Which foreign academic job markets most favor (monolingual) American PhDs? I am pursuing a PhD in one of the physical sciences. I attend a university that is top 10 or so in my field and has a recognizable name (Ivy league). My adviser’s past students have had somewhat good luck finding professorships, but even so several have left the field for jobs in computer science. Since I enjoy traveling, to increase my chances of finding a permanent academic position I plan to also apply abroad. Unfortunately, I only speak English.
Do you have any suggestions of where a monolingual American PhD can find an academic job abroad? If I need to complete a postdoc first like in America, would it be better to do it in America or said foreign country?

I'm Dutch. In physical sciences, most of our universities teach their MSc programmes entirely in English. Some of our universities also teach their BSc programmes entirely in English. If you find an academic job here, you are quite likely to get by with only speaking English. From a language POV, American PhDs are welcome here.
Dutch universities commonly do expect at least one postdoctoral stint before starting a tenure-track position. Whether that stint is performed in Europe or the USA makes little difference IMO.
Of course, your mileage may vary, and this answer sketches only the situation in a single foreign academic job market. But the conclusion is: yes, there are foreign academic job markets where American PhDs are sought after. Beyond the Netherlands, I expect the situation to be similar in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Also, anecdotally, I know of one American PhD who did a postdoc in the USA and then moved to a professorship in Belgium.


Researcher with Startup Company - Conflicts of Interest? Looking for your advice on best practices on how to avoid conflicts of research.

The facts:

Researcher is a director of a research institute on campus.
Researcher has a start-up company involved in same research as his    university research.
Researcher uses this company as a way to get Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) grants to fund    his lab under subcontracts.
Researcher has company located on campus in university sponsored    incubator.
Researcher employs a post-doc and shares this post doc with his    company – funding of post-doc is 50/50 between the company and his research center.
Researcher's lab members go between his lab and the company lab space freely.
Researcher is interested in submitting closely related grants through his research center and through his company as SBIR/STTR.

What are best practices or rules to put in place to minimize conflicts of interest in such a scenario?

First of all, you should know that this sort of setup—a researcher has a side business very closely related to his research—is quite common. It does sound like there are a few unusual details in your story, but the overall picture is standard fare for most universities.

The only direct answer that I can think of is to work very closely with both your advisor and whatever department your university has set up to handle this sort of thing. I went to Pitt, which has an entire department set up to assist with questions like yours. My advisor had a very good working relationship with the university, and I found these people very helpful. You should be able to find this within your university (if it exists) by talking to your department chair. On a very similar vein, Pitt, had a distinct Conflict of Interest department set up for these types of matters as well. They can answer questions.

NOTE: talk to your advisor before doing anything!!! The chance that the university is unaware of this is pretty slim, particularly if he has an SBIR grant. He has probably worked out all the necessary details a long time ago. If you go around raising alarms where none should be raised, you'll end up seriously annoying your advisor and looking like an idiot. You don't want to do that.


How to get through with an unsupporting supervisor? My supervisor does not have time to neither read my report nor give me feedback. The topic I am working on is totally new and my supervisor does not know about that.

There is another guy in my group who works on the same topic. I got the correct result and the other guy did not get the correct result but my supervisor believes the other guy and made me feel very bad by implying that I made up the data. Even if I show her my solution, she will not be able to understand or simply does not want to admit that I am right. It is not an easy feeling for me when I am in group meetings, I have to shut my mouth when the guy says wrong things.

I like the topic and I want to continue work on that but I really need to get over all the bad feelings. All other professors in my university working on that topic have some kind of collaborations with my supervisor so it is not ideal for me to change supervisor.

Has anyone been in the similar situation? How would you get over that and become successful?

Show your supervisor why you are right and the other guy is wrong. Gather solid proof, wait until you are less emotional, ask to meet your supervisor and tell her in a neutral, professional tone. Maybe she just wasn't able to see your point at that moment.


How can I email a professor to ask if I am still being considered for an RA? So, I have applied to a Research Assistantship based Master's at a Canadian University. I have offers pending from other universities and would like to ask the professor if I am being considered. This is the email I wrote:

  I hope you are safe and doing great.

  Currently, I have received a few offers from other institutions. Their acceptance deadlines are beyond April and expect the first round of admission results of (your University) will be announced soon. I am taking courses on Power Electronics, Sensors and Motors (offered on Coursera). I found the interactive online learning quite helpful and once again thank you for suggesting me the courses a few months ago.

  Just checking in to see how you are doing and what admissions timeline I can expect.""""

Is this an appropriate email?

Given that you prefer an offer from them to all others, I suggest the following.

First, the opening and closing remarks are a bit trite unless you know this person already. You aren't writing to a friend, so keep it professional. I sometimes use "Stay safe" as a closing salutation now days, but nothing else.

But the important point is to leave out most of the detail.

  I'm juggling some other offers now, but would very much prefer to accept one from you and would accept it if offered before I need to make a final decision. I wonder if I could have some decision from you by June 1. Also, thank you for the advice on things to do now. I'm following up on those and find them helpful.

That is really all you need. The date you give should be the drop-dead date for the other decisions.


Are extended periods of unpaid leave compatible with an academic career? In Academia, a sabbatical means a leave to do only research, as opposed to an unpaid leave to do anything you want.

A recent question over on The Workplace SE raises the situation where  someone has too much money and just want to have more time. — like working for 6-9 months per year, which would earn one enough to spend the rest of the time travelling.  Regardless of the relatively low pay in parts of Academia, the same situation may apply, in particular to DINKs.

The answers mostly boil down to: be a consultant or freelancer..  That may work in the software industry or other private sectors, but it doesn't translate very well to academia.

Is a career which includes one or more extended unpaid leaves, such as sabbaticals in the classic meaning of the word, or unpaid leaves in the order of 3 months or more in a row, compatible with working in academia at all?  If yes, how?

