Should undergraduate researchers expect payment? I'm about a junior-senior in college and got the chance for an interesting lab that's conducting research information theory, where the role would be to help write ML model code. This is an area of interest for me and I think I could learn a lot from it.

I want to know if it's reasonable to expect to be paid, because this position doesn't compensate. I've heard of some positions that are and some that aren't. Money isn't that big of an issue but it's a nice to have. There are part time jobs I've been considering and admit that if I were to receive payment, I would probably spend more time doing research on this than working on my own projects. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn, disclaimer, I know I'm not entitled to anything.

I know it's related to and I don't want to open up the argument for should interns be paid. But are undergraduate researchers normally paid?

Usually, undergraduate research assistant positions are compensated in two ways: 1) academic credit or 2) hourly wage.

From my own personal experiences, paid undergraduate research assistantships are hard to come by. In the United States, a lot of these positions are considered "work studies" where it's considered an on-campus, part-time employment. However, even then, a lot of these positions were restricted to lower-income students who were able to document financial need. Usually, the research labs would be using their research grants to fund these paid positions. As many people in academia may know, research funds are also hard to come by. A lot of labs may have limited funds that they prioritize for hiring more important positions like Graduate Research Assistants/Associates or Lab/Project Managers.

Undergraduate Research Assistant positions compensated via academic credit are much more common since they allow for students to take fewer classes (and also saves the lab's funds).

However, when neither options are given, then it's ultimately just a volunteer position where the undergraduate may take on the position for intrinsic value or to gain experience.

Ultimately, a lot of professors and researchers may agree that it makes sense to compensate undergrads for hourly wage if possible (especially if they're putting in significant amount of work every week!), but a lot of times, it's really just the fact that the labs do not have the adequate funds to do so.


What to do with a very long research paper? Some background first.
I recently graduated (a couple years ago) with a Master's in applied mathematics. During grad school I began working on a paper, which I continued to work on in my free time post-graduation. A complete rough draft of the paper is nearly done and is ~115 pages in length. The work contained in the paper is completely original and solves an open problem (the problem is open but not anything necessarily revolutionary).
It was of my opinion that the paper contained publishable material.  To verify, I emailed a professor at my alma mater with a copy of the current draft. The professor did reply stating that the work was publishable and even suggested some Q1 and Q2 journals that might accept this type of work. While this was useful feedback, I received the reply in just a few days so I doubt the professor in question had the ability to read my paper in depth.
The problem:
I have published a couple papers before and thus have some experience in the world of academic publishing.  That said, the scale and complexity of this paper is something I have never dealt with before and so I am not comfortable with proceeding to publish it without help/guidance, i.e. on my own. In particular, I suspect I am going to have to divide the work into small portions and publish a few separate papers but don't know how to do this. Also, the paper is very dense and I am concerned that its "readability" is not exactly optimal. Given that I do not have a ton of experience and am essentially working in a vacuum, I also really desire to get feedback on the quality of my proofs, which I suspect are not as concise as they should be. My situation seems a little unusual and I suspect that the feedback I am looking for would typically be provided by an adviser in a PhD program (not claiming the paper is worthy of a PhD).

Given that I do not have an adviser that can provide detailed feedback, what should I do?

I thought about reaching out to professors/experts with relevant backgrounds and proposing to add them as coauthor in exchange for helping navigate the process of publishing my paper.  Is this an absurd proposition?  I wonder how such a request may be viewed. Are there any other routes one might suggest I consider?

Most journals will make any page limits public. Some will take long papers, but that assumes some significance to the result. The best way to find out is to make a submission to one that doesn't clearly state a shorter limit.
Navigating the publishing process isn't co-authorship and shouldn't be offered.
It might be necessary, however, to split the paper into two or more papers, assuming that there are intermediate results worth publishing independently. In applied math, it might be that some intermediate results have their own application. That might be a way to look at it. But the sum of several smaller papers can be expected to total more than the original.
If you make a submission, the editor and reviewers will comment on the writing and if it is "too dense" will suggest edits, though maybe not in specific terms. But you can decrease the density by increasing the length (more explanation) and this, again, leads to the possible necessity of splitting the paper.


How to ask rejected full-time candidates to apply to teach individual courses? My department has a number of courses we need covered by adjuncts in the next academic year. We were given permission to hire one (and only one) salaried adjunct and to cover the rest of the courses with per-course adjuncts. Salaried adjuncts receive benefits and are better paid than per-course adjuncts.

We received excellent candidates for the salaried position, only one of whom we can hire. After we close the search, (how) can I approach rejected candidates about teaching individual courses at the lower rate? Some career adjuncts have told me it would be offensive to offer a lower-paying and lower-status position to someone who applied for a better one, and I do not wish to offend anyone.

While the salaried position was publicly advertised, our institution does not advertise single courses. Furthermore, most of the candidates who applied for our salaried position were invited to by committee members or by our contacts, not because they were looking at ads.

How can I get the best outcome for our students and for teachers who would be willing to teach individual courses? I will continue to ask the administration for permission to hire a second salaried adjunct but do not expect to receive it. There is not much time to wait before starting our per-course search, as the current academic year is nearing its end (and our administration moves very slowly).

Update

Because each of the top two candidates seemed too good to reject, we proposed a second salaried position, which we made by cobbling together the remaining courses and one from a related program. To our surprise, the administration reversed its earlier decision to let us hire only one salaried adjunct, and we were able to make two salaried offers. While my question is moot, I will leave it up for future search chairs.

Don't ask them. It's a smack in the face. Advertise the position in the same place you advertised the salaried one; they will see it if they are still looking, and apply if they feel they need to.


Is the journal "The Winnower" scientifically trustworthy? The Winnower is a journal that offers a post-publication peer review, meaning that reviews of people can be written after online publication. There is no classical peer-review by a scientific committee prior to publication. If there are reviews to an article posted, we cannot know whether it is a "normal" person with no scientific background or a prof. Only upvotes and downvotes can be made.

After a long search in Google Scholar I found articles in this journal that were cited by other authors.

Is this journal trustworthy?

"Scientifically Trustworthy" is not something with a fixed meaning. But lets break down some things that it could mean:

Is this as good as a peer-reviewed journal?: If you believe in pre-publication peer review, the answer to this is clearly "No". The Winnower is an experiment, a philosophical stance, an an extreme exercise in transparency in the publishing of scholarly material.
Does it have the reputation of a good journal in X field: Again, probably not. I do know some people who have considered fairly extreme principled stands in favor of the same things The Winnower supports - open science and post-pub peer review, who look on it favorably, but I very much doubt it carries much weight in most fields - at least the ones I'm familiar with.
Does it count as a publication?: Maybe. This will very much depend on whose reading your CV, etc.
Is it predatory?: With it being free to post things, and a DOI being relatively cheap, I think it's hard to argue that The Winnower falls in the category of a predatory journal.

But mostly, I think the question betrays a misunderstanding of what The Winnower wants. The whole stance behind the site is that you shouldn't "trust" a journal because it's The Journal of Whatever. You should interrogate what's published there yourself, and the back and forth between reader and author should be made public.


How should one interpret a rejection on the grounds that a paper "has no added value to the existing state of the art"? I've got a rejection for my paper that was submitted to a high impact journal;
after waiting 6 weeks instead of 4 normally it was rejected with only one referee comment 4 lines:

  This study seems to be well done and the results are properly and concisely described. But, the paper is also nothing more than that...It is just the determination of some basic  properties and a comparison of the calculated and measured ones. As such, the paper presents no new insights, new methodologies, or whatsoever... Hence, it must be concluded that the current study applies current measurement protocols in a correct way, but has no added value to the existing state of the art. Therefore, although I have hardly any small remarks on the paper, it does not meet the standards of the journal.

How should one react to such a review? Submit to another journal? The paper is about new material, so I don't agree the referee about the fact it has no added value to the existing state of art!!!!

Journals and conferences tend to have a particular standard for novelty. Some (especially high-impact journals) have a very high bar for novelty, and will only accept papers that have exceptionally high significance and novelty. Others have a low standard for novelty; they'll accept most original papers, as long as they are within the scope of the journal and present solid work. And of course, there is a whole range in between.

From this review, it sounds like you "overshot" a little bit; that is, your paper (as submitted) was not up to this particular journal's standards for novelty. This isn't an accusation that you didn't submit new material; it just means that it didn't contribute enough new insight, new techniques, etc. to meet this journal's standards.

For example, it may be an application of an existing technique to a well-studied problem, that didn't offer any surprising findings - new, possibly valuable, but not very novel.

Your choices are then:

If possible: Make some major improvements to your paper. Highlight the novel and impactful aspects of it. Ask others in your field to read your revised paper and give you feedback on where they think it belongs. ("What journal would you expect to see this paper published in?") If they suggest that this revised manuscript is suitable for a high-impact journal, then go ahead and submit to such a journal.
Maybe you can't do much more than you already did, or the feedback you get suggests that this work isn't suitable for a journal with high standards for novelty. In that case, find a journal that publishes papers like yours, and submit your paper there.


