and are there any guidelines for how to do this?

The easiest way would be to do a Web of Science search using the 'Address' field, with the university name or institution name as query. This will most likely return lots of results, and you will maybe need to go through them manually to do some quality checking. You can also refine search results by 'Countries/Territories' to filter irrelevant results (e.g. similarly named institutions in different countries). You can also use the 'Address' field to search for individual department names while also including city and country for some good results.

You can ofcourse do similar searches in Scopus etc. as well, but if you are specifically after ISI-indexed papers you should use Web of Science (maybe even restricting yourself to only the Web of Science Core Collection database).


What is the maximum age to get into academia, as a recent PhD / recent post-doc, in the US? At what age does breaking into academia as a professor, e.g. recent PhD / recent post-doc, in the United States become effectively impossible?

Is it at the age of 30 or 40?

I keep hearing about this from people who are at the very elite institutions, e.g. Harvard and Princeton.

I'm asking the question specifically for STEM subfields and for universities in the United States.

I am not only interested in what typically happens at the very top schools - I'm also interested in hiring at the less prestigious schools.

This is strictly speaking not an answer, since OP was asking about the US, but I felt sharing a European perspective may be of interest here as well. Flag if you feel I am straying off topic too much, and I will happily delete the answer.

ETH Zurich, presumably the premiere technical university in Europe (and one that often follows US procedure pretty closely), actually has an official policy on this.

  The academic age of assistant professors (e.g. without the time period of maternity leave, industry experience, military service, etc.) should be 35 years or under at the time of appointment.

Source

Note that they explicitly speak about "academic age", not biological age. Time spent as a postdoc counts against you, but time in industry or in maternity leave does not. Given that, there is (in theory) no biological limit to become assistant professsor if you have been doing "something else" before in your life, but I suspect in practice there is: at Swiss universities, there is mandatory retirement at age 65, and ETH presumably is not overly interested in investing into young professors that don't have too long until retirement anymore.

In Germany, a rule that I sometimes hear is that you need to become professor before the age of 40 or get out (where "professor" usually means W2 or W3 professor according to the German system). However, this is more of a guideline than a formal rule - I have certainly seen cases of people who got appointed with their first professorship after 40.


Bulk Download PDFs from Google Scholar I would like to download ~100 scholarly articles from Google Scholar. I have institutional access, so Google Scholar presents the available PDF. Is there a way to automate the downloading of the PDF files?

I know one relatively simple way.
Zotero + a Google Scholar Zotero plugin for you browser (typically, Firefox or Chrome).
Bibliographic manager. The program helps you to download bibliographic meta-data together with the PDFs (if they are open).
So, you may "save" all the needed papers to "My library" in GS (if you have several collections, you may assign a special "label" to each collection). Then, when you have all the papers in one list, just export them all to Zotero. Whenever possible, Zotero will download a PDF.


Should I get a master's in math before getting econ PhD? I'm planning to apply to phd programs in economics and I'm hoping to eventually work in academic research on economic theory, social choice theory, welfare economics or related areas. I'm wondering if doing a masters in math before applying to economics phd would be worthwhile? Seems like it might be nice to have the math stuff down really solid, so I can focus on economics in grad school.

By the time I finish undergrad (in U.S.), I will have taken the following math courses (one semester each): Multivariable calc, linear algebra, abstract algebra, real analysis, topology, optimization, probability-statistics, basic numerical analysis with matlab programming. Econ courses that I'll have taken: year of micro, year of macro, year of econometrics, year of graduate micro.

The main problem with taking a course/major/degree in a subject like math, in the hopes of it improving your ability to perform at some other field, is that the math program will most typically not have been designed to cater the curriculum to the tools that will be most helpful to you in your future career. So effectively a 2 year degree program in math might be equivalent to 3-6 months of "math for Economists", or whatever degree program you might seek. While math is useful in many fields, exactly what specific kind of math is useful varies tremendously!

A simple example of this is statistics. Most math programs may only require 1-2 classes in any kind of statistics (Northeastern's Applied Math program, for instance), and beyond introduction to statistics the methods used in one field are often very different than one taught in another. Depending on how you choose your electives, you could very well come out of the program with little more than the equivalent of "I took some extra math classes as an elective" during your undergraduate degree, as far as actual ability to perform useful research at a PhD level is concerned. I'm not going to say it's a total waste of time - but it's kind of a weird "side quest" to go on.

Its not that you wouldn't learn anything useful - it's just that the time would not be spent very efficiently if "being a great non-mathematician" is your end goal. In comparison, you might instead take advanced math classes or an independent study while still an undergraduate (especially if you can identify someone with advanced knowledge of math useful to economists).

You would also do well to look at prospective PhD programs and see how they handle classes. Many PhD programs in the US require you to take advanced classes catered towards your degree, while also allowing/requiring you to take some advanced classes in an area outside your key classes - and you could use those slots to work on improving your relevant mathematical knowledge.

I would only remind you that everyone contemplating high level research - even mathematicians - wishes they had a stronger background in math, because there's always more math to learn and you'll have long died of old age before you learned all that might be of potential use to you. But if you plan to use math as a tool to aid other goals, then you can expect to pick it up like any other tool as you progress in your work.


How does one try to make a journal cover? Though fewer and fewer scientists actually read dead-tree editions of journals, being featured on a journal cover is still a nice way to highlight your paper to a large community, and is usually considered a great recognition of one’s work. So, how does one go about getting on a journal cover? If you feel you have extraordinarily attractive graphics, do you submit them for consideration to the editor? Or is it useless, and should only be done when explicitly asked (or suggested) by the editor?