Clarification: I am interested in answers considering either a career that contains specific gaps (such as a year to see the world, either between jobs, or interrupting a job), or a fixed job that contains less than 12 months per year (minus holidays) of work.

Frequent, extended periods of unpaid leave are easily compatible with certain types of academic careers, such as teaching as an adjunct on a course-by-course basis.  However, this involves low pay and no prestige or job security, so it's far from an ideal solution.

There will be a lot of obstacles to doing this with a tenure-track job.  Your collaborators will be unhappy when you put the collaboration on hold to go do something else.  You colleagues will be unhappy when you aren't available to teach courses or supervise students (thereby making the department work around what they consider to be your eccentricities).  Wanting to take substantial amounts of time off will be considered a bad sign, and everyone will worry about what you might do once you have tenure.  Your chances of getting tenure will go down.

Taking time off can also make you a less productive researcher, even normalized by the amount of time you spend on research.  The problem is that keeping up with the field takes a certain amount of time and effort.  If you work on research for only six months per year, you still need to keep up with twelve months of progress by others, so it's as if the rest of the world were moving twice as fast.

It's not impossible that you could find a flexible academic job.  You might end up with a specially negotiated soft-money position (funded by grants under whatever terms the funding agency will agree to), you might take a job at a less prestigious university than you could have (who are so eager to hire you that they are willing to make a deal), or you might happen to find an unusually accommodating department.  Unfortunately, this isn't something most people can reasonably expect to work out.  I don't know what the chances are, but I expect they are pretty low on average.  The academic job market is tough, and adding non-standard constraints makes it even tougher.  If you can't be happy without frequent, extended leaves, and you have good non-academic employment options that fit your needs, then that might be the way to go.

Another theoretical option is to take advantage of tenure: work hard, don't tell anyone your plans, and then quit doing any academic work over the summer once you get tenure.  You shouldn't do this.  Your colleagues will feel resentful, the administration will be upset, and you'll be manipulating the system in a way tenure is not intended to support (and thus weakening the case for having tenure at all).  If you're too extreme, you could run into trouble with a post-tenure review, depending on your university's policies.

[I'm assuming you intend to use the leaves for something entirely unrelated to your academic career.  If it's more closely related, such as applying your scholarly expertise to government service, then you may have better luck.  However, it doesn't sound like that's what you're talking about.]


My University's communications office reserves "Dr" for MDs only - is this common? I recently became aware that, when writing an article, my university's communications office reserves the prefix "Dr" for only those individuals with MD degrees.

For example, if Jane Smith holds a PhD, an article published through this office would state, "Jane Smith researches memory..." instead of "Dr Jane Smith researches memory" or "Jane Smith, PhD, researches memory". But if Jane holds an MD, the statement would be written, "Dr Jane Smith researches memory."

The communication office's response to this is that "Dr" is most often associated with medical doctors; also, the AP guide recommends this approach.

First, is this a phenomenon in other institutions?  I am at a large public university in the US, for reference.  Second, the office may be correct that "Dr" is associated most with physicians, but does anyone have a citation for that?  Third, I couldn't find this in the AP guide--any hints on where to look?

The AP style guide does say that "Dr." is used to indicate medical doctor, and that academic degree (Jane Doe, Ph.D.) is used to indicate doctorates. That said, if you don't like that policy, you can point out:

1) It is standard etiquette to use the title a person prefers, and rude to do otherwise.

2) The AP style guide is just one convention among many. Lots of institutions have their own policies (e.g. NASA's communication office has the exact opposite convention, referring to Ph.D.'s as "Dr." and referring to medical doctors as "Jane Doe, M.D."). Several high-profile press institutions (including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal) do not follow the AP style guide in this regard as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)#United_States


Asking to get paid for academic research work I am currently a student working for a professor full time over the summer on science / engineering research projects. My first meetings with this professor took place during the spring semester. During these meetings, the professor agreed to hire me and agreed (in speech only) to pay me for my work. No specifics were ever discussed and the remark about paying me was made casually. I have signed no financial paperwork of any kind at any time. If I were to get paid, I would almost certainly be paid minimum wage. After this meeting, payment for my work, which I have been doing most of the summer, has never been brought up again by the professor or anyone around them.

I have not brought this issue up to the professor because:

The experience working on the projects I am being assigned is metaphorically worth its weight in gold to me right now. It is both work I am intensely interested in pursuing, and also a great resume experience listing for potential future employers.
I am in a financial situation that allows me to offer my time for free. Since this is my first experience working on academic research, I did not want to be turned down by the professors I asked because of money. I also will almost certainly need to ask this professor for a letter of recommendation for future internships to very selective companies in the same industry as this professor. I also know this professor regularly communicates with high ranking industry professionals who work at the same companies as I want to apply to. Thus, my relationship to this professor is of paramount importance above all else.
I will almost certainly be working for this professor through the end of the next academic year (however, I will have to work part time during the school year since I am a student). I have considered the possibility that it might be wiser to wait until I have worked for this professor longer before asking to be paid for my work. As far as the feedback on work I have already performed, I seem to produce results that are on par or better than they are expecting, and I deliver my results on or ahead of schedule.

All of this said, I still would like to get paid (however small an amount it may be) for this position since I am working full time and, when I was hired, the professor I work for did (again, verbally only) say I would get paid. I feel like I am in an awkward position here, and I am unsure what the best way bring this topic up is. How should I bring this up to professor if at all?

Given that payment was offered but just not followed up on, it is entirely possible that this professor does not realize that he never got around to the paperwork for paying you. (I say this having seen that exact scenario play out more than once.)

I would recommend just bringing it up casually, e.g.: "When we spoke in May, you mentioned the possibility of payment. Is that something we can arrange now?"