Is it academic misconduct to post assignment solutions on public websites? I belong to Computer Science background, and most of my assignments are programming based. I usually use Github(private repos) to maintain assignments during the semester. Since I only have limited private repos, I usually make the code public once the semester is over.  In a few subjects, the assignments remain same over semesters but usually the instructor use tools to check for plagiarism from previous submitted assignments for the new submissions.

Seeing this question, Are there universities that consider it academic misconduct for students to publish material created by faculty?. I became curious that whether posting solutions to assignments of courses comes under academic misconduct or dishonesty ?

I became curious that whether posting solutions to assignments of courses comes under academic misconduct or dishonesty ?

Generally, I would say that putting material online is not academic misconduct or dishonest. What is important in the question that you have linked is that the "dishonest" part for the student is not that he wanted to take material from the web (this may or may not be against the rules, but it is by itself not dishonest), but that he intended to pretend that he solved the assignments independently. Strictly speaking, I see it not as your responsibility to make sure that students that later on take inspiration from (or outright copy) your solution declare that they did so.

Of course, from a practical point of view, your behaviour may still be somewhat unpopular with your professors, as it clearly opens up additional venues for cheating for the next batches of students. Personally, as a lecturer, I was never bothered, because I strongly believe that you always need to assume that the solutions to an assignment that you "recycle" from the previous year are "out there" in one way or another. However, I know that other lecturers feel differently, so if you want to piss nobody off, you should check with the professors beforehand. In any way you should make sure that you are not uploading material that you do not possess the copyright for (for instance, lecture material or assignment descriptions).


Is it okay to cite a paper from arXiv? I have found a very good overview of a topic and I want to cite it in the introduction of my paper. The writers are very well known people in the field. Is it then okay to cite the paper that is not published and is only available in arXiv?

There is nothing wrong with citing paper, reviews, etc., which have appeared on the arxiv (and only on the arxiv). Go ahead and cite the paper.
(If your paper gets accepted at a journal, they might ask you to update in case the paper has been published in a journal in the meantime, but in the fields where the arxiv is commonly used, journals and referees will have no issues with references to the arxiv.)


How to know a supervisor's working style before joining his group? I have recently joined a research group, where everything was excellent until two weeks of my joining.

My supervisor was very friendly when I met him for the first time at a conference. He was very interested in conducting work similar to mine in his lab. He showed interest in the subject and insisted that I make an application for a vacant position in his group.

He was very happy when I cleared all formalities (completed the application, was shortlisted, performed well in the interview and received an offer letter). After joining, I felt that I had joined a very good group that could help me enhance my research skills, as my colleagues are very friendly and helpful.

However, two weeks later, when I met my supervisor to discuss my work, he suddenly gave me many difficult tasks, many of which are very new to me and out of my skillset and told me that everything should be finished within another two weeks. He also told me that I should do everything by myself and never disturb my colleagues.

When I discussed this with my colleagues, they told me that he is very strict, not a good person, and he intends to dominate.

My question is how would I know about these things before joining his group?

For now, I can’t imagine how to continue to work in this group.

...never disturb to other colleagues. When I discussed with other colleagues...

Good for you!

  My question is how would I know about these things before joining his group?

By talking with other members of the group, away from faculty, during your interview visit (or some other time before accepting the offer).

Conversations with students outside the professor's group would also have been useful. Also with the clerical staff. Even if unhappy group members themselves are hesitant to talk with strangers, for fear of reprisal, people know who the unhappy research groups are.

If the professor didn't actively encourage such conversations, that's already a red flag.


What should I do if I'm trying to go into academic from a mostly non-academic background? I have finished an undergraduate programme in Biology, and went on to do a Masters in Global Health.

The problem is that I don't really have any articles of thesis to show. My undergraduate programme didn't have the option to do a thesis (I assumed all undergrad programmes did, so I didn't look into it before joining). I did a thesis for the Masters, but it wasn't that great. My supervisor at the time took on too many students and couldn't give us proper directions. I guess he assumed we knew what we were doing, but I hadn't had previous experience so I had no clue (he was also banned from being a supervisor for my course afterwards as a lot of students under him were failing due to lack of guidance). I actually finished it, passed and managed to graduate, but it is not good and I wouldn't submit it to a new study.

Needless it is to say, I also don't have any letters of recommendations. I'm quite introverted and, although there were a few tutors and lecturers who knew me, none did any major works with me and I didn't ask for letters of recommendation.

I'm currently working at a non-academic field, to do with Health Policies, but I want to go back to an academic field. I'm at a loss of what to do though.

I was wondering if it would be possible at all to do a PhD or research position (mostly because there are more paid positions or grants for these), or if it would be best for me to do another masters (only reason why I hesitate is that they are very costly). Or maybe I should approach some old teachers and ask for recommendation letters? I could ask some from my current manager at work, but then he would take it as me wanting to quit my job, not a good move until I do have something lined up.

Anybody has advice? I'm based in Europe, btw.

TLDR: have an undergrad and masters, but no (quality) thesis, and no letters of recommendation. Working a job, want to go to academia. Which routes could I take?

Generally, I do not believe that it will be problem that you do not have an extensive Master thesis. Most universities are likely to pay more attention to your grades and other documents such as letters of recommendation, motivation letters, etc.
So, the letters of recommendation could be a problem. I would advise reaching out to your old professors and tutors. Focus on those from whom you received good grades, briefly explain your reasons for reaching out now (in 1 or 2 sentences), and mention that you got a good grade in their course. At least in my experience, most professors/tutors will be willing to help. If it puts you in an uneasy position in your current job, then you should not ask your manager a letter of recommendation. This can easily backfire. However, it does not have to be your manager writing the letter. If possible try a more senior colleague whom you can trust.
If you apply for a Ph.D. position that is associated with a specific project, then make sure that you do your homework on the topic and show it in any application letter or motivation letter. The same holds for any position that associated a specific advisor from the beginning. In this make sure you know the advisor's work and research agenda.
If you feel not ready for a Ph.D. you could also consider programs that include coursework in the first year. Overall, do not overthink it, and do not forget that a Ph.D. program is there to teach you how to do research. In your application focus on conveying that you are able and willing to learn how to do that. Your professional experience could be a plus and more important than the perceived quality of your Master Thesis.


how to incorporate Virtual Reality in a business school setting? Business School faculty here. We have some budget to buy electronics. We're thinking of buying a Virtual Reality "thing" and using it somehow.

We can use it for pedagogy, or as a marketing tool, etc. (E.g., it could contain a demonstration of the advantages of a business degree, and we could leave it in our waiting room or take it with us to student recruitment events).

We can't figure out what to buy and how to use it.

Suggestions?

A Quick Thought

Using VR in the classroom is pretty difficult if not all students can benefit from the VR system simultaneously. If only one student could use it at a time, you'd have to schedule time for students to use it outside of class.

My Best Ideas

Perhaps your best bet is to create a brainstorming contest for your students and incentivize it with prizes. As business students, they'll benefit from coming up with ideas for a "client" and competing for funding.

You could just purchase the system and encourage students to create VR applications for it. Encourage them to network with people in other fields to see what their needs are and how those fields might be able to benefit from VR. Perhaps they could do some market research? If you're feeling ambitious, and your students are up to the challenge, have your students work with computer science students to make a new product. This may work better as an honor's project or a class project for an upper-level or specialized course.

You could also use existing VR software to show the students what is being done with VR in other fields in order to inspire creativity and innovation. Show them how it's being used in medicine (a tool for robotic surgery), engineering (design visualization/analysis), real estate and tourism (virtual tours), the military (drone control, virtual warfare, etc.) and so on. You could show them Google Expeditions.

If possible, try to build a course around it. Virtual reality is expected to become much bigger (citation needed), so there are tons of business opportunities. Use your VR system to give your students an advantage.

Other Thoughts

The primary strengths of most commercial VR systems today are:

3D visualization (seeing in 3D with the ability to view any angle)
Interactivity (the user can manipulate the virtual environment)

If you can leverage both of these things in the context of business, you're good to go.

Using it as a flashy public-relations stunt is a great idea, but try to effectively use the VR system in an interactive way. One possibility is using existing VR software to show the students what is being done with VR, and inspire innovation. Show them how it's being used in medicine (a tool for robotic surgery), engineering (design visualization/analysis), real estate and tourism (virtual tours), and so on.

I designed a VR system for an intro CS class once and came up with some demonstrations/applications for related fields. I'll try to do the same for a business school:

Practice navigating difficult situations (or job interviews!) in a simulated, repeatable and immersive way. (An example of this is the "training room" in Monsters, Inc.) If before you simulated these situations using people, you had have a few people play the part of a difficult boss, employee or client, and students' experiences would vary. A VR system could simulate it all in a repeatable way, and it would be easy to record and analyse how students react (their words, body language, etc.). This could be used as a training exercise or in evaluation. After the software was developed, you wouldn't need to hire people to "play the parts".
Marketing: Users walk down a city block and experience a number of signs, billboards, advertisements, etc. Use this to discuss what sorts of marketing was effective vs. intrusive.
Visualize data: certain logistical and/or financial data may benefit from immersive 3D visualization. It may help visualize how different fields/markets/regions are interconnected. Machine learning is huge, so helping students learn via visualization could be useful.
Programming is becoming more essential for all fields of study. You could develop a VR framework and offer a course where business students learn to program using this framework by creating their own content. They'll learn a programming language in an engaging way, and might create something new.