I emailed the editor and suggested I had a beautiful and relevant graphic for a special issue. That worked.

Edit: Image attached. Also, note that I did go about it incorrectly, but it worked anyway. I emailed the editors when I submitted my paper. I should have waited until it was accepted.


How to get into position to teach college Arabic? I am interested in teaching at the university-level in Arabic.  Would teaching arabic in a high-school first(as I have no university-level  teaching experience) help me? I currently teach science to 6th graders, and am considering quitting after 4 years there.

I have an MS in Arabic from UCLA, also an MS in Educ. Bachelors in Arabic also.
Thanks

It is my opinion that unless you have a PhD in Arabic or something intimately related to it you won't get more than a part-time adjunct instructor position. If your goal is to teach some classes without working towards a full appointment, then you might not need the PhD.


Programming Interview for PhD Admission in Computer Science A prospective supervisor is interested in me, and has asked me for programming interview. As I have been told, his research group does a lot of system programming, and he is seeking a good programmer.

I have no industry experience in programming, though I have programmed for assignments, projects, and a Master's thesis. I know that, as a computer scientist, it is essential to have good programming skills. I tried to search for some tips about programming interviews for prospective PhDs, but could not find anything.

Does it differ from industrial interview? Did anyone have similar experience? Any references or tips?

I had the interview yesterday. I would like to share the experience as it might be useful for anybody who might go through similar kind of interviews in the future.

The interview was via Skype with an outsourced software engineer (not the prospective supervisor), and we used shared .doc file to solve two programming problems about strings. By the way, most of programming interviews I had (mostly industrial and this academic one) pretty much involve strings manipulation and sometimes data structure.

The interview lasted for an hour whereby I was given 20 minutes to solve each problem and 10 minutes to discuss. The general impression was positive. The concept was always known, yet I needed some practicing to make my code works.
I was given the choice to choose the programming language I like to write in.

I would say, bachelor level of programming is enough. You will just need to revise and practice a little bit your information. You might need to focus on the logic you follow more than the small details that differ from language to another.


How to prepare for undergraduate research of which I have no background in? I recently applied and got accepted to a very large research lab in the U.S. Although the catch is that I did not get put into my major ( Biology ) and instead was placed into computer science ( simulations/super computing).

I reason this is because I had several computer science classes in the past, but I eventually changed majors to biology due to not flourishing with high level maths or coding.

I assume that to prepare for any research, one must read the supervisor's papers and self study. Although the issue is I feel I am totally outmatched for this position, due to my struggles in computer science before. Is there a good strategy for approaching this upcoming internship or should I resign instead?

My advice is to discuss this matter directly with whoever your supervisor will be -- tell them about your past experience, your concerns, and ask for their advice. They may be able to have you shifted -- or they may tell you that they were explicitly looking for your biology background.

As to why they would be explicitly looking for your biology backgrounds -- computer scientists frequently collaborate with other scientists when working on large-scale simulations. The reason for this is that there's two sides to the simulation -- the actual code required to run it, and the domain knowledge required to design the code in the first place. As @Sumyrda pointed out, this may be one of the goals of the internship (to give you experience in working with/as the domain expert).


Any platform for building research collaboration? My research is theoretical and have published some papers in high impact journals. However, I need further expertise to advance my works (e.g., advanced mathematics). Is there any online platform to post my research idea on which like minded researchers express their interest?

I look for a platform in which people are frequently doing this. I know it's somehow possible in websites like researchgate, but it shouldn't be very likely to happen.

No funding is involved. I do most of the research and write the paper, I just need a mathematician to do the math formulation or even check my math works.

My advice is to use personal, in person, (sorry that this had to be repeated but it did) outreach.  Network and find someone at your institution and talk to them.  If you are not at a strong enough institution to have anyone, then network outside the institution.  Forming collaborations is an important and valuable thing.  But doing it on a board is a bad, bad idea.


Does publishing in journals known as "predatory" hurt one's reputation? Does publishing in what is known as a "predatory" (such as OMICS) journal diminish ones reputation? Do these publications help at all when applying for grants (or do they impede ones chance)?

Yes, your reputation is diminished, because people will think you couldn't get published any other way.  It will actively harm your chances at pretty much any interaction with reputable organizations, including grant proposals.  Don't do it.


How can I prove my self-studied knowledge? In applying to graduate program, what are some ways to prove knowledge gained from self-study?

I've been told of the following:

Independently conduct research / create projects that require the knowledge
Partake in research that requires the knowledge
Contribute to a project that requires the knowledge

But the former seems like an expensive hurdle in many experiment-heavy fields, and the latter two seem like a catch 22. You must collaborate with people to prove your knowledge, but you must prove your knowledge to be considered for collaboration.

Are there other ways to do so?

One may prove their knowledge by these aspects.

They may have a certificate of the courses they have passed.
They may have a publication or patent registration in the field of their personal studies.
They may have worked in the field of their knowledge and their projects and portfolio is a proof of their knowledge.

A website designer may not have any certification of their design knowledge, but the websites they have designed are the proof of their knowledge.

You may have done voluntary/paid teaching at your undergraduate university or in an educational institute, so you have the certification of your teaching activity and that may be counted as a proof of your teaching and your knowledge. (Also teaching/research assistantships to a course which you have never passed but you did assistantship in that area.)
You may have some publications in the area of your knowledge, for instance, a published paper or book; or a contribution to a publication which is so related to your knowledge.
You may have done some jobs related to your knowledge. An engineering design, done some code-developing, etc.
You may have a recommendation letter from a professor in which has written that you have sit in their class for that course, but you have never registered for the course; so it proves that you have the knowledge of the course.