How can someone get access to German education system with poor grades? According to the German education system, applicants are evaluated on the basis of their immediate previous academics grades. For instance, if someone wants to do an MA, his bachelor grades are examined. Similarly, if someone wants to do a BA, his highschool grades are examined.

Now, the problem with this system is: If someone has poor grades in both high school and bachelor's, there is no way he can be admitted into the MA.

How can someone get around this issue?

In general, this is not correct.

There is no direct equivalent high school in the German school system. The closest to high-school graduation is an abitur.
This is called Hochschulreife¹ (suitability for academic education) for a reason.

Common interpretation of §12 of the German constitution is:
If you have an abitur, you may only be excluded from studying due to place restrictions, in which case the restriction is primarily based on your abitur grade (numerus clausus), but can be bypassed by waiting and other qualifications.
The latter primarily applies to some subjects like medicine.
There is a plethora of bachelor’s programmes that have no restriction at all (besides requiring an abitur).
Admission to a master’s programme also is not grade-based in general. You will probably always have a restriction on the content of your bachelor’s degree though.
With a quick search, I found a programme that automatically admits all graduates from the respective bachelor’s programme at the same university and has no grade-based restrictions for others.

That being said, you will probably find more grade restrictions for master’s than for bachelor’s programmes for the following reason:

On the one hand, bachelor’s programmes are subject-specific in Germany and occur in a similar setting than master’s programmes².
Thus your degree in a bachelor’s programme is a good predictor of your success in a master’s programme of the same subject.
Moreover, most grade thresholds are comparably lenient in light of the common grade inflation.
If your bachelor’s grade does not suffice for admission to a master’s programme, this usually means that you barely made it through your bachelor’s.
In that case it is reasonable to assume that a respective master’s programme is not the right place for you.

On the other hand, since the abitur is not subject-specific, it is not a good predictor of your capability of studying certain fields.
For example, I have seen students with an excellent abitur (particularly the math section) giving up studying math, because they were bad at proofs and this hardly played a role for them before university.
By contrast, somebody with a bad abitur may excel at studying math.

You may also want to read the Wikipedia article on academic admission procedures in Germany.

¹ Hochschule: university or other institution of academic education. There are no equivalents to colleges in the US/UK. Reife: maturity, suitability. Combining these two, Hochschulreife translates to suitability for academic education.
² The separation of bachelor’s and master’s is only around twenty years old in Germany. Most current bachelor’s and master’s programmes originate from a single big programme (Diplom) being split.


Mentioning professor's name in SOP I have applied for a PhD program in USA. I have mentioned a professor's name in the SOP. Will the professor only get the application to review or the other professors will also be able to see my application? Will the other professors mind as I did not mention their name?

Usually PhD admissions in the US are by a committee of several professors. Everyone on the committee will see your application (except that applications are often triaged or only read in full by certain members); the professor you mentioned may or may not be on the committee.
If your application suggests you are interested in working with a particular professor, then your odds of admission go up if that person is taking students and wants to advise you - one of the things an admissions committee is looking for is "fit", and "fit" is pretty good in this circumstance.
Your odds of admission go way down if that person is not taking students or does not want to advise you. Again, the admissions committee will be looking for "fit" and this would suggest you would not "fit".
I wouldn't expect other professors to be offended, but it's quite reasonable to not admit someone who will not have a place. Typically I don't think it's a good idea to mention an individual professor unless you have had previous positive interactions with them and are applying to the program specifically to work with that person.


What are the pros and cons of having multiple co-advisors during a PhD? Can you have more than one co-advisor as well ? I yet have to check with my department but wanted to see the pros and cons of it.

I did read this but wanted to see if someone else has opinions as well ?

The number of advisers you have really is a scenario-by-scenario issue. For example, during my PhD I had three advisers. However, only my primary supervisor was involved with the day to day aspects of my research whilst the other two showed up occasionally and asked some questions before disappearing for a few months again.

I do know of other cases where students have been split 50:50 between two advisers which also means two labs and two offices with them jumping between both trying to keep both happy because the two advisers don't talk very much.

It all depends on the research you're doing and the expertise of those around you. I imagine that in most cases, your primary adviser is enough but there are definitely cases, for example in interdisciplinary research where the expertise of an adviser from a different field would be very handy.


Why doesn't a master's thesis get read by a PhD admissions committee? I have heard from three professors internally at my school that my master's thesis will likely not be looked at by Phd admissions committees - these professors are frequently on the admissions committee at our Department, too - and that at most my abstract or graphs / pictures might be looked at very quickly or not at all.

Of course, writing a thesis still has great value for the student - we get some research experience that could perhaps help us develop more clearly defined goals for pursuing a PhD, and we earn a letter of recommendation out of the thesis.

But, I would like some broader information, so I want to ask the question here.

Has any of you who has served on admissions committees actually read a master's thesis before?  Why or why not?  Is it just a waste of your time and doesn't really give any indication regarding the strength of the applicant?

My main motivation for asking this question is to decide whether I should delay my graduation date and ask for an extension on my thesis, since I feel I am just starting to do something decent and want to continue it and not give up on it too early.

While I am not on an US-style  admission committee, which I suspect this question implies, I assume that the answer is quite simply that the committee does not have enough time. Or, in other words, the information tensity of taking half a day off to read a single thesis with any thoroughness to better evaluate a single candidate is not high enough.

For better or for worse, any evaluation on any level (PhD admission, faculty applications, paper reviews, grant reviews, tenure, ...) needs to balance thoroughness with time effectiveness. Pragmatically speaking, this is also why we have (for better or for worse) grades, bibliometrics, awards, honours, conference rankings, or journal impact factors - not that the information captured by these metrics is great, but because they give away some information in no time at all.

To what extent time becomes a factor obviously also depends on how many candidates there are to be evaluated. A tenure committee can and should afford great thoroughness because it is evaluating only one (or a few) candidates. PhD admission, on the other hand, usually needs to compare hundreds of candidates. Note that, annoyingly, the importance of the decision to the candidate is usually not a substantial factor in the decision how much time to spend.