Would participating in student politics as a PhD student without an advisor create a bad impression? When I had joined the program last year, I was assigned an advisor who was the one I'd wanted to work with. However, due to things not working out (because she thinks I lack the background), I have had to start looking for a new one, and that's what I was working on all summer. I'm still in the process of finding someone by working on small projects with some faculty (in order to show them I can do the kind of research they do). This kind of puts me a bit behind my cohort. In my department, most PhD students have an advisor within two quarters. While a lot of other students I spoke with told me that it is perfectly normal to be finding an advisor a bit later than year 1, I'm very much embarrassed about being at this stage.

So anyway, my department's academic advisor just sent out an email saying she needed someone to take up the role of President of the grad student organization of the department, and I really want to go for it. In the past, I've enjoyed working with people and organizing stuff; I really enjoy talking to people and putting forward people's problems and finding solutions to them, especially the seemingly small ones that actually do make a difference.

My question is, would faculty members consider it strange on my part if I ended up as President when I don't even have an advisor and a research project going for me? I mean, would it look like I don't have my priorities set straight? I wouldn't want to do it if there's even the slightest chance of it creating a bad impression.

It very much depends on the quality of your PhD work. If that looks good, it can be a boost to your CV. However, if your work is middling, this may appear like escapism (or perhaps a political career is what you should pursue instead of a PhD).

This is always, as @user3209815 said, your decision. What is unlikely to work well is to take up this job and getting even further behind on your PhD work.


Usage of a web application that I sold for an academic project: Copyright issues? I am currently a master's student and really glad that I learned almost everything about plagiarism prior to my master's thesis, I really want it to be perfect.

Anyway, I have an issue that has been lurking around my mind for a while, it wasn't a big deal before but I am currently making a huge moral deal out of it to the point of not deserving my BBA!

It is regarding my senior (or BBA graduation) project, I used to be a web developer well before taking any university courses, so when the time came for the senior projects, I was like: "Hey, I have that excellent web application (I worked on its codes for a month!)  which I developed and sold 2 years before to a local organization, why not use it for the senior project?". I earned "very good" (a grade between 14 and 16 over 20) on it.

Did I infringe any copyright here since I already sold the web application to another party? Back then, I thought of this and since I wasn't a perfectionist, it was okay for me since I am ONLY using it for an academic (and not a financial) purpose. To clarify, it went like this: I developed the web application for the other party, they paid for it, I taught them how to use the web application and that's it, I never gave them the source code as I remember (this was 6 years ago). I discovered a few months later that they aren't using it anymore and went for another web application by another developer. One of the answers makes sense, I made the source code available for public (other students) when I submitted it for my graduation project, I feel guilty now that I did not think of this in this sense back then. What can I do to for making up? Does this affect, in any way, my credibility of holding this BBA?

After your clarifications, I don't see that from the point of view of the company, you did anything wrong. Since you sold them the application and not the source code and since you didn't transfer your copyrights to them, or signed any contract saying you will not resell/reuse the app, there is no issue.

From the point of view of your university, it really depends. You reused previous work for your project and you will find people arguing on both sides of whether that's ethical (check Is reusing old code for a new assignment considered self plagiarism? How to protect yourself if you consider it to be, and a group partner does not?). In my opinion, it is not the best thing you can do because you are supposed to learn something new in your master thesis, but personally I don't find it unethical.

Moreover, your supervisor(s) must have realized it when you showed up with a finished/polished product, with a designer on the acknowledgments and without asking him/her any questions on how to get there. If he/she didn't realize, then he/she didn't really care.

If this is really eating you up, you can have someone else (maybe a current student at the same institute) send an email to your past supervisor and asking if it's OK to use material from previous work in ones master thesis. In any case, don't beat up yourself.


Using downloaded NES/SNES ROM files for research work The only official statement for nintendo is their legal terms page, which prohibits from anyone using downloaded ROM files.
Scenario -

If someone play downloaded ROM file (any ROM file will serve the purpose) on FCEUX emulator on PC. The ROM file remains intact and will not be changed. Only the game will be played and in-game variables will be change via emulator.

The reason someone can use NES/SNES games, is the availability of many diverse genres within the same platform.

Is there any fair use policy to use proprietary material for academic research. There are some YouTube  videos and some projects on hackster.io, where people have used AI (Artificial Intelligence) to play Super Mario and Tetris in emulator. There was a research paper on AI playing tetris too. (A simple google search reveals lot of published papers with Super Mario and Tetris).

The for specifying any jurisdiction is to have a blanket protection to anyone in the world using it for academic and research work.

What is legal, and legally enforceable, varies from place to place - especially for things like scientific study. But there is an additional ethical and respect issue.

I would suggest that you contact them with your research proposal. As long as it doesn't have competitiveness issues, or encourage activity that they frown on, they might actually support you. Of course it might also set them against you depending on what you want to do, but it is worth considering, at least.


Short Research Postgraduate Courses Are there any mathematics or physics postgraduate courses (not taught courses) in the UK where you can continue a piece of research work you did whilst an undergrad? So you effectively do a project that maybe lasts a year(ish) which is productive but you would not do it for 3 years+ and receive a PhD?

In the UK it is possible to apply for an MPhil (Masters of Philosophy) degree (which is essentially a mini-PhD) or alternatively an MRes (Masters by Research) degree which is generally shorter.

A caveat: the MPhil may be interpreted as a botched PhD as the degree is often awarded to PhD candidates who don't cut the mustard or drop out. Don't let that put you off though.


Better to give a poor/unfinished talk at a conference or cancel it? Here's my dilemma. I met a post-doc at a conference a while back, and told him about the project I was working on at the time, and he subsequently invited me to give a talk in a session at an upcoming (next week) conference.  I accepted, since it was my first invitation to speak at a conference, and overall I was/am excited at this prospect, and at the prospect of collaborating with him in the future. However for various reasons (mostly time commitment on my part), this particular project - which is really a side-project to my main dissertation work - hasn't panned out like I hoped it would when I accepted the talk.  Needless to say, I don't feel confident that my talk will make a good contribution to the session, since my results are very lack-luster and my expertise in other aspects isn't enough to make up for this.  Since I'm a PhD student and this is a side project, I don't have old work to "fall back on" and my advisor is impartial.

So which is better: cancel the talk and apologize to the organizer profusely, perhaps suggesting a future collaboration, or suck it up and give a woefully under prepared talk, risking embarrassment to myself?  I'm leaning towards cancelling, because I feel like a poor talk makes me look bad to everyone who listens, while cancelling only makes me look bad to the session organizer.

When this happens to me, I just describe it as "work in progress" or a "research attempt" and present what I can with what I've got.  What's wrong with that?  That's how research works.

"...hasn't panned out like I hoped it would when I accepted the talk."  You can say this during your talk, and explain why it didn't pan out, and ask the audience if they can help.  Maybe someone in the audience (your next co-author perhaps?) knows how to proceed, and has the expertise you're lacking.  If nobody can help, maybe that's an indication that there is an obstacle (which is important to know).

You've said you're a PhD student, without expertise in the side-topic.  Feel free to mention it in your talk "I'm a PhD student in [some subject] at [some university] under [someone]."

You said a post-doc invited you to give a talk (which I expect is not in the sense of an "invited speaker"), who presumably knows you're an early PhD student, and presumably knows what early PhD student talks are sometimes like.  My suspicion is that this question is more about inexperience and lack of confidence than an inability to give a reasonable talk due to the work being unfinished.


Variance in academic fecundity during and after graduate school Some people used to be prolific when they were working on their PhDs, but years after graduation, they hardly published a single paper. Why?

Also, some faculty members published great papers while working on their PhDs that received dozens of citations, but few years later and after they started leading their own research, most of their published work barely got any citation. How come?

I'm sure there are more reasons, but here are two positive reasons.

Some people get a job that stresses teaching more than research and so they put their focus there. It can be a rewarding life, actually. Lots of teaching and a bit of research. Maybe less stress. Of course this is an unlikely scenario at an R1 university.

Some people, after gaining tenure and leading a fairly large group of graduate students in a lab or research group, are willing to let the students gain the glory and don't add themselves as co-author, even though it might be appropriate. This isn't a good path before tenure, but can be afterwards. So they are doing research but, by feeding ideas to them, the students gain the credit for it.