However, as far as you are registering for a graduate program, you must fulfill their requirements not what is generally/logically reasonable or what seems to be acceptable. So it is better to provide all your proofs in your CV or their application process website and let them ask you for more official documents. Also, you can email them and ask for your special issue.

P.S. It seems that your question indicates self-study knowledge, but some people may have done some non-degree programs and certificates of those courses may also prove their knowledge in the course.


PhD at same location as undergraduate? I'm an undergraduate currently. I am looking to pursue a PhD next year. I have an established PI here who I have been working very well with, and we already have, well, probably at least 2 years in the future worth of plans for potential projects.  Obviously, it often does not look good to do your PhD at the same program as your undergraduate, as I have read that institutions view it as though the student does not want to leave their comfort zone, will have a more restricted network, fewer diversity in the background of recommenders, etc.

The problem is, my undergraduate institution is number one in the field I am doing, and in the graduate field I hope to pursue (its "specialty" is a different subfield than mine, but I am sure it is still at or near the top of the specific subfield I work in, and the entire program itself is still number 1). So my question is, could it potentially harm me in pursuing my PhD at the same place? What potential impacts could it have on me down the line? If I have other connections that I also have worked well with in the past at, say, the number 10 school in the field and am accepted there, would that be better, worse, and why? If I could instead work in a similar field at a different campus of the same university that is also top 5 (and also would allow me to perform the same research, take as interesting and focused coursework, etc), and my current PI would be able to co-advise me with a faculty member from that department, would that change things and be "far enough" of reaching from the undergraduate institution?

I am not at all concerned with rankings, but obviously with the current pay structure and employment market in academia, that is not something that can be taken out of the equation. I agree that I really enjoy pushing my comfort zone as well; at my current university, The only places with that sort of funding for the area of research I perform are top 25 schools, and getting hired by one of those is obviously a majorly uphill battle to start with.  I really appreciate any insightful feedback/suggestions/tips you guys can give!

The problem is, my undergraduate institution is number one in the field I am doing, and in the graduate field I hope to pursue.

Here's a well-known story:

Richard Feynman did his undergrad studies at MIT. Near the end of his studies there, he approached John Slater (the head of physics at that time) asking to stay on as a PhD candidate. Slate asked him why, and Feynman's response was:

"I want to go to MIT because it is the best school in the country."

Slater then said: "That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how the rest of the world is."

(Paraphrased from "Surely you're joking...")

Here's a personal story:

When I was applying for graduate schools, everyone is applying everywhere, and in particular most of my cohort also applied for the graduate school program where I did my undergraduate degree. Now, most of them do not really want to stay another four or five or six years there---entirely understandable as the town is not very exciting, and after four years of undergraduate studies there one typically cannot wait to go away for a while. So the department is often reluctant to admit their own students for fear of "wasting an offer".

So I was slightly surprised when I got a phone call from my then undergraduate thesis advisor inquiring about my intentions, after laying out the above "facts". This being rather early in the process and before I had received any concrete offers, I responded in a way that is mostly truthful but also (I thought) calibrated to not ruin my prospects of getting some/any offer! So I equivocated that only an offer from one other institution would seriously tempt me away, and in the case I get offers both from that other institution, and my then current one, I would have to think harder before making up my mind. But the chances are 50-50 absent any significant differences in the offer.

My thesis advisor then asked me whether I am out of my mind, and why I would consider going anywhere else when he is the best in the world there is.

I stayed, and I am not sorry for it. (Well, at the very least, I still have a job.)

Having been in hiring discussions: I have never heard the esteem of any candidate lowered solely because he or she studied for both the undergraduate and graduate degrees at the same place. Concerns about "leaving one's comfort zone" and about "lack of connections" are more often raised in the context of

Having postdoctoral research that closely mirrors doctoral research (no growth).
Having a very small set of collaborators, one of whom is the doctoral advisor (no connections).

By the time most of us finished our undergraduate degrees, we are significantly less mature than we are after we finished our PhDs. No reasonable person would judge you on one decision you make when you are so young. Besides, if you really are the type that cannot venture far from your comfort zone, it will show up (probably more clearly) elsewhere in your CV.

So your consideration should really be: will I learn if I stay? Will I grow if I stay? Can I count on myself to reach out and make more connections should I stay? Will I perform excellent research if I stay?
Your decision should ultimately rest on your expected growth as an individual (both scientifically and otherwise) and not on unreliable perceptions from "the community".


Is it ethical/acceptable to give a lighter penalty to students who admit to cheating? I am at the moment dealing with an academic dishonesty incident in a class I'm teaching (a few groups of students submitting identical code, when the class policy forbids getting help from another person on a graded assignment).

When I noticed indications of plagiarism, I emailed each affected student something along the lines of:

  The code you submitted is nearly identical to another student's work. Can you comment on this?

Their reactions mainly fall into three categories:

"I made a mistake and I take full responsibility for it, I hope you will let me make it up but I understand if you can't."
"I talked about the assignment with another student, but I didn't copy anyone's code." But then when I inform them they're getting a zero grade for the assignment, they don't argue.
"I didn't do it! You can't give me a zero grade for the assignment when I didn't cheat, I refuse to accept a zero grade."

Assuming I have evidence that all of these students cheated, is there a good reason to adjust the penalty based on whether students own up to their misconduct, or continue to lie about it?

On the one hand, I appreciate honesty, and doubling down on a lie seems like something that should be punished. On the other hand, I've never heard of anyone adjusting penalties like this, so I'm wondering if there's some reason I shouldn't.

It's also not clear to me what the relative difference in penalties should be, if there is one. I thought about it and it's hard for me to come up with one penalty that's appropriate for Group 1, another penalty that's appropriate for Group 2, and a third penalty that's appropriate for Group 3.