That being said, I personally still often use the master's thesis as an important piece in my decision for or against a PhD candidate (I work in Europe, and we hire students directly). However, I am not reading the thesis end-to-end, but I glance over it to find out:

How well the candidate writes, especially how well the candidate writes in English.
Whether the thesis would in terms of contribution hold up in my own university - if this is not the case and I do not know the university that the student graduated from, I will assume that the level is weak. If the contribution is small but I know the university to be good, I will often assume that either the student or the advisor is weak.
Whether the student knows good scientific practice, in terms of plagiarism, overselling of results, truthful reporting of threats, ...
If the thesis is in my field, I will also check if the student has a reasonable grasp of the state of the art by looking at the background and related work section.

All of this can be done in very short time - it is not necessary to read more than two or three paragraphs to figure out if the student is able to write English documents, for instance.


Are you permitted to forward the reviews from a rejected manuscript when submitting to a new journal? Suppose I have a paper rejected from a top tier journal. The anonymous reviews highlight a number of strengths of my paper, but ultimately judge that the paper does not merit publication in that lofty journal. When I resubmit to a lower-tier journal from a different publisher - presumably after addressing some or all of the reviewer's substantive concerns - can I include the entire original reviews as part of my submission? How about including excerpts from these reviews in a cover letter?

On one hand these reviews might be seen as the property of the journal that rejected my manuscript and as part of a closed correspondence. On the other, in my role as an editor I do think everyone would be better off if we were more open about where we'd submitted and what feedback we'd received. That is useful information for an editor trying to assess the merits of a paper and decide whether to desk reject or to proceed with a full review.

I'm interested both in formal policies (I don't see any for the journals I frequent) and in general thoughts about the ethics of doing so.

Addition: To clarify, I am more interested in whether it is allowable to forward these reviews than I am in whether it is advisable to do so. The latter question depends so much on the particular circumstances that I cannot imagine a single universal answer - though it is interesting to read the thoughts of the community on this issue as well.

I have done this a couple of times (but not always going down in the journal hierarchy). In my cover letter I indicated that "the paper was previously submitted to [blah], but was rejected because [...]. A copy of the report can be obtained by writing to [editor name]."

The motivation for not including the copy of the report is that it keeps me honest. I can't just select the bits I like.

I have never had any problems with this approach, and I believe it to be the right thing to do. It saves editors' and referees' work.


Filling in a form before going out of town One has a tenure track position. Before leaving out of town for a conference or a seminar talk one has to fill in a form a month in advance (at least in some departments) even if one does not apply for any financial support, and there is no problem with teaching.

Question. What are the goals of this procedure?

I am mostly asking about the US, but other answers are also welcome.

Employers generally like to keep track of their employees' whereabouts, both for practical reasons related to things like insurance (as mentioned in the comments) and to prevent abuse in the form of employees using work time for completely personal travel.

Now, in the specific context of your question, it's true that academic faculty enjoy an almost unparalleled freedom to travel whenever and wherever they like during times when they don't have specific duties like teaching. Most faculty are responsible and ethical people who wouldn't abuse this freedom, but in a large department or institution invariably there will be some who aren't. The form that you are describing is a minimal form of oversight that lets the department know when faculty are traveling and for what reasons, and signals to the faculty that they should act responsibly and that ultimately their travel during workdays is subject to scrutiny by their employers. Maybe it is a bit annoying and intrusive, but if you compare this level of scrutiny to what workers in basically all other industries are subject to, I think you will find that academics are incredibly fortunate, and that having to fill a form isn't really a big deal in the grand scheme of things.


Is it appropriate to ask my supervisor about publication of future results now? I'm doing my Master's degree in applied mathematics. I went there from CS department, because of multiple recommendations.

I knew before, that the most successful people of my university are usually students/graduates from this maths department. However, I was very surprised, when I found out, that the successful ones are usually chosen by professors during B.S. or very early during their Master's degree.

Every reputable professor has one or two so called "golden children" who have incredible (and insuperable usually) advantage over other students, who are not collaborating with the "best" professor so tightly.

Because of some awards I got for my Bachelor's thesis, I was offered a place in our research center and so far, I'm doing pretty well there. I talked about my ideas with one of the professors (very reputable, he's probably second in our uni just to one much older professor) and he was excited about them and offered himself to supervise my Master's thesis. Moreover, as a specialist advisor will be my immediate superior in research team, who has great ties to some good U.S. universities (we're in Europe), he even got his PhD from one of them.

So far so good, I was excited about all of this, but then I found, that some other professors care incredibly much about their students, to the point where on of my colleagues has arranged place in the international conference even before he started writing his Bachelor's thesis!

Now I'm not trying to degrade him, despite his age he's a very good mathematician and I have no doubts that with "his" professor's help, his thesis will be great.

The point is, I'd love start publishing papers as soon as possible, especially, when I'm working on two research projects which are both directly connected to my thesis's topic, so my thesis will have a lot of foundations from the beginning (so I don't have to start with the whole topic "from scratch").

Do you think it's inappropriate to talk with the professor about this? Not that I'd want to compare him to other professors, I'd simply want to tell him that I'm willing to publish some papers as soon as it'll be possible, because I think it'll help my career very much.

It's actually a very smart idea to talk with your advisor about publications as early as is reasonable: that is, once you think you have a handle on what the papers will be about, you should initiate the discussion. By starting the discussion early—before you begin writing the manuscript—you can begin to deal with some of the important questions associated with writing and publishing:

What is the main messages and results of the paper?
To what journal will I send the manuscript?
What form will the manuscript take?
Who will be authors and co-authors?

The longer you put off this discussion, the greater the probability that problems that could have been easily averted earlier will persist.