Asking a High School Teacher for a Letter of Recommendation I am an undergraduate senior applying to graduate programs in Computer Science (with math-y specialties, such as Machine Learning and Data Science), and am trying to figure out who the best people to ask for recommendations are. I've already asked a professor whose class I did well in and tutored for, and a former manager of mine who has a PhD in the same field. As for my third one, I'm thinking about two options:

a) My high school math team coach: Math Team was my life back in high school, and I feel that my coach is one of the few people who truly knows how much I love math and learning in general. In addition, he also has a PhD in the field (in fact, he and my former manager did their PhDs together!). The only downside to this that I can see is that he is not familiar with my work in college, but I think the fact that he knows academia and my own academic potential makes up for that. Unfortunately, I have read that recommendations from high school teachers are generally looked down upon, so I don't know how great that would be.

b) My current Machine Learning professor: Machine Learning is what I really want to do, and a recommendation for someone who actively teaches it and is involved in the field would be great. However, I am worried that since the semester is not over yet, he may not have an accurate feel for my academic ability (although I have been doing well in the class so far). Additionally, I do not know him very well - I have been talking to him a little bit about grad school and advice for a career in ML in general, but I don't know if that is enough for him to write a strong recommendation with.

Given this background, which recommendation do you think would be stronger?

Don't ask the high school teacher unless that's the only way you can get an enthusiastic letter.  First, asking someone from high school looks like an admission of weakness or decline, like you haven't impressed anyone in college as much as you did in high school, and that's not a good message to send.  Second, a high school teacher will have less perspective on how you compare with undergraduate and graduate students, which is the primary issue.  Finally, it's really hard to judge graduate school potential on the basis of high school performance.  For example, the math team experience you mention can be misleading.  Contest problems differ systematically from research in that they are guaranteed to have short, elegant solutions and they have strict limitations on what sort of background might be required.  These constraints are often comforting to students, and I've known people who loved math contests and were great at them but didn't enjoy or weren't particularly successful at research.

I'd recommend talking with your machine learning professor to see whether he thinks he's in a position to write a compelling letter.  If so, then go with that.  If he is reluctant, then you should choose someone else.  That could include the high school teacher if necessary (better a recommendation from a high school teacher than from someone unsupportive), or other options you haven't mentioned.


Is there anything that has been tried to stop publication shopping I find it very annoying as a reviewer when I get asked to review a paper several times as it gets submitted to different journals/conferences or, worse still, I help send it to the reject pile only to have it published elsewhere with my comments ignored. I definitely get the impression that a small minority of authors "shop" their papers around too much, which wastes a lot of the community's time. Often these papers are completely unpublishable, but sometimes it seems the authors are just going down some list until they reach the appropriate "level", rather than submitting appropriately in the first place.

I often devise hypothetical schemes to prevent this. For example:

Require authors to pay to submit.
Require authors to disclose the submission history their article.
Have journals/conferences publish a list of rejected articles.
Calculate an acceptance ratio for authors, along the same lines as bibliometrics.
Somehow publish rejected articles too, so that they cannot be published elsewhere. E.g., have a journal that accepts nearly 100% of submissions, but includes a review or rating with each article, so readers know which ones are the good articles.

Of course, these are just wild ideas, many of which are impractical and would greatly annoy authors.
I'm curious to know if any such schemes have actually been tried and, if so, whether they seem to have worked. Surely, in some far-flung corner of academia, one of these ideas has been tried.

Question: Are there systems that have been tried by journals/conferences to disincentivize authors from submitting their articles to too many journals/conferences? If so, did they work?

I am only aware of one experiment along these lines: ICLR - the International Conference on Learning Representations. All submissions and all reviews are made public and they stay online even if they were rejected. I don't know what effect this system has had. I would like to hear other examples and also know if there is any evidence regarding the effect of such policies.

A version of your suggestion 1. is implemented in my academic field (mathematics).

In mathematics authors usually pay dearly to submit to any particular journal, not in money but in time. Namely, an unacknowledged but hard to dispute stage of the refereeing process in mathematics is the part where the referee lets the submission sit on their shelf for N months.  It would be interesting to track the dependence of N on various factors, but based on my own experiences as an author (and okay, yes, as a referee!) I believe the median value of N to be about three months, with a higher mean.  Especially, when I submit a paper to a large range of reputable journals in my field, I feel that I am incurring a risk -- small, but not negligible; let's say 3-5% -- that the referee will wait a year or so before rejecting the paper with a wholly superficial accompanying report (say, one paragraph that does not make specific reference to anything in the paper past the introduction).

This makes it rather impractical to shop a mathematics paper around to a large number of journals at about the right level.  (If you send a less than excellent paper to a truly excellent mathematics journal, the chances are good that it gets bounced back to you quite quickly.  I have heard stories of the absolute top journals in mathematics keeping a paper for a year or more and then responding negatively...but then I have also heard of them doing this and then accepting papers that I would have guessed they would reject.)  This certainly works for me: I have submitted over 50 distinct math papers for publication.  Most often I step down in quality after the first rejection and always after the second rejection.  For me, having three or four journals consider the same paper feels like quite an ordeal....because it is likely spread out over several years!

Maybe this sounds sarcastic.  It is not intended to be.  If anything, it is a relief to think that there might be some good effect of the current endemic slowness of mathematical refereeing.  Because we have a thriving preprint culture, it is hard to argue that slow publication has a significant effect on the intellectual progress of the field.  If only the slowness were equidistributed, I think there would be little to complain about.  (But it isn't, and I suspect that my suffering is as nothing compared to that of some of my junior colleagues...In fact, just now I realize that while for many years now my papers have been treated better by top journals whether they take them or not, at the beginning of my career I had several papers languish in top journals for a really long time.  The rich should have to pay more, not less.)


Can most functions of universities be categorized as teaching, research and service? I am writing a research proposal and I plan to approach it by dividing the most important functions of university into three categories--teaching, research and service.

Teaching will include all forms of education afforded to students.
Research broadly refers to all attempts at generating new knowledge.
Service refer to service to the monarchy, state, the public and in some situations, to the students as customers.

Do these categories sufficiently cover most functions of a university? Is there anything important that I could not include in these categories?

Universities, and their students, do a lot of community service. While this might fall under your service category, I wouldn't describe it as service directly tied to the monarchy, state or "public".

At a minimum I think your list is missing

Social: At the undergraduate level many universities actively promote social interactions via greek life which I would not describe as teaching, research, or service. Even at the graduate student level the social networking that students engage in is a critical part of university life.
Sports: Many universities, especially in the US, also stress sports.
Fund Raising: Unfortunately a large portion, at least in the US, of the university function is to promote the university by raising funds


Is it appropriate to compare students to other successful students in a letter of recomendation? Say you are writing a letter of recommendation for a freshman student of yours who is applying for an undergraduate research position in a field very different from yours. You can of course say some things about how well she did in your class. However, you had a student that this person reminds you of who went on to do great undergraduate research in the exact specialized field that she is applying for, getting two first author publications. Would it be inappropriate to spend a paragraph comparing the two students and how that in your class they shared all of these great qualities that you think were the driving force for the previous student doing well as a researcher. This seems like it may be a bit unorthodox, is it advantageous or perhaps utterly inappropriate to compare students like this? I'm split, ideally I should just be focused on her but the fact that she reminds me of this student is really the most compelling argument I think I can make.

This makes the letter of recommendation more personal and shows, you really want to support her. It makes a difference to all the other "this student has good grades and is always on time"-letters. So go ahead!


Can I use images from an arxiv paper (and some others) in my undergrad thesis? I want to use images (in their unaltered form) from some arXiv papers (and some other venues) in my undergraduate thesis.

For instance, here are the papers from which I'm considering using images:

From Arxiv

Dropout
Resnets
"Why does deep learning works so well?"
"Visualizing and understanding Convolutional Networks"
Image Denoising with Kernels Based on Natural Image Relations

Not from Arxiv

ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

I am citing the papers from which I am taking the images, but I'm not sure if citing these images is sufficient, is bad practice, etc.

There are at least four things to consider:

Is it allowed by academic ethics?
Yes, if you cite appropriately and make it clear where the image came from.

Is it allowed by copyright law?
Maybe.  You'll have to look at the license that the arXiv paper is released under.  If it is copyrighted and not under a license that allows reproduction, you may have to get permission from the copyright holder (could be the author, or a commercial publisher who published the paper.)  On the other hand, there could be fair-use laws in your jurisdiction that allow it; see  Academic fair use and using publication images in your thesis.  But that question is not strictly on-topic for this site, since it's more about law than academia.

Is it acceptable under your university's thesis regulations?
You'll have to read them.

Is it acceptable to your advisor?
Ask him or her.  Excessive use of material from outside sources, even if properly cited and permitted by copyright, may suggest that your thesis does not contain enough original work to merit a passing grade.


Does it have any value getting a PhD in engineering after 45? I am talking about academia and research.

Suppose, a person doesn't have either professional or academic credentials or experiences. Suddenly he decides to study engineering because he wants to change his stagnation both financially and socially. So, he enrolls in BSc in an engineering program at the age of 40. He completes his BSc at the age of 44, completes his MSc at the age of 45-47, and then completes his Ph.D. in engineering at the age of 49-55.