I would very much appreciate answers based on research and/or experience with policies like this, rather than just opinion.

(My school has no official policy on the matter.)

TL; DR: We adjust the penalty.

I sit on my department's Academic Misconduct Committee so unfortunately I see a lot of these cases. The University policy has created two similarly sounding, but different terms: academic misconduct and poor academic practice, with academic misconduct being much more severe than poor academic practice. Every student suspected of having engaged in poor academic practice is called into a meeting with the Academic Misconduct Committee. This committee looks at the evidence supporting academic misconduct/poor practice and hears the student's case which generally includes what training they have had about good academic practice, how the incident happened, and any evidence of extenuating circumstances (e.g., death in the family).

Based on this process we can come to one of 3 decisions:

not poor academic practice,
poor academic practice,
academic misconduct.

If we decide that they did not engage in poor academic practice, the incident is essentially purged from the system. If the student is called in again in the future, we do not nominally know that they had been called in before. If we decide that it was poor academic practice, the students are warned and it is documented. We are not allowed to apply formal penalties in the case of poor academic practice. If they are called in again we know from the documentation and are unlikely to give them the benefit of the doubt a second time.

If we decide that academic misconduct has occurred we can apply one of a number of different penalties to the work: no reduction of the mark, remark the work with the offending material removed or reduce the mark commensurate with the misconduct (anywhere from a 5% penalty to a 0 for the piece of work). A second incident of academic misconduct results in the penalty being decided on by a university panel and starts with a zero for the class and can go as high as a zero for the year. In this way there is a big difference between poor academic practice and academic misconduct with no reduction in the mark since poor academic practice does not count as a first offense.

Within this framework the committee is faced with how to handle the students who admit the issue and the ones who deny the issue. Those who argue they didn't cheat and have no explanation as to how their assignment matches another's work are almost always found guilty of academic misconduct since they are not willing to help us create a case for poor academic practice. More often than not they receive a 0 since we have no evidence that mitigates the penalty. For students who admit what they did, we often consider poor academic practice as an outcome since they describe what they did and realize it was wrong. Sometimes the offense is too blatant to let off without a reduction, but generally saying what you did wrong and how you will not let it happen again reduces the penalty.


Etiquette when a student attends a conference with his/her supervisor I am attending a conference with my PhD supervisor! So, I was a little bit nervous how to treat for example in welcome cocktail, during the conference time and at the gala dinner! Do I need to accompany him most of times? Or only need to be around? It is such a long time doing research with him, but never able to communicate easily! This is hopefully a chance for me to improve my relationship.

There's no ethical dilemma here. You might tag along with him at first to let him introduce you to some people in the field he knows, but after awhile of that, you should feel free to introduce yourself to people who look to be more your age or status (younger looking people are more likely to be students like yourself). Also, at the dinner, you should feel free to introduce yourself to people whose talks you attended and the people at your table.

The above assumes you are comfortable in such social situations. Not everything at a conference is business. Network and enjoy the social aspects of the events if you can.


Shared office is messy to the point that I can't do any work, how to proceed? Four months in my postdoc and I feel the mess, up to the point that I can't further do any, any work in my office. Nothing. My passion, bioinformatics, is gone.

An office with 12 students where just 8 should be, and plenty of disorganised stuff, people coming in and out, chatting, not very clean... I would say it's more similar to a bar than to a real work office. Almost all them work on the bench, so they come and go to the computer frequently.

I've been promised to get a new place in a 5 students office in about a month, but this has already a delay of 2 months since I should have moved there like 2 months ago. This is the reason to be in a limit situation.

What to do? My mentor knows almost nothing about this. He knows I'm waiting for the new place but thinks I'm doing well, when this is far from true.

I work in bioinformatics but seems my mentor thinks this is like kid games. I feel homeless moving through libraries trying to go ahead with my work.

To add another perspective: You write that everyone else is doing fine, and in fact is doing productive work. I know that people have very different working styles (in our department, all office space is 'flex-space', i.e., no-one (including full professors) has an 'own' office and people have very different preferences whether they want to sit in a more quiet place or a more social stting), and it can very well be the case that you are not productive in a setting where others are.

Nevertheless, I think you should consider the possibility that it is actually you who has the problem, not the setting that is the problem. If there is no easy solution (i.e., a different space for you), then, in fact, I guess it would be unreasonable to expect 11 people to adapt their working style rather than you (1 person).

I do not mean this negative at all, but there are solutions to work in a busy place, like putting on headphones and the like. Have you considered such options?

Good luck!


Letter of Recommendation Expiration Date I have 9 and 10 months old recommendation letters. Can I use these when applying to graduate programs (United States)? Is that okay with the admissions committee?

In addition to other points already made, in most situations you do not send the letters yourself, but have the recommenders send the letters directly. Sometimes this involves simply uploading the letters to a web site, but this would be done _by_the_recommenders_, not by you.

Thus, some action will be required by your recommenders.


Tenure possibilities for junior professorship I have read whatever I could find online about W1 (junior) professorship in Germany, and to me it seems it is somewhat close to a full time lecturer and the tenure possibilities are slim if none, all the more slimmer at the same university. However, the person who has invited me for an interview said this is rather because they are legally required to do so, but there are tenure possibilities. I will ask him for more information, but 1. I do have a tenure option at other university (and another country), however the university is not at all in a good ranking, I also have an invitation from a couple of really good universities but I will need to decide soon so I don't know if I will be able to act upon those.