How to cite a lab manual? While looking for information on how to perform a particular basic lab technique, I found the lab manual from another university's undergraduate lab course. This lab manual illustrates the technique very well, with concise description, useful tips on fine points of the procedure and nice, helpful pictures of how the procedure should be performed.

In my research notes, I try to cite relevant material in a format resembling usual citation styles of well-known journals, both to build a habit and because it happens to be a good way to keep track of precisely what information I based my decisions on.

However, this lab manual does not have a DOI or ISBN and the PDF itself does not provide enough information to uniquely identify it in a traditional fashion. By looking at the URL it was posted under, I can deduce a fair bit regarding exactly what course this document pertains to (in my particular case, it seems to be the 2013/2014 version of the lab manual of the Bi204 course at Boston University, hosted here). What is the best way to cite it, to ensure that future readers of my notebook will be able to follow the citation without being hopelessly confused about which document I am talking about?

In theory, I can keep searching for other, more "formal" texts such as journal publications, then cite those. However, I don't want to do this. Firstly, I would be doing extra work to find what I already have discovered. Second, the manual is exceptionally well written and it will be hard to find other sources which provide the same information just as clearly. Third, I would like to give credit to the person who was actually the most helpful to me in my own reasoning.
I could just cite the reference given by the lab manual, but many of the issues I raise for the previous point apply.
I could cite the URL, but what if a year later the web page changes drastically, and the version of the notebook I used disappears?

I would like to, to the extent that is reasonably possible, provide the means for locating this lab manual to anyone reading my notes in the far future, even if the original author removes the manual from the web page I found it at. And I would like to provide this information in a style that conforms to established citation practices of scientific writing. How can I do this?

BibTeX knows how to deal with this, using the entry type @manual:

@manual{abc,
    organization = {University of Neverland},
    author = {John Doe},
    title = {Manual for ABC123},
    year = {2012},
}

If you don't know the author because it is not listed in the document, you can omit the field. The name of the university will be used instead.


Our final exam has us work in pairs. I am struggling with personal issues and worried about being able to pull my weight. Should I ask to work alone? I am an undergrad about to graduate this month. I've been dealing with post-traumatic stress and severe depression for almost two years now. This time of year is especially difficult for me due to when the trauma happened.
My professor would like us to work in pairs for our upcoming final exam (which is more like a take-home project - we have a week to complete it). I worked alone on the last exam, ended up having to turn it in late, and got a C. I'm in worse shape now than I was then, and now that I've just moved home (which is where everything with the trauma happened, so there's lots of triggers here), things are more likely to get worse before they get better.
So I'm scared I'm going to drag down whoever I get paired with. I am obviously going to try my best, and hopefully things will go better than I'm expecting! But I also want to be realistic since my ability to function will now impact someone else's (final!) grade as well as my own. If I crash and burn, I want to be the only one doing so!
I am planning to talk with my professor about this, but I'm not sure how to approach it. Would it be appropriate to ask to work alone? Since the exam is pretty involved they said working in pairs makes it both easier on us, and easier on them to grade. I don't want to cause more inconvenience for them, especially since they've already been super understanding about my situation.
tl;dr: My professor wants us to work in pairs for our final. I am struggling with major mental health issues and am worried about dragging my partner under with me if I can't pull my weight. How should I approach this when talking with my professor?

It is possible that there are an odd number of people in the class and that someone might need to work alone. Put in a request to be considered for solo work, giving your reasons.
But, there is value in joint work and your professor may be depending on this being a valuable lesson for everyone.
And, to be honest, I'd much rather have a partner who was worried they wouldn't be able to do their part than one who wanted a free ride on my hard work.
If you can't make it happen, just do your best. It is all anyone can do, after all.


What does a PhD application rejection mean for other applications? If you applied to several PhD projects, all in the same "level" of university prestige.

Could a refusal from one of these applications be interpreted as a inadequacy for the rest?. Could it mean the applicant should start aiming for one "level" lower?

Virtually everyone gets rejected from at least one of the places they apply to. I have never heard of anyone who got through the process without getting rejected somewhere. I even got rejected from several places that were lower ranked than the ones I did get in to!

So no, one single rejection is not a sign that you are applying to the wrong level of universities. In fact, you should probably expect more rejections. Depending on the subject there can be 5-10 qualified applicants for each spot, so lots of good candidates are rejected every year. If you discussed what universities to apply to with the professors writing your recommendation letters, you are probably applying to universities of the right "level". The sheer number of applications means that you will get some rejections anyway.

With that said: if your are really set on graduate school, it is a good idea to apply to a wide range of schools on different levels.


PhD interview - short (!) presentation I got invited for a PhD interview to the University of Edinburgh. I was asked in the email to prepare a 10 mins presentation on a recent research I was involved in. I did a sandwich placement year and it just so happened that this week I just gave a presentation about my placement project. I was given 30mins, which was still barely enough to cover everything. Now with 10mins, I might struggle to convey everything. What's more, what should I focus on in such presentation? I believe it's not to manage to show everything possible within the given (I don't want to try to squeeze too much data and speak ridiculously fast), but is it perhaps to show that I can present in scientific way? That's what my university tutor has told me. What exactly does it mean? Should I show that I fully understand what I present (which I believe I do), explain well my graphs etc? Any tips? What are they looking for in this short presentation?

I struggle a lot with presenting/public speaking, which is why I might worry too much over it but then again, I need to prepare twice as much as a person who is good at presenting.

Many, many thanks for help!

Edit: I realise that I'm still a bit stuck in the format of presentations I have given at the university and I wanted to ask what I should change to make this 10mins presentation as good as possible.