Does this Ph.D. degree have any material value for this person?

There are multiple factors to think about.

Firstly, this person never had any corporate and academia related job experience. It is hard to believe that he would be able to get along with these work environments. It is generally hard to mould someone's brain and personality at the age of 40+. So, I believe that he will find hard-times finding a job.

Secondly, most people are forced to retire at the age of 65-68. If he starts his job at 49-55, he has only 16-13 years of his life left for earning money. The amount he earns with his Ph.D. is highly unlikely to compensate for the earnings he sacrificed while getting his degrees.

So, my view would be: this person is not gaining much with his Ph.D.

What do you think?

You can answer this with salary survey data.  Based on the data, it would be reasonable to assume a CS academic would earn $95,000/year a few years after their PhD.  This would rapidly make up for any lost earnings from not driving a taxi during a PhD, so we can determine that the answer is yes without figuring out the taxi driver's earnings or the PhD stipend.


Faculty job search (one year from graduation/starting postdoc) I am reaching out to get a piece of friendly advice on the search process for a faculty job worldwide.

I was awarded a PhD in Pure Mathematics from a Russel Group university in July 2018. I started a postdoc during my PhD, and it is has been now one year and a month of my postdoc. I wrote the grant for my postdoc and my doctoral advisor secured the funding.
My research interests are in analysis on quantum groups and noncommutative spaces, contractions of Lie groups, geometric quantisation.
I have 12 preprints and nine are published, and more are coming. There are 48 citations of my papers in Google Scholar.

I have put my best efforts in the application materials.
At the moment, I have applied for 145 faculty jobs mainly in the USA (  both tenure-track and non-tenure-track).
My references for the applications are the tenured recognised professors and heads of the departments in Europe.
Could anyone in the community share a piece of friendly advice on what I might be doing wrong?

My sole aim is to improve and suit the faculty search.
Unfortunately, I have not been given any constructive feedback so far (cold, formal e-mails mostly).

The time scale is from mid-November 2018 - up until now.
I followed up with 6-8 e-mails and received cold written official rejection e-mails (eight overall).  The rest are keeping silence. I have not had any interviews yet.

Many thanks to everyone who replied!

You are not doing anything wrong, at least not more wrong than many of us here.

One cay say that is is wrong that research and education are so under-funded and under-appreciated in modern society.
One can say that it is wrong that academia sometimes is such an unwelcoming and tough place. Providing zero feedback to unsuccessful candidates is a norm in academia, but would not be appropriate in IT industry sector, for example. This is extremely discouraging and damaging for people at the start of their careers. Another example is visa fees, which would be compensated in industry, but usually not compensated by universities, making international  scientists essentially to pay for the privilege of working at a university in a first-world country. This is wrong, but academia goes away with it as there are always enough people who wants the job bad enough.
One can say that over-production of PhDs, driven by managerial approach to tenure and promotion in academia, is wrong, as it makes young people to spend many years and a lot of money pursuing something which eventually may not increase their chances for successful employment, but instead make them overqualified and unemployable in many "real-world" jobs.

I wish you good luck with your job search and future career.


Ask how to pronounce advisor's last name? I am an undergraduate working with an advisor, but I do not know how to pronounce his/her last name. I have talked with several different people who work in the department, and have heard the name pronounced several different ways.

Is there a polite way of asking an advisor how to pronounce his/her last name?

By the way, I have heard your last name pronounced a few different ways and I want to make sure I get it right. Can you teach me the correct way to pronounce it?


Do you include papers that you contributed to but weren't cited as an author in on your CV? I'm an undergraduate and about to apply to graduate school. I did summer research that contributed to a paper and was asked to extend my time there to write the publication but could not stay due to academic reasons. Because I contributed to it, is it appropriate to include it on my CV?

I had a similar situation, there were a few papers I assisted with as an undergraduate where I was listed in the acknowledgements but wasn't listed as an author. Generally, people don't list those on their CV, simply because it will look odd... you'll get a lot of people asking, "why are you listing this if your name isn't on it?"

That said, since it's your CV, you can list anything you want with the proper commentary. You may consider listing it as:

  <Citation goes here>

  Note: I am listed in the acknowledgements section for this paper, as I assisted extensively with data preparation and analysis.

Do realize that the fact that your name isn't on the paper will significantly decrease it's value in your promoting yourself. The more I think about it, it's probably a bad idea to list it... I would recommend just listing the work you did in the appropriate section on your CV and leave the paper out.


Can I submit two papers to the same conference event as me the first author? I have two studies that are not related to each other but in the same domain (Social Media Analysis) and I already submitted one of them to a conference as my name the main author.

-Can I submit the second paper where I am also the main author to the same conference event? I have read the conferance regulation but did not find any related information for such an issue.

EDIT: I also tried to contact them, but since two weeks, still no answer and the deadline is within 2 days. And normally if it ok to submit two papers, will I be having two-time slot for the presentation, or will it be one slot to manage both?

Yes, unless the conference regulation specifies a different policy, it's fully OK to submit multiple papers as main author to the same conference.


Googling my name reveals silly things from when I was younger. I am embarassed. How will this affect me in my future academic career? I am a masters student at one of the top two universities in the UK and will be applying for PhD positions soon. When I google my (unique) name, the first few results are what you'd expect, my LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and some university web pages.

However if you keep scrolling and go through the pages of Google's search results, you see some silly forum posts from when I was 12-14 years old, and some poorly written Yahoo Answers questions from the same time. I am now 22 so this was almost 10 years ago.

I know it's stupid but when I was that age no one really taught me how to use the internet properly and so ended up using my full name in a number of places.

I've not written anything offensive and my name isn't on anything objectively bad, but it's just childish silliness (memes, poorly written stories, Yahoo Answers nonsense, and just weird forum posts) and I'm a bit embarrassed to be honest. I feel like as I continue to progress academically, it will become more likely that people will Google me and see all this which might make it likely that I will be judged. Again, it's nothing offensive or objectionable just old young teenager stuff. Benign but embarrassing.

Should I just ignore it and hope that as my career develops these old results get pushed further back in Google's search results? Should I try to remove this stuff from the internet (very difficult as I have lost all these old accounts)?

The stuff I posted back then has little to nothing to do with who I am now professionally, and I would hate for people to think it is. Having a unique name does seem like a curse sometimes and I have made it worse by being extra foolish when I was young.

I'm deeply involved in web technologies, including search results. The simplest and fastest way to solve this problem is to add other search results. The more "legitimate" and positive results found, the less likely the others will be seen. There are numerous factors in raising search results, but still:

Create another Stack Exchange account with your name and use it.
Create social media accounts with your name.
Join groups and use your real names (in addition to pseudonyms).
Create a Disqus account with your name.

You don't need to make many posts on each site, but place professionally enhancing content there.

If you really want to spend time with this - open other accounts with simple variations of your name thus creating even more false results.

A little work every day and soon you'll have 100s if not 1000s of positive results that will appear above the other silliness.


How many different(but overlapping) master degree can one have? Take an example, if I have a master in mathematical physics, can I have master of physics or master in mathematics?
To make the the question more applicable to other, the question is, how many different master one could have, with the contents of the degree highly overlapping?
(Another example is master in information engineering and master of information science, etc)

There are no regulations preventing you from having as many as you like. But admissions committees will use the fact that you have a related degree and possibly downgrade the application so that the slot can be given to someone else. That isn't guaranteed, of course.
But at a certain point one wonders why you would want to do this. Lifelong perpetual students aren't looked at especially favorably. Especially when institutions are government funded to some extent.
And, if you want to continue your education, why not consider a doctorate in a related field instead. There is little benefit (some) if your CV shows multiple masters.
An exception might be if you were interested in industry and one of the masters program was very narrow and applied to the industry sector you want to work in.


What is a research assistant in the Australian system? I've noticed postings for positions with the title “research assistant” from Australian universities. They require a PhD and are often (or exclusively) one-year contracts. Are these positions akin to anything in the US system? Are they more of a trainee position (like a postdoc)? Or is it more of a senior position within an established lab (like a research assistant professor)? Is it something else?

The one-year contracts suggest that they might be soft money positions. Are they typically renewed or transformed into more permanent positions?

Job advertisements in Australia invariably list a level.  If it says "Level A Academic" it is a postdoc.  If it says "HEW Level Something" then it is not a postdoc.  Consult the unversity's Enterprise Agreement for detailed definitions of the levels.  An enterprise agreement is the same as a collective bargaining agreement.  Note that starting pay for Level A is usually much higher if you hold a PhD.

http://www.nteu.org.au/rights/agreements


Is the degree conferral date the same as the completion of degree requirements date? I am an MSc student in Greece, and this year I am applying  to PhD programs in US universities. My question is about my BSc degree.
Most universities require a conferral date as well as a start and an end date.
The start date is the date I was registered.
The end date is Jan 2020.
Now, my BSc transcripts state that I have completed my studies but I have not attended the graduation ceremony yet. The examination period (Jan 2020) during which I completed them is also mentioned. Furthermore, the date the last exam result was announced is mentioned as well - that is, the last course grade (that result was announced after January). Finally, I don't have the degree certificate yet, because no graduation ceremonies have taken place due to COVID-19.
Is completing my studies equivalent to being a graduate or to being conferred/awarded a degree?
I am worried that if I state that I have earned my degree, I will be required to provide the degree certificate (which I don't have yet) and that my transcripts won't be enough. Should I state that I am expected to earn a degree and leave the expected conferral date blank, or that I have indeed earned my degree, and give the date I fulfilled the requirements as the conferral date?