First things first, I don't want to be a lecturer - meaning that I don't want to focus on coursework but research, I heard that junior professors can have students and a research group? But they also teach a lot of entry level courses? so what are these "tenure possibilities" exactly? Does he mean a remote possibility in 6 years? Or does he mean somewhat something close to a tenure-track? What are tenure chances?

It depends: There are W1 professorships with a tenure track, and there are those without. If there is a tenure track, then that is usually prominently advertised, and more importantly, in writing. If there is nothing about tenure in writing, then the safe assumption is that you won't get tenure, and you will have to leave after 6 years. Verbal assurances that you might get something aren't worth much.

As to the teaching load, there are those that focus on allowing the person to qualify for a "real" professorship (W3), i.e. either as an alternative to a Habilitation or as a possibility to write your Habil. There are others were the position is used as a form of cheap labor for teaching. W1 positions with tenure track tend to fall in the first category, but there are also W1 positions without tenure track that fall in the first category. In that case, the W1 position is a stepping stone that helps getting a W3 at another university. Again, if it is a W1 aimed at allowing the inhabitant to qualify for a W3 professorship, then that is prominently mentioned and in written form. Only verbal assurances would make me worried.

If you know someone who work at a German university that you trust, you may want to let that person have a look at it. For an outsider it can be hard to read between the lines.


What to do when research is ending up in useless clinical trial I wonder a bit whether I should have behaved differently. I worked in a institute. They developed "drug candidates" for a disease.
At the end of my PhD I definitely proofed that the binding mechanism is unspecific and the binding coefficients are low (for the whole class of candidates). I was, by the way, not allowed to publish that stuff and PostDocs working there started to get angry in meetings acting like I do crap.
I noticed that experiments from other PhDs were manipulated as well:

Small sample size (1-3 mice)
Repeat until you see what you want
General problems with positive controls

Later, I left for PostDoc and had to sign a confidentialiatity contract. Now one of the besaid drug (candidates) is going into human patient test trials, and I suspect that they take something which will not do anything (good). A subsequent PhD published parts of what I was forbidden. In the initial manuscript a friend send me, my name was missing, than I got one of the last positions, for "previous work". I guess, they got afraid, that I may read it later somewhere. Of course all the initial PostDocs which opposed, were in the author list :D

Actually, during that time I started to write a Review which illustrates all the contradictions in that field in general, knowingly that no higher IF journal will ever take it. I also noticed that many groups in the field are doing similiar fake science and even publish sometimes high (Nature, ..). I once wrote to the journal that one paper is based on a wrong experimental setup without any further answer.

Question:

Is it worth it to write a Review when you actually work in industry and have no institute email anymore
What should you do, if you know that you will lose your job and others their founding if you whistle blow?

Against this idea speaks the fact that you cannot really proof manipulated setups
.. and institutes tend to roll over single persons

The problems you indicate should result in non-replicable results. The way this can be shown is repeat the published experiments as closely to the published protocol as humanly possible, with a correct design, carefully documented, etc. etc., and get different results. That is a publishable result.

Whether such a replication will somehow violate your confidentiality contract is something you need to discuss with a lawyer. My feeling of justice says that it should not violate that, but justice and law are two very different beasts.

Just writing down your experiences, risks ending up in a "he said, she said" situation, which is not going to resolve anything. Moreover there is the legal aspect of you signing a confidentiality contract. Anything legal needs to be discussed with a lawyer, not random persons on the internet.


Journal won't allow PhD student to be corresponding author I've submitted a publication to an ACS Journal where I performed all the experiments myself, most of the editorial work, and all the coordination. Other authors agreed to let me be the corresponding author.

ACS spontaneously changed the corresponding author to the last author (which doesn't even have a position a our institution) and send following e-mail to him:

  Thank you for your recent submission. ACS Policy requires that the role of corresponding author be assigned to a senior editor who has the equivalent degree to Ph.D. If John Doe has the necessary requirement, and you agree, we would be happy to update the manuscript records. Thank you for the confirmation.

Beeing in Academia since many years, I am pretty aware of what a corresponding author is as I am aware of the questions Is it okay to list a PhD student as corresponding author? and Should student or supervisor be corresponding author for publications based on student research?, I'm a bit upset and asking myself on what base one can make such discrimination.

Since I couldn't find this ACS policy on their website: is this a kind of unofficial policy? What is the point of making someone corresponding author who doesn't have as much insights as I have?

I already have published in the past in ACS journals. My highest concern is that these only write to the corresponding author during the review and editorial process and the other authors are familiar with overfull e-mail boxes and "skipping e-mails"...

It is an extremely weird policy, and I never heard of any journal having a policy like this one.

I couldn't find a "general rule governing corresponding authors" that would apply to all the journals of the American Chemical Society.

In 2012, the editor on chief of ACS Nano wrote, in an editorial called "Who Are Corresponding Authors?",

  In order to be accessible to those requesting information or materials, the corresponding authors must be stable in their positions and locatable. Unless students or postdocs have long-term positions, it is typically not appropriate for these authors to be corresponding authors, even if they serve the function of submitting the manuscript. (There are occasional exceptions, such as where the senior author has passed away.)

Cf. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/nn301566x

Their policy (that doesn't say anything about having or not a diploma) seems really strict, and, in my opinion, outdated, but it answers your question

  What is the point of making someone corresponding author who doesn't have as much insights as I have?

Well, their idea (at least according to this editor) is that it is better to have a correspondent, even not aware of all the details of the publication, that no correspondent, because the "student without long-term position" left without leaving an address.


Is it common for universities to have multiple boards (eg, a General Planning Board, a Finance Board, etc.) and what is the typical name for these? I am wondering if it's common for universities to have multiple boards, each with a specific mandate to manage and carry out initiatives in a specific field, such as General Planning, Education, Finance, Global Initiatives, etc. I am particularly interested in universities in the US and the UK.