The format that I usually follow is:

introduction to the topic --> should I make it as short and simple as possible?

aims/objectives

methods/materials --> I wonder if I should skip it or make it very short?

results --> I believe I need to select most relevant ones

discussion --> this part usually takes some time in presentations, maybe I could combine it with conclusion to prevent repetitions maybe?

conclusion

further experiments

acknowledgement

references

Definitely don't try to cover everything. This is certainly not expected, and as you noted, is just not possible in a limited amount of time. What they likely would want to see is if you can explain the main points of your research in a succint way. Trying to cover too much will force you to rush trhough the material, making it difficult to follow. You can still show that you master a subject without getting into all the technical details. Indeed, it takes a good understanding of a research problem/project to be able to place it into perspective, to explain the main motivations and the most important results.

So what should be in the presentation? Different people will give different advice, but I think the following guidelines are sensible. First of all, you should identify the one or two main results of your research. Make sure that you have enough time to cover them, for example by addressing the main points in the beginning of your talk. You can go into the details (such as the methods you used) later on. Another important item is the motivation behind the research. Why did you research this particular problem, and why should people care about it? This might also be a good point to briefly mention the state of the art of the field, and explain how your work extends this. Towards the end of your talk you could go more into the technical details, but take into account that most of your audience may not be an expert on your topic.

And finally, make sure you practice your talk a few times. Ask a few more experienced people whom you trust (and can give good feedback) to attend a practice talk to give suggestions on how your presentation can be improved. Don't worry if it seems like you would have to redo the entire thing: this will only make it better.


Correction Note or New Paper? I have been alerted to a mistake in a (mathematical) paper that I published about 8 years ago, during my PhD. The error is relevant, in the sense that it affects one of the claims made in the main result, but does not invalidate the rest of the paper. After some effort, I now also know how to correct the error.

So one course of action would be to submit a 'correction note' to the journal where the article was published.

On the other hand, since the time the paper was published also my understanding of the topic has matured a bit. In hindsight I would write the paper somewhat differently, I have had some related ideas that were not included in the original paper and finally I am also not convinced that my choice of journal was optimal.

So another course of action would be to write a new paper, including the corrected result and some new additional results and submit it to a different journal.

What course of action would be best, from an ethical and from a scientific point of view?

That depends on one question: If we assume that the original paper would not contain this error, would your new related ideas be enough for a publication?

If yes then go ahead and publish it, including the correction (and of course notify the journal about it). If needed put a bit more research into the topic to get enough new results.

If no then this might seem like an excuse to get a new publication with content that is not worthy of publication (yet), so it might look like you try to cheat on your paper count, which is of course bad for your professional reputation.


What are the implications of the whole class failing an exam? I am an MSc student and in my class are 10 people.
The module has been taught exceptionally poorly and as a result none of us can see ourselves passing the module. The exam is in two days time.
By failing the exam we will have to retake it in the summer because we will not met the threshold to pass the module.

The lecturer mentioned that the department was thinking of scrapping this module so this may be the last time it is run. Also throughout the module we got the impression the lecturer was really concerned about us and we got the impression people have done really badly in this module in previous years to cause him concern. Talking to other lecturers in private, have supported the fact that this professor is very bad and has not taught the module well enough to prepare us for the exam.

In the open book homework assignments, the class average has been high, around the 60%-70% region. But these assignments in total only account for 20% of the final module grade.
The final exam accounts for 80% of the final grade.

What are the implications, if any, for the lecturer or the university if everyone in the class fails the final exam?

I am in the UK.

Your question is about the consequences for the lecturer, but you've asked in comments what you should do.

In the UK, if it's felt that noone has reached the required standard then noone will pass. The basic paradigm is that everyone is measure against a standard, unlike in North America where it's more about measuring students against the others in the class. Still, it would not be a popular move to fail a whole class. What the effect on the lecturer would be will depend on their position, and what the uni is like.

Given it's two days from the exam, and I'm guessing it's in maths or similar, I think you should start memorising. The pass mark is 40% (usually), and with high homework scores you can pass with slightly less than that. You're more likely to convince someone you deserve to pass if you can show you've understood the basic ideas of the topic. Make sure you can reproduce the key definitions and theorems, and have at least an intuitive understanding on the methods of proof appropriate to what you are doing.


How do I cite ebooks without page numbers? I am directly quoting a sentence from an ebook. Thus, I want to add the page numbering to its citation. However, different to the print version, which I do not have, this ebook (Amazon Kindle version) does not have page numberings but rather "positions".

Do I just pretend it's a page numbering and note in the bibliography that it is a Kindle version? Or is there another way?

In case this is of interest, I am using Latex with Bibtex.

You are not providing page numbers with citations for their own sake, but to help readers to locate the cited passage, e.g., if they want to verify it or see it in context. (Therefore page numbers are already diminished in their usefulness for regular books as soon as there are two editions with significantly different paging.)

The arguably easiest way to locate a verbatim quote in an e-book is to just feed a few words into a full-text search. Thus giving page numbers or similar information has no purpose anymore. However, you could ease finding the location of the quote in a classical book by giving edition-independent location information, such as chapter and section numbers.

Note that this is a “utilitaristic” approach to citations. A relevant reader of your publication (e.g., a supervisor or reviewer) might have a “dogmatic” view on such things and thus require page numbers or similar for their own sake.


Is it unfair for paper circumstances to play a role in the review of the paper? Let me say beforehand that this question does not refer to scientific correctness and treats it as undisputed, i.e. the paper is assumed correct in the sense that it clearly states a valid purpose, has an adequate literature review, the theory and methods are scientifically sound.

After a brief introspective, it came to me that I often take into the account under what circumstances a paper was written when assessing the scope / prestige of the venue it is to be published at. This usually includes funding, if any, seniority and number of the authors.