Is the degree conferral date the same as the completion of degree requirements date?

No, not necessarily. Most schools award degrees once per term (whether that's semester, or quarter). So if your last final was on the 8th, you would have received your degree on the same day as your friend whose last final was on the 10th.

Is completing my studies equivalent to being a graduate or to being conferred/awarded a degree?

Again, not necessarily. In most places, you have to "apply" to graduate or similar, which as I mentioned in the comments is the formal check you completed the requirements. This means "completing" your studies doesn't mean anything until you've asked the university "I've done all these courses, can I have my degree now?"
For example, you could have done enough coursework to earn two separate degrees, but if you only apply for one, you only get one.
This very well could be different in some places (or for other types of degree). But it is certainly not a rule to rely on.

I am worried that if I state that I have earned my degree, I will be required to provide the degree certificate (which I don't have yet) and that my transcripts won't be enough.

Nobody needs the certificate in the US, the (sealed, official) transcript will tell them whether you have a degree. If that doesn't say you have a degree, then they won't ask for a certificate, they will think you don't have a degree.
It sounds like there is a possibility you weren't conferred with your degree, because of COVID. You will have to follow up with your university to verify.


How can an undergraduate Computer Engineer start making publications before his Thesis? I am interested in getting involved with research, but I don't know exactly how or what I should be doing to achieve that.

What would be the best moves to do towards the campus, teachers and/or other groups inside the university?
Are there other ways of getting started?
What should I be doing to get noticed?

Thanks in advance for your responses.

Take classes from professors you'd like to do research with. Do really well. Ask good questions. Participate. Go by office hours and talk to the prof. Show interest. Try to read and understand their work. But don't be so persistent that you become annoying. You're looking for a personal fit as well as demonstrating your interest.


When to Allow Makeup Exams I have a classroom (as opposed to online) course for which I set the date of the first exam about a week before the last date a student can withdraw without penalty, such that I can have grades returned before the withdrawal date.  The date was in the syllabus, released on the first day of classes.  A student has asked to take a makeup exam at a later date or to take the exam remotely.  I generally allow makeup exams when there exigent reasons, and in the United States some conditions, such as military deployment, impose a legal obligation to accommodate the student. So, I asked why.

The student replied that he would be "on vacation" in connection with a later work-related trip.  In other words, his job is sending him someplace nice and he wants to go early to allow some play time with the travel paid by the job.

My students, who think I am Darth Vader, would never believe it, but I am torn about this request.  The university's rules tell me when I must allow a make-up exam, not when I may.  I have decided that if I do allow such an exam, it will be before, not after the scheduled time.  Allowing a makeup exam will, as usual I think, be modestly inconvenient for me.  I believe I need to consider the appearance of fairness to the other students, and a precedent I may set that would affect other faculty.

Are there general rules or best practices about when professors should/would allow makeup exams?  What should one do in the case where a student's absence is clearly voluntary, but which is a "nice" opportunity for the student?

One good way to approach this kind of thing is to state a policy in your syllabus. For instance, you could have:

  Make-up exams will be given only in case of an emergency or unavoidable problems such as an illness requiring hospitalization. You must communicate with me as early as possible about the problem.

Under this policy, you would just tell the student no in this situation. Or you could craft a policy that does allow a make-up exam in this situation.

The advantage of having it spelled out in your syllabus is that it's communicated clearly, it's clear why you're making the decision you're making, and administrators will support you in your decision.

Personally, I just say no in the kind of situation you're describing. The student is making a commitment by taking the course, and the nature of the commitment was made clear from the start in the syllabus. It's quite a bit of extra work for me to write a different exam for one student and make arrangements for it to be proctored. When you're a college student, it's simply not reasonable to expect to have a week off from school with no consequences. Lots of other students would like to have a week off with no consequences.


Dropping out of a master's program to pursue a PhD This might be a bit of a weird question, but I'm wondering if anyone's been in similar shoes or knows about this.
I'm a master's student who applied for PhD programs this round. I didn't think I was going to get in anywhere and my advisor suggested the idea of extending my master's by one semester and applying again.
It turns out that I recently got contacted by a POI who I've been really keen working with. The problem is that this contact was much later than the period for students to apply for their thesis defense, which I didn't apply for because I was pretty set on the idea of staying one more semester.
I'd really like to pursue a PhD under this professor but my graduation schedule is a little tangled. Some options I have are to discuss the possibility of deferral, but I'm wondering about the hypothetical option of dropping out of my master's program completely and going ahead with the PhD starting from this fall semester. Is this scenario unheard of? Is it even typically allowed?
Thanks for any opinions/feedback.

When I was an undergrad I had no idea how the machine I was scuttling about in worked.
This was brought to mind by

Is it even typically allowed?

Here's the thing. Masters and PhD students are an asset. Somebody wants you to study with them as much as you want a higher degree. People start PhD programs at all kinds of weird times, even when there's a "normal" intake period. The rules to which you allude are practices that are followed to make administration easy. They are not inviolable Laws.
So my advice is to talk to the academics involved. First, your current advisor, then the other person. While you should take care to avoid being seen as disloyal, those people will eventually find out anyway. So try to get them onside from the start.
It's easy to make assumptions about what is or is not possible, to your detriment. So don't assume. Talk.
And that machine? It's made of people. Good luck.


Should I cancel an interview if I already have a preferable offer? I've been on the US tenure-track job market. I finally got an offer
(let's call it A) that I am happy with.

However, I have another interview scheduled (let's call it B). I think
it is unlikely that I would prefer B over A. They are comparable in
terms of academic strength, but there are strong non-academic reasons
to prefer A.

I'm wondering if I should cancel my interview at B. On one hand, I
feel like I should go ahead with the planned interview and it would be
rude to cancel. On the other hand, it's potentially a waste of time
(also rude) given that I am unlikely to take up a potential offer from
them.

Of course, it's theoretically possible for me to pick B over A. For
example, if the details of the offer from A aren't good (still waiting
for those) and B really impresses me. But it seems unlikely given what
I know.

What is the best course of action? If I do decide to cancel, how do I
go about cancelling? What reason do I give?

I am answering based on a subtle but important point in your question. If I am misinterpreting, please let me know and I'll edit or remove my answer. You said:

  I finally got an offer (let's call it A) that I am happy with

but you also said,

  For example, if the details of the offer from A aren't good (still waiting for those)

To me, it sounds like you don't yet actually have an actual offer in the sense of a binding, written document - maybe it was a verbal offer? At any rate, you're admitting you don't yet have enough details to make a decision about offer A.

If that is true, I would absolutely continue pursuing option B, until such a time as you get the details (preferably written) from A that allow you to decide.

I do agree with the other answers that it would be more rude to waste their time in an interview if you already have an offer you like (versus being rude by declining the interview) but I think it is critically important to be clear with yourself about whether or not you do actually have an actual offer from A or just a verbal discussion that's gotten you excited about a potential offer you may or may not get in the near future. You have a responsibility to B to decline their interview and let them know you have another offer you're taking but you also have a responsibility to yourself to make sure you do have an official offer with terms you can agree to from A. It would be a huge shame to cancel your interview with B only to discover A retracted their offer, changed the details, or gave you additional info you were unhappy with.


Listing expected graduation GPA along with current GPA for grad admission of senior undergraduate I am a senior undegraduate CS student who is interested in applying for a good grad school (current GPA 3.76/4.00, distinguished in engineering competitions, written a lot of code, has 2 papers - one before university and is currently working on multiple research projects).

I am now filling in the application form of some particularly demanding grad schools (e.g. Stanford, MIT) and I am faced with the following dilemma:

I have some remaining courses to pass (since I have not completed the 10 semesters that are required) until the end of this year. Moreover, I have not defended my thesis yet (although I have almost completed it).
My thesis counts for 20% of the grade (and it is almost impossible to get a grade different than 4.0/4.0) and all the courses (passed and ongoing) count for the rest 80%. Having this in mind and being optimistic enough, I suspect that my finishing grade will be about 3.8/4.0.

I am finalizing my SOP and CV and I am faced with the following question:

  Should I list my expectation for a finishing grade along with the current GPA that is on my official transcript?

My problem is that on the one side, I feel not being fair to myself since it is a feasible goal and the overall work I have done is not directly depicted in my current transcript. On the other, I am afraid that I may get a conditional offer like "maximize your graduation GPA" and in a semester which I am currently doing research and, personally, optimizing course grades is my primary objective.