These boards would be hierarchically under the main governing board of the university and would be staffed with professors and led by trustees from the board. They would be at the administrative level.

Would it be more common to name these boards committees or subcommittees?

I know that you ask preferably for the US and UK, but as a side note, this model is standard for universities in Switzerland (and presumably other German-speaking countries). These are typically called Kommissionen (which translate to commissions or I think more appropriately committees). Contradictory to your example, these committees are not exclusively staffed with professors. They are composed of a president and representatives of all levels of the university employees and students: faculty, "intermediaries" (postdocs, lecturers), admin/technical staff, and students.

Here is the list of the different committees from the University of Zurich. It includes the research committee, the ethics committee, the disciplinary committee, etc. The other universities of the country are organized in a very similar manner.


Effective Strategies for writing papers and be more productive? Have you found any effective strategies for writing papers which you apply every time? Do you have a system as to how you work? What things have worked for you, what things did not?

If you have any tips on how I could become more productive and produce better papers faster, that would be welcome.

I think I am lacking some structure, and sometimes I am finding it difficult to put it all together, and I am wondering how other people do this.

For any written work writing an outline is very useful. Write down all the chapters, sections and subsections and in them gather bullet points of the content und key messages, e.g. like this:

Introduction

1. Literature review
2. Scope of work
3. Importance in scientific context

Methods

1. Some experimental methods

Results

1. Some data

and so on and so forth. The more specific you are, the better. Write down any idea you have now, it might be gone later. If you think of a sentence that sounds good to you, but is somewhere in the middle of your paper, write it down! It can be the seed for a much longer paragraph

I usually like to get literature review out of the way first, because it is the most tedious. Gather the sources you want to cite and construct a nice introduction around them.

From here on it is just writing, no way around it. Personally, I write rough drafts of every section and come back to it later in an iterative process. Some people may like to perfect one section first before going to the other.

If you have trouble concentrating in front of the screen, get up and write somewhere else using pen and paper. Print your rough drafts and write your corrections on them. I am usually more focussed when reading on paper.

I hope some of these tips help. This is not only restricted to papers, but applies basically to any scientific work, theses, reports, etc.


Are postdocs students or staff when calculating staff/student ratios? The ratio of staff/students is an important factor for university rankings. How are postdocs and non-faculty researchers considered in calculating this ratio?

I am referring to researchers who have an official contract with the university such as postdoc fellowships (which are competition based), higher level researchers like Senior Scientists (some universities give such titles) and even Research Professors?

To rephrase my question: Are research staff considered part of "staff" in staff/student ratio? They are not academic staff but they can do teaching jobs too!

For the US, there is actually a fairly standardized answer, though it's complicated.  The short version appears to be:

  Postdocs who teach count as 1/3 of a staff member.  Postdocs who do not teach are not counted at all.

First, note that the number usually used in the US is student-faculty ratio. (Not "staff": in US academic parlance, "staff" typically refers to non-academic university employees: administrative assistants, accountants, gardeners, cooks, etc.)

We can pretty quickly eliminate the possibility of postdocs being counted as students - I've never heard of postdocs being considered students anywhere in US academia.  They don't enroll in classes nor work towards a degree.  (Even for PhD students working exclusively on research enroll in classes each term until they graduate, typically a 12-credit course called "Independent Research" or something similar.  Postdocs do not.)

So, are they counted as faculty?

There is an organization called the Common Data Set Initiative which sets forth standard definitions for university statistics like student-faculty ratio.  CDS doesn't actually gather data or publish survey instruments, but their set of standards and definitions is written in questionnaire form.

Item I-2, "Student to Faculty Ratio", says:

  Report the Fall 2014 ratio of full-time equivalent students (full-time plus 1/3 part-time) to full-time equivalent instructional faculty (full-time plus 1/3 part-time). In the ratio calculations, exclude both faculty and students in stand-alone graduate or professional programs such as medicine, law, veterinary, dentistry, social work, business, or public health in which faculty teach virtually only graduate-level students. Do not count undergraduate or graduate student teaching assistants as faculty.

For the definition of "instructional faculty", we refer to Item I-1, which has a table explaining how various types of faculty members should be counted.  For

  instructional faculty in preclinical and clinical medicine, faculty who are not paid (e.g., those who donate their services or are in the military), or research-only faculty, post-doctoral fellows, or pre-doctoral fellows

it says they should not count as full-time instructional faculty, and should be counted as part-time instructional faculty "only if they teach one or more non-clinical credit courses".

So this is the answer.  A postdoc or other researcher who does not teach any non-clinical credit-bearing courses should not be counted in the student-faculty ratio.  A postdoc who does teach at least one such course should be counted a part-time instructional faculty member, and contribute 1/3 of a person to the denominator of the ratio.

Of course, it should be kept in mind that this data is provided voluntarily by each institution, and it is ultimately up to the institution to decide how they classify each of their employees.

With regard to rankings, the best-known rankings in the US are the US News & World Report Best Colleges Rankings.  They explain that they generally follow the CDS definitions when collecting data from institutions.