On the one hand, I find it unfair to expect the same scale of experimental devotion from a student-mentor author pair from a developing country with no or relatively little funding as from a research group with multiple grants from a developed country. Given the relevance of the contribution, the first group shouldn't be rejected on the grounds that they don't have a comparable abundance of resources. Also, they shouldn't be discouraged as they managed to make a difference without those resources. And, after all, we do this kind of expectation management in other aspects of life, e.g. one doesn't fail a student because they wrote the assignment in a free text editor, because they can't afford MS Word.

As a concrete example, I once saw another reviewer comment that they would like to see a more significant average deviation on the graphs. This requirement would've required the authors to run tens of multi-hour simulations on a cloud cluster consisting of ~50 high-end instances, each billed by the hour, and it is also rather irrelevant to the proof or the contribution itself. The two authors received a government grant which translated to roughly $1200 for this research at an university that doesn't have subsidies with the cloud provider.

On the other hand, this is clearly a bias. Augmented additionally by the fact that it is not possible to implement during a double-blind review. Also, somewhere in there is an argument how practices to include low-cost research would result in research funding being gradually cut in some way or the other.

So, my question is the dilemma whether it is unfair to let capabilities outside of a research group's direct influence contribute to the review of their paper (again, only once the contribution is established)?

My field is computer science, so, while not strictly pen-and-paper, few resources are needed, relative to other fields, e.g. experimental physics, bio-medicine, etc., to do meaningful research.

No, your review should not change based on knowledge of the authors' circumstances. Your role is to give the editor an objective assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the author's submitted manuscript. However, you can still help less advantaged authors. Write your review to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of their work, and leave the authors to choose how they wish to address these.

To take your example: suppose that the authors have developed a new algorithm for X, which you consider to be a worthwhile contribution to the field. However, they go on to claim that their algorithm outperforms the current standard, based on only one test-case.

An unhelpful reviewer might write:
"This paper has potential, but it cannot be accepted unless the authors run more test-cases". A more helpful review would be: "The algorithm in this paper appears to be a useful contribution, and it is deserving of publication. However, I do not feel the authors currently have sufficient evidence to support their unqualified claims regarding performance, and this should be addressed before acceptance."

By doing this, you leave the authors with a choice: they can either run more experiments, or they can put caveats around their discussion of performance. (Of course, you should only do this if you feel the paper is publishable in such a form.) A wealthy research group will likely choose the former option, a less well-off one might settle for the latter. However, both have been held to the same standard of scientific correctness.


A few students requesting to cancel lectures due to their personal reasons. What should I do? I give lectures to postgraduate students. The number of students in this batch is very low (< 20). The lectures are foundation lectures for the course. We are only into the basics of the course.

A few (maybe 4) students of this batch are requesting to cancel two lectures as they won't be available for personal reasons. In fact, they are going to attend a workshop. In my university, attending workshops that are not fully recommended by the department is considered 'personal interest'.

One option is to ignore their request and ask them to study the topics covered during the lectures or with the help of students present during the lectures. If they could study these topics themselves or with friends, they wouldn't have requested me to cancel these lectures.

What should I do in this case?

I could ask this question to my head of the department, but, I don't know how this will turn out for students. They should not feel that they were not allowed by the head to attend this workshop.

I do understand that there will be variations of opinions on my question as per the different academic rules of universities but I still want some insights from experienced academicians.

If you do this for a minority, then you will have to do it every time a few students have some excuse.

I suggest that you don’t consider this and make it clear that if they miss lectures then it is up to them to catch up on material.

Providing double or triple repeats of lectures due to a few absences, especially if unpaid, is not a good use of your time.

Some students will want to rationalize their choices and make sure which they attend - some workshops can be valuable. If you think one workshop is very worthwhile then you could consider re-scheduling for all, but that depends on your schedule, and yes, I have done this for similar reasons involving the majority.

Based on a comment>
I always provide the material used in class - notes & worked example on Moodle as well as further practice problems (some 10 to 20 for each topic with solutions) for those who attend as well as those who do not.


What makes one fail a PhD viva? I do not ask about special cases, e.g. supervisor does not approve the thesis, there is rivalry between the supervisor and the examiners and so on.
Is there any general standard for viva, e.g. one needs to be able to answer 2/3 of the questions, etc.

I'm waiting for my viva, and I'm only worried about questions about related work. For example, my thesis only addresses a problem on deterministic programs, do I need to know all approaches to the same problem on probabilistic programs? (at the moment I don't).

UPDATE

I would like to emphasize again that I do not ask about special cases, e.g. plagiarism, wrong methodology etc. I believe theses cases are extremely rare. I just want to ask about a normal case where one managed to publish some papers, and advisor (happily) approved the thesis.

No, there are no general worldwide standards, other than "the examiners should be satisfied".

Your advisor is probably the best person to answer questions like this for your specific case.


Asked to be a reveiwer after submitting to a conference I recently submitted a paper to a conference. Within days all of my co-authors and I received an email asking us all to select (bid for) papers in the same submission stream from the conference to review. The conference has purposely invited some authors to be reviewers. Our paper has not been reviewed yet.

Is this normal behavior?  Will it look strange to have an accepted paper and be a reviewer for the same conference?

In my field (CS) it is common to have accepted papers and act as reviewer (otherwise all well known authors would not be able to publish at such conferences), but it is uncommon to decide after submission who will be reviewers.

Sometimes it is necessary to recruit additional reviewers because you are not having enough experts for certain sub-disciplines or reviews are cancelled / not in time.


Should I add a short-term visiting scholar affiliation in paper submissions? I'm currently a visiting scholar with a small stipend at one institution, but will be there for a short period of half a year only. At the same time, I'm still affiliated to and get a salary from my home institution. I'm actually spending all of my time at the institution where I'm a visiting scholar for the half year period.

Now I'm wondering whether it makes sense to add my visiting scholar affiliation to any papers that I'm submitting during this period? Even though I would have worked (at least partially) on these papers from the visiting scholar affiliation, this affiliation will not persist until such a paper is published, maybe not even until it is being returned with reviews. Instead, I could be using only the affiliation at my home institution, which would be valid for more long-term.