I would like to hear advice, especially incidents of (if they exist) of such offers, as well as experience from other students who were in this quandary.
Would that really count given my academic profile?

First the difference between a GPA of 3.76 and 3.8 doesn't seem very big or relevant to me. Beyond that, in general I would not put the two numbers in the application. Put the GPA of your already graded courses, so the 3.76 and write next to it that it is preliminary and in particular does not contain your thesis grade yet, which accounts for 20% of the total grade. With that information anyone reading your application can make their own estimate of what your final GPA will be.


Post-doc application: references not requested? I have seen that some post-doc ads (in the US) do not explicitly ask for contact details of references. This is more or less common on LinkedIn, even for academic post-docs.

Is it ok to not provide those contact details initially, and just send a cover letter with the standard "please do not hesitate to contact me for additional information"? Or will it harm the application?

If they do not request references, you do not need to provide them. In that case, they may still ask for your references later if they need them (for example, if you are selected for an interview).

It is always better to mention the names of people who can provide references in your CV. But I assume that you do not have good references since you are asking that question. If you have some good references from top researchers in your field, it is better to mention them in your CV. It would make your CV look better perhaps. If you do not have good references, and do not want to mention them, then it is ok. But expect that they may ask for your references later.


Can American students do research in Europe with only a bachelor's degree? It's not clear to me, looking over all the various regulations and requirements, how (or even if) it is possible for students holding a four-year or five-year bachelor's degree from the US can work at a university as a part-time or full-time researcher. Is this possible? If so, are there specific programs to help set this up? Does it matter which EU country the institution is located? Is there a specific type of visa involved?

(Effectively, I guess this question could be boiled down to: what is the equivalent EU mechanism for a J-1 visa, when the student will be engaged in research rather than coursework?)

I think there are two parts in your question: can someone with a Bachelor from the US get a job from a university or research lab, and what kind of visa such a person would need. For the first question, it's really depending on the university. As for the visa, it depends if it would be for a PhD student, or for a "regular" researcher (i.e. not a student). However, in both cases, the visa application depends on the country, as far as I know, there is no Schengen Research Visa. For instance, for France, there are two types of Visa the person could apply to (Visa section of the french consulate in Washington)

The “Skills and Talent” Card visa (Carte Compétences & Talents). However, for this one, they say:

  University graduates should be PhD. Lower graduates will be required to add proof of profesionnal experience in the same field for a minimum of 1 to 3 years (the lower the degree, the longer profesionnal experience expected)

Visas for professors and researchers holders of a "convention d’accueil". According to this site (in French, I couldn't find an English version), a "convention d'accueil" would basically be the work contract with the university/lab, and the eligibility requirement seems to be a Master degree or equivalent (but it could be the case that a 5-years US Bachelor degree counts as an equivalent to a 5-year French Master degree). As far as I understand, that would be the best option for someone who wants to do her PhD in France.

It would also be possible to apply for a student visa, but I think it's not possible to get a work contract with such a visa. Another solution could be to apply to a:

 Employer Sponsored visa / OFII. There does not seem to be anything specific to research in this case.

So, to sum it up, I don't think there is a unified process to apply for a visa in Europe as a researcher, and each country has its own rules. Note that these visas are not automatically Schengen visa, and I've known the case of some extra-EU students, who obtained a visa in one Schengen country, and were not allowed to travel in other Schengen countries before becoming officially resident of the country.


Can I lose my job over writing a negative comment on (anonymous) faculty evaluation of institution? I'm faculty and I work at a place that does faculty evaluations of our institution. I wrote a pretty harsh, but true comment on the back. While it's supposed to be anonymous, I'm still afraid it could be traced back to me. I know, it was a dumb move, but it didn't occur to me that writing the comment would be. Do you think I will lose my job over it? Maybe another dumb question, but I'm stressing right now.

The true anonymity of "anonymous evaluations" is a key issue (in academia and also in the workplace).  If you say an evaluation is anonymous, can you later take them to task for something they wrote that you regard as problematic?

This happened at my university a few years back.  Student course evaluations are done electronically now, and they are said to be anonymous.  However, one student "contributed" an anonymous evaluation which criticized their instructor for their sexual orientation.  The university IT staff got involved, did in fact trace the evaluation back to the student, and the student was prosecuted for it.  In particular, IIRC their name was made public (I read about this in the university paper!) and they may have had to write a letter of apology.

This is a good problem for an ethics class: should the university have done this?  After reflecting about it for a while, my feeling is that the university did behave unethically: not by tracking down a comment that violates rules of university conduct (not to mention the rules and conventions of civilized society about treatment of minority), but by not being open with the students that the anonymity in the evaluations was meant as a policy decision, not a factual description of the way the technology is implemented.  They could have designed the system so that university IT staff would have no way -- or at least, no standard, built-in way-- of tracking it back to its origin.

Anyway: yes, it is probably technically possible that the evaluation can be traced back to you.  The moral of the above story is that unless you specifically know and trust the mechanisms that prevent that, you should regard the anonymity as being at the level of policy -- i.e., you are honorbound not to act on the knowledge of the identity -- rather than a true lack of knowledge of the writer's identity.

As for the rest, you ask:

  Do you think I will lose my job over it? Maybe another dumb question, but I'm stressing right now.

That doesn't sound like a dumb question for you.  However, in my opinion it's  "a dumb question" (rather, an unfruitful one) to ask us.  We don't know:

Who you are, and what are the conditions of your employment.
Where you work, and who your colleagues are.
What you wrote.

Without this information, our best guess at the answer is nowhere near as good as yours.  I understand that because of your closeness to the situation and reasonable anxiety, it may be hard for you to view objectively.  I suggest that you confide in someone you can trust and who is closer to the situation.

@Trevor Wilson asked:

  Was it this case: nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20wwln-ethicist-t.html ? If so, it sounds like the evaluation was handwritten.

Nice find!  I checked it out a bit, and...I think it is likely that this is the same case, and that it was long enough ago (longer than I thought) that I am not quite remembering the particulars.  It is also interesting that this made "Ask an Ethicist"...and the Ethicist said very much what I said above.  Adding to the irony,  I suppose I am now criticizing my university a bit by weighing in on this.  I think they can take it.


Sound reasons for excluding a reviewer I am about to submit a paper, and I'm asked whether I want anybody to be excluded from consideration as a reviewer. I also need to state a reason. I briefly considered listing someone who - I have reasons to believe - once reviewed a paper of mine by listing criticisms that were unspecific enough that I spent a very large amount of time just trying to figure out what they meant. Of course my guess could be wrong, and it seems unfair to label someone as a suboptimal reviewer based on a hunch. Which led me to wonder - what are some good reasons for asking for exclusion of a reviewer? And additionally, what would polite wordings be for each of these reasons?

You should list reviewers (if any) that you think may be unfairly biased towards your science in some specific way. this includes persons with whom there may be a personal conflict that would shadow an objective review or people who have shown an unmitigated dislike for your science or the like. It is not intended to be used to list persons just because they may not agree with your science. In the specific case you list, I can see that such a reviewer may be unwanted but I do not think the reasons are strong enough to warrant signalling the reviewer as unwanted. The chances of the reviewer being asked may be small if there are many others that can be considered useful. Finally, if you were still to receive a review that is as unclear as the one you describe, you should ask the editor to clarify what you should read out from the review. After all, the editor must have read the review and used it to evaluate the degree of revisions necessary of your manuscript. So in short, you should save the nasty for listing as unwanted or non-preferred (whatever the journal terminology may be) reviewer.


Getting a letter of recommendation from a new professor I've read in multiple places that it is important that your recommenders be known to the admission committee. If I were to have a letter of recommendation from a professor who is quite new (Assistant Prof), would their recommendation be discounted due to their lack of reputation or stature in the field?

An unestablished professor that knows you well, and writes a fantastic letter, is far better as a letter writer than a famous professor that will just write a generic "he was 3rd out of 38 students in my class" kind of letter.

There are two types of letters that will really help you in general. (1) A great letter from a professor who knows you well, regardless of their stature. This is likely someone you did research with, and (2) A famous professor that will write you a decent letter, saying you did well in his her/class and you show real potential, ideally you should have done a class project for them, so they can say something beyond basic things like class rank. Letters of type (1) are the most important (if the professor is famous that is a bonus). But you need 3 letters usually, so you are not likely going to have 3 professors that know you well (if you do you are in great shape). Type (2) is another good option for filling out 3 letters. If all your letters are of type (1) and (2) that is a really good sign. Most people will have at least one lackluster letter from an unestablished professor.

The next best bet is an unestablished professor that you did a good class project for or knows you well from a class. Generic letters really do not help your cause.


Can I use the whole mathematical proof from references like books and reputed research papers for my own paper? Currently I am trying to publish my research paper on cosmology. I have found some useful proved equations in other research papers. As this is my first research paper, I have no experience with plagiarism in a research paper.