I uploaded my test questions to a website (so I could cheat), but then thought better of it and didn't use the answers. How to proceed? So, I was taking my exam, and there were two questions I really had no clue on, and I was running out of time on. So I quickly went to a website and posted pictures of my exam questions and asked for answers. I immediately regretted doing so, and went to delete them, when I realized, it wasn’t possible. I then started freaking out, shaking, crying, etc. I know it was wrong, and I really don’t know why I did it. I just didn’t want to fail. They haven't seen it yet, and I hope they don’t ever, I didn’t even use it on the test, and was too frazzled to even fully finish the exam. I don’t know what to do, and my heart has been racing for 12 hours now, and I haven’t been able to sleep. The schools policy is essentially that the teacher will decide what happens, unless I already have a record, where the school will decide to expel me. I know I haven’t even been caught or anything, but I just want to do the right thing here, because I know it was wrong. But I also don’t want to possibly get expelled.

Interesting. You are actually not asking an ethics question here; that one you could answer yourself, and very quickly.
I think your question has two aspects:

You are asking for psychological advice. You are suffering because your mighty superego just doesn't shut up. If that's any consolation, to me this means you are a good person. But you would like to come clear in order to have moral and mental closure.
You are (that's the on-topic part) asking for academic advice: You are interested in the likely consequences because they play a role in whether you will decide to confess. If it's likely that you'd be expelled you'd rather try to sit it out. If the likely reaction is stern admonition and a grade reduction you are perfectly willing to trade that in exchange for moral and hence psychological relief.

I cannot really answer the academic question; it probably depends a lot on the country, the school and the teacher, none of which you can reasonably disclose.
But if there are clear guidelines — whatever they are — it may not make a great difference whether they find out or whether you confess. Or it may work to your disadvantage: Unless your name or a unique identifier is on the photos you posted (and if you were that stupid you don't deserve your degree anyway) they will have a hard time proving that it was your exam, and not somebody else's. Unless you go and confess! All jurisdictions accept the right for the accused to be silent. No jurisdiction requires you to indict yourself. This is the time to call on this privilege and observe the prime directive for all accused: Do not talk.
My advice: Take this as a lesson. You'll remember it for the rest of your life. Don't go and serve them your own head on a silver platter. We all have done things in the past we were not proud of; we all have probably hurt people emotionally by acting less nicely than we wish we had. If we could, we would go back and fix it. But here, no damage has been done; there is literally nothing to fix here except your future behavior.
Unless you can't bear being a "pragmatic coward", I'd simply live with having been an idiot, not do it again and hope not to get caught this one time.


Paid twice by university for "same" research: how to proceed? I'm a graduate student doing research in physics. Through this month, I had an NIH grant through the Engineering department. I was also covered by my advisor's NIH grant in physics, with possible backup from the Physics department in case of a shortfall.

This month, I was paid twice, for different amounts—once, apparently, from the the Engineering grant for work done in Engineering, and once from the Physics department for physics research. The problem is that, effectively, they're the same research. I wasn't doing twice as much research, although there were minor additional projects and requirements for the engineering grant. This is the last month of the engineering grant, which may explain the overlap.

How should I proceed?

Keep the money? Could the university demand it be returned at a later date? Might I not get paid next month?
Keep only one of the payments, and try to get the other back to the university? Which one?
Return them both and try to get paid again?
Something else?

If the university decides one of the payments was made in error, they will almost certainly demand it back, and if you don't repay it promptly, they'll likely take steps that you won't enjoy (e.g. withholding from your paycheck, suing you, firing you, etc; specifics will depend on their policies and local law).  So don't spend the extra money until the situation is clarified.  Keep it in your bank account.  If they're paper checks, don't cash or deposit them.

Contact your advisors in both departments and explain the situation.  If somehow you're entitled to both payments, you'll get explicit confirmation and then you'll know you can keep all the money.  If not, they can negotiate between themselves as to where the money should go, and they'll tell you how much to repay, to whom, and how.


Does it make sense to make exam grading very transparent? Is it advisable (in terms of the benefit for the students and the work it causes) to make the grading completely transparent to students? I think for instance of publishing the sample solutions for the exam or the distribution of the grades given. Would those measures be suitable to convince the students that the grading is fair or would it rather make worse students feel treated in an unfair way and trigger many complaints? As far as I understand the University now normally lets the students only see their individual grades. Of course they will always compare themselves in smaller groups.

Transparency is great, when you can do it.  Many of my large undergraduate classes would show a score histogram for every major quiz or exam, and some would explicitly give the grading rubric.  This was generally very much appreciated by the students for exactly the reasons you give: better understanding of how they stand and why they got the scores they got, letting them judge fairness and know when to reasonably object (which sometimes happened).

From the TA side, my experience was that transparency actually decreased my work, because it meant that I didn't need to deal with many spurious complaints, and that many of the complaints could be resolved directly through reference to the rubric.


Post-Bologna process, is my sociology degree an undergraduate degree or a graduate degree? I obtained my Sociology degree after 5 years (stipulated) university studies in Spain (Licenciatura) in 2004. Now with Bologna, sociology is only a four-year graduate program.

I am not sure whether to put on my CV that I have a Master (3+2) or Bachelor Degree and how to abbreviate it: MA, BA, or else way.

Just call it a Licenciatura and indicate in parentheses that it is a five-year undergraduate course of study.  For example you might say (obviously adjusting to the format of your C.V.)

  2004 - Licenciatura en sociología (5 year undergraduate degree in sociology), Complutense University of Madrid.
  2004 - Lic. Sociología (equiv. B.S./B.A. Sociology), Complutense University of Madrid.

The reason I'd recommend not translating it as a masters is that the licenciatura not considered a graduate level program (you could homologar 4-year undergraduate U.S. bachelor programs into licenciaturas back in the day), and seeing the abbreviation M.A./M.S. would imply that it is graduate level.  You can discuss it in a cover letter if you feel the need to explain it further.


Incentives for professors to write recommendation letters Is one incentive their ability to communicate their perceptiveness to people in their general community?