Can I add these proven equations from other papers into my paper?

You certainly can, and should, use the equations (and theorems, etc.) that others have proved. Otherwise, you would have extremely hard time getting anything new done, as mathematics and physics research is quite cumulative in nature.

You use other results by citing the source. At least in mathematics, sometimes you just write "by the Lax-Milgram lemma we get...", if you are writing for an audience which knows what the Lax-Milgram lemma is. If you suppose not all of the audience knows this, then you provide a reference to the result: "by the Lax-Milgram lemma [1, theorem 4.7] we get..." (where the citation format may and does vary). If in doubt, err on the side of citing, as it will be helpful for beginners.

However, if you are writing a research paper and the concept of citations is unfamiliar to you, then it is a good idea to get some help from a scientist in the field (or any field). If you are at a research institute, find someone there. If not, it will be more difficult, maybe impossible, to find a contact, but you might still want to try. Publishing scientific articles is not a trivial task and there are some traps (predatory journals).

[1] Reputable source with bibliography info.


PhD thesis Report has questions from reviewer I submitted my PhD thesis to a EU university and I already have the review reports of the two reviewers.

They both accepted the thesis for the viva.
One reviewer left a couple of remarks, while the other left some remarks but many questions.
My supervisor told me what I should provide a response letter to both reviewers, addressing all the questions in the case of one reviewer.

-Why do reviewers ask questions on the report and ask for the answers before the viva?

-They both told me that my thesis is very good.
I am able to answer all the questions well, at least in my opinion. Can I still fail the viva?

-People tell that PhD defense is just a formality, however, I am afraid of failing it after so many years of hard work.

Please let me know your experiences on this matter

Thanks in advance,
Best wishes,
King Baboon

My experience is the US, not the EU, but, while the "defense" is mostly pretty pro-forma, you still need to give a reasonable answer to any question asked there. In rare cases the candidate failed the defense and failed to get the degree for responding to a question wrongly when they "should have known" the answer.

I think that the written questions are given as a favor to the candidate, though the questions will most likely be only about the dissertation rather than general questions about the field as a whole. In some places you need to be prepared for both. But if you can answer the written questions you have a good idea about what a careful reader of your work might still want to know. This prepares you for the first, but not the second sort of questions - about the field as a whole.

The lesson here is not to focus so closely on the dissertation itself that you forget everything else you know. Freezing up can be an issue for some people, so it is good if you have practice in speaking generally (say through teaching) and have ways to calm yourself quickly if asked an odd question. This is more of an issue in those places that have an "out of field" member of the defense committee - a person from a totally different field who will not have read your work. Your answers need to be reasonable, even when not strictly correct.


Is it worth attending the Grace Hopper conference without presenting anything as a first year PhD student? My university sent out the GHC 2016 emails recently. I have always wanted to go, because every year I see every single one of my female CS friends go there. The vast majority of them are sponsored by their companies, so they don't really have anything to present. My question is, is attending GHC in such a situation of any use at all? I have always felt that you get more respect in a conference and also more contacts (because of people wanting to talk to you) when you actually contribute something to it as opposed to being a passive observer. But I am not sure.

My second question, as the title says, I am a first year PhD student, so I don't really have any one big project I'm working on, just small projects I've been doing to get a feel for my field. So I can't present anything worthwhile. As a student, is there a way to go to GHC as only an observer (not presenter)? I mean, in case I conclude that simply attending will be useful too, I'd like to give it a shot, but can't find anything like on their website.

Thanks!

GHC is less of a research conference and more of a networking and educational event. They had over 12,000 attendees last year but only ~700 presenters, so clearly most people do not present anything.

I've known several people to go (Masters and PhD students) and none of them have presented. They all loved it and at least one got a job out of it.

You'll get to listen to some great talks, attend workship-like events, interview with many companies, and meet a lot of other students. It seems like a great experience so you should definitely consider it.

The scholarship applications just recently opened, which would cover your costs of traveling and attending the event.


How to prepare poster paper for conference that rejected full paper I received a paper reject for a full paper (10 pages) submission in one of the top conferences in CS (distributed systems). I agree with some of the critical remarks, but we felt they should be considered as "extensions" of the work rather than deficiencies in our work. I also felt that the reviewers were not as familiar with this new reasearch area (always seems like the case!). I was planning to extend the work and look for another conference 2-3 months down the road.

Meanwhile, the same conference has started a poster track and "invited" us to submit a poster paper (3 pages) for the same. I am debating whether and how to go about it. I used to be under an impression that posters are "less" important than paper talks, but after reading this (How important are poster sessions in conferences?), and discussing with colleagues, I feel this could be a good opportunity to discuss with the research community, polish the work and then extend the work (with new / existing remarks) and submit for a journal. Extending a full conference paper into a journal is reasonably common practice in our lab, especially for papers that go in thesis.

Considering I have plans to publish a longer paper eventually, how should I go about preparing this 3-page (IEEE 2-column) "poster paper"? Shall I keep it more textual and keep the model / results in the poster? Or put the model with preliminary results in paper and all extra material in poster?

I checked with the conference that this 3 page paper gets published and not the poster. Any general guidance?

I've been involved in a number of conferences that offer posters to rejected papers as well as other newer work that wasn't ready or acceptable as a full paper.  Usually they don't publish short papers in a proceedings, though some do, as in this case.  I think presenting a poster is indeed a good way to get your work out into the community and get feedback.

The poster is not usually "reviewed" in the usual sense and the bar is typically pretty low.  So if the conference said "this might make a good poster" then it probably will.

  Considering I have plans to publish a longer paper eventually, how should I go about preparing this 3-page (IEEE 2-column) "poster paper"? Shall I keep it more textual and keep the model / results in the poster? Or put the model with preliminary results in paper and all extra material in poster?

Regarding the question of what to put into the paper, I suspect some may want to close this question as depending on personal circumstances, but I will try and give more general suggestions.   I would not recommend putting results in the poster and not the paper.  That seems wrong to me.  Just like with a full-length paper, the paper and the presentation should be roughly in sync.

I'm not clear on what "all extra material" refers to.

In general, treat your poster as an advertisement for the work and for people to read the paper (even if it's abbreviated).  There should be more material in the paper than the poster, not the other way around.


Is the phrase "results show" appropriate in academic writing? I once heard of a professor saying that it is not appropriate to say that "results show", because it is not the results that actually "show" anything, and a more appropriate way of putting it would be that the results "support" the idea of something.

I am not sure if this is overthinking or there is actually a point made.

The professor is suggesting that in academic writing one needs to be precise and one also tends to be more formal. Things that are natural in conversation, for example, may not be the best way to express something in writing - especially academic writing.

But it is easy, and natural, to slip up since we normally spend more of our time speaking and writing informally than formally.

But yes, most "results" only give evidence that something is true. Only in some fields do the "show" or "prove" something (say, mathematics).

I think the point is valid - precision and formality are likely good, but condemnation of such terminology is probably overblown. In most cases the reader will make the right assumptions about what is meant. Novices might be misled, however, if claims seem a bit overblown. And intentionally overstating a conclusion is wrong in general.


Writing homework essay anonymously to avoid controversy I am attending a course at a neighboring institute purely out of interest. Neither credits, nor grading of any kind are involved.

As part of the course, we are required to work in pairs (assigned, not chosen) and write an essay on a controversial/contentious topic. My partner and I find ourselves on opposite sides of the debate.

On account of the controversial nature of the topic, its connection with my academic work and my own contributions to the field, I am not comfortable diluting my stand. However, compromise is inevitable in pairs/groups, and I realise the point of this exercise might be to reinforce exactly that.

Nevertheless, I don't wish to sign off on something that I don't believe in 100%.
I also don't wish to opt out of the assignment as my partner is being graded on it and it seems unethical to leave him hanging.

So I propose submitting the essay titled:
(Title),(Partner name and affiliation), (Anonymous, independent).

Is there any precedent to do this, or is there a strong reason not to? Do I use a pseudonym instead?

Any advice on alternatives or other points of view would be appreciated.

The point of an exercise in dissecting a contentious issue is not that you must agree 100% on the solutions to the issues by the end. The point is to find where you and the other members agree and where you and the others agree either that a) further research is needed or b) fundamentally different approaches are being proposed.

Your desire not to sign off unless you agree 100% with everything in the document essentially defeats the integrity of the exercise. You are allowing your (preconceived) stand to override the goal of finding common ground. Common ground is saying "We agree on these statements, we need more time on these statements, and we disagree on these statements."

So, first compile a document that presents the statements where you both agree, where you both agree that further research is required, and where you both agree that you both disagree.

Then, prepare an addendum. Present your views for the statements where you disagree. Invite your co-author to do the same.

Avoid using the addendum as a way to poke holes in the main document. The addendum should be of the tone "I FULLY agree with the presentations in the main document. I see issues however at the noted points of disagreement. My reasons are as follows: ..." Limit the addendum to a minimum (e.g. one page or even one paragraph).

Submit the document and the two addendum pages.