Are there other incentives?

The principal reason for writing any letter of recommendation is to benefit the person for whom you are writing it.  If a student is talented, helping him or her get into a good program is its own incentive.  I can't imagine writing a letter with the motive of showing off my perceptiveness.

An additional motive is that others wrote letters for the writer once, and he/she can show gratitude by paying it forward.  From David Keyes' excellent essay on procuring reference letters:

  Everyone in a position to write a career-changing letter of reference
  is there by the grace of earlier generations of mentors at school or
  work who poured their lives into today's writer and then wrote about
  the results in now dusty letters. The only gifts today's authors
  expect from today's candidates are those "in kind" or better to be
  delivered to tomorrow's candidates, in one-way cross-generational
  equity. Writers have their own rewards in the success of their
  protégés, and though they will moan to each other about the burden,
  they recognize that reference letters are key components of an
  imperfect system that nevertheless is on the whole effective in
  keeping their discipline healthy and growing.


Professional writing tips I just started my post doc and currently writing a paper but I don't have any professional writing experience. Is there a learning curve or forums that can help with improving writing skills? E.g. I want to rephrase "The review paper published recently talked about the wide range of.." into more professional sentence. How can I get help on this?

Many universities have a "writing center" or equivalent that will typically be your best starting point, since it has people who are paid to sit down with you in person and help you solve this problem.

If your institution does not have such, there are massive numbers of online scientific writing courses that may help. Personally, I have found Jean-luc Doumont particularly helpful, and especially his "architectural" view of writing. Different people will find different resources fit their personal learning styles best of course.

Next, if at all possible, make sure that you are partnering with mentors or co-authors who are good at writing.

Finally, read!  The best way to understand what works in communication is to be a reader and learn what works for you.


What is the proper way to judge the quality of education of a university? Why do Russian and Israeli universities score low in various world rankings?

In this question, most of the answers more or less stated that, rankings of universities available on the net are kind of useless.

Then my question is, how can a student judge the quality of education of a university before getting as admission? What factors he/she can observe to take the decision? What information they should collect?

The best metric is comparing the quality of current and recent graduate students, in various research outlets. If students from institute X stumble more over questions at conferences compared to those from institute Y, or if they publish in lesser venues, or produce less-solid papers (more errors, more failures to think a problem through), then you can conclude either that Y attracts better students or that Y does a better job of training students than X (I don't think it would matter, for your purposes, which it is). But this is a very labor-intensive evaluation. A second runner-up method would be to look at the job-placement histories of institutions, though getting hired often reflects politics (who your adviser knows, who hates your adviser) as much as student quality.


Is being a volunteer useful for academic prospective Is being a maths "tutor" volunteer at sites like MATHNERDS useful in terms of "good impression" for future academic prospectives?

If you apply for grants where "Broader Impact" (or something like it) is a criteria, then a demonstrable history of volunteer and outreach activities related to your academic field of study can be helpful. Same goes for awards that consider "service" as a criteria.

(The reviewers of my NSF graduate research fellowship application commented favorably on my volunteer experience, which I mentioned towards "Broader Impact".)


Should I offer to come to campus if given a phone interview? I applied to a faculty position at a university (a small state school) near my hometown and I just received an email invitation for a Skype interview later this week. Coincidentally, I am visiting my parents' house this week, which is about a 20 minute drive from the institution offering the interview.

Would it be weird if I mentioned that I am nearby and/or offered to come in and meet some of the members of the department in person while I'm here?

I didn't mention anywhere in my application that I grew up nearby nor did I indicate that I have family here. I did all of my studies out-of-state and I'm currently living on the other side of the country. However, I am excited about the opportunity to move back "home"!

It is worth asking and is probably worth a visit even if they would rather stick to a Skype interview. They may prefer that so as to treat all candidates equally, but if that isn't necessary, they might prefer you to come in person.

It is a good way to get a feel of a place and to meet a few students and several faculty. I don't see any downside in asking.

"I'm actually quite close and could easily arrange a face to face visit. Would that be preferable?"


Demand code and/or data as a condition of peer review? It is still relatively uncommon for social scientists to share data or code as a part of the peer review process. I feel that this practice runs contrary to notions of replicability and reproducibility and have a desire to voice opposition to instances in which manuscripts are submitted without data and code.

Where, however, is such opposition appropriately expressed?

I am specifically curious about whether or not it is appropriate to refuse to review an article in the absence of code or data.

UPDATE

I'm going to watch this for a couple of days to see what surfaces. FYI I cross-posted this to Andrew Gelman (http://andrewgelman.com/2015/09/14/its-not-so-easy-to-share-data-and-code-and-there-are-lots-of-bureaucrats-who-spend-their-time-making-it-even-more-difficult/) for those who are interested in seeing his response and the response of his followers...

I would suggest first spending a little bit of time reflecting to yourself on why you want to see sharing of code and data, and which code and data you would want to be shared.  Is it more ideological in nature ("information wants to be free"), or at its root is it a belief more about scientific ethics and efficacy?

I am almost certain that you do not actually want all data and code to be shared.  For example, you probably do not want identifying information about subjects to be shared.  Likewise, you probably do not care too much about little bits of utility code that don't have anything much to do with the science.  Where do you draw your boundaries and why?

The reason I would suggest doing that, is that you will then be in a good position, as a reviewer, to persuasively argue for the inclusion of code and/or data for objective reasons that the editor and author are more likely to agree with, even if their personal preferences are different.  I don't think you'll have much effect by refusing to review (unless you can get a lot of colleagues to exert pressure along with you), but I think you may make much more difference by refusing to accept poorly justified conclusions in the absence of result and method information to support them.