It's conventional in my field (electrical engineering) to use the home affiliation in the "regular" affiliation field, then note the visiting affiliation in a footnote.

e.g. in footnote,

  Jane Doe conducted this research while she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Basket Weaving.


How does laboratory funding and money management work in grad school? there's something I've been curious about regarding the funding of labs in graduate schools. I imagine it's different in different schools, but there's probably a most common scenario.

How is money managed for a lab? My most naive understanding is that the lab mostly gets money from grants. But what happens when a lab runs out of grant money? I assume the school doesn't want a major lab supporting several students and postdocs just folding, so I'm guessing they lend them money.

For example, the are several common facilities at my school that charge the lab when students use them (electron microscopes, etc). I know we're short on money right now, but I've never heard of anyone not being able to use the facilities. I would definitely make sense to me that the school internally lets a lab rack up debt to them with the expectation that it'll be paid back when they get grants in the future.

But how does it work for peoples' paychecks, and non-school payments? I know our lab also has a p-card. Does that mean we may be racking up debt externally?

Bad things happen when a research group runs out of money. If it's a short-term cash flow problem (for instance, having to meet payroll in the aftermath of the US government shutdown of 2013), the university should be able to provide short-term funds to cover the gap. But this can come at a cost:

It may not be possible to order necessary supplies.
Travel may be restricted.
Normal operations (usage of expensive equipment, etc.) may have to be partially or totally curtailed.

However, if it's a long-term, structural problem—for instance, because the group has grown faster than grant funds to support the group—the consequences can be much more dire:

New students and postdocs can't be hired.
Support for undergraduate students (REU's, and similar programs) get cut.
Students may have to take on teaching assignments to receive their stipends.
Recently assigned students may be asked to switch into another research group.


Recruiting process time for assistant professor position in Japan? What time scale is typical for the evaluation of applications for an assistant professorship in Japan?

It depends on the position, but couple of month is a reasonable scale. If you go through the first round (your resume is picked, which itself easily a month), you are contacted for an interview generally at least a month before the interview. However I have seen cases when it took months just to appoint an interview.

Note that many assistant professors are getting jobs by internal promotions and not through public advertisement.


How should I address a potential FERPA violation by a professor? In the United States, federal law prohibits professors from releasing any student's grades to any party other than the student and any party whom the student authorizes to receive the grades.

One of my professors appears to be violating this law by uploading each student's lab grades in one file, which is accessible to anyone who is enrolled in the class.

Here is my proposed plan of action:

Ask the professor - in private - to post the grades using the online management system the professor already uses for other things.
If the professor doesn't fix this privacy violation, inform the professor that the method by which he/she post grades is a violation of federal law.
As a last resort, contact the department dean.

Go with option number 1. See what happens.

  1) Ask the professor - in private -

If you're just worried about your grade being posted, may be you can ask him to at least remove your grade from there and leave the rest for the students that want to know their grades as soon as possible. Either that, or may be he could just post people's student ids next to each grade. Or assign a random id himself once, and use that id to communicate future grade reports.

Do note that some online management systems are not all that user-friendly, especially compared to an excel spreadsheet. So do not mandate the way he should solve the problem, mention the problem, and discuss the kind of solutions that may be acceptable to you.

Also note that some grades only affect a tiny percentage of the entire course grade. So that is why some Professors are less worried about the privacy implications of releasing those grades publicly.

And yes, option 2 and 3 would work too, if option 1 doesn't work, but hopefully you won't need to escalate. As you can see from this Supreme Court decision regarding peer-grading, FERPA is not as absolute as you might believe. Furthermore, very few students would have the motivation or the tenacity to pursue this issue in a court of law.


Why do universities share test questions? I have had quite a few take home exams, mostly because they required you to be online and were a lot longer than 2 hour exams.

When taking these exams and answering questions (all essay questions) I've typed in the question into Google and bam. I find the same questions used from some PDF associated with, often, a different university and the PDF has either the answer or guidelines as to whether or not the student gave a close enough answer.

This has happened in 3 courses so far and I brought it up to a professor a year ago and she had no idea that the PDF she got test questions for had the answers on the same PDF online.

I assume it isn't students putting these PDF's up because the PDF's often have more questions than are on the exam and will have pages with a university name, class, and symbol which are not given on the exams handed out.

So, why would a university use questions from another university when a simple copy and paste reveals the answers or at least guides as to how to answer?

I am not aware of any university having agreements with other universities about exchanging exam questions and i doubt that such agreements would exist in many places. I would wager a bet that the same is pretty much true on departmental level.

On the level of individual teachers there might be many reasons why exam questions pop up in different places. One has been mentioned by Brian Borchers in a comment (questions taken from textbooks). Secondly, many first- and second-year courses teach pretty standard material which often has not changed for quite a while (e.g. basic linear algebra in many disciplines). For such courses (and even some higher-level courses) the set of questions that are useful as exam questions tends to be limited and so i would not find it surprising to find that most if not all questions have been asked somewhere and have been discussed on the web. Thirdly, it is not unheard of that teachers re-use exam questions from previous years. Fourth: sometimes teachers talk to each other and exchange experiences and material.


Why is data falsification reported to be more usual in some fields than others? This big info-graphic (at the end of the question) explains that biomedicine and psychology have greater rate of data fabrication/falsification/mishandling than other fields. A similar effect was reported a PLOS ONE paper:

  Once these factors were controlled for, surveys conducted among clinical, medical and pharmacological researchers appeared to yield higher rates of misconduct than surveys in other fields or in mixed samples.

and

  it suggests that misconduct in clinical, pharmacological and medical research is more widespread than in other fields. This would support growing fears that the large financial interests that often drive medical research are severely biasing it.

However, the paper does not offer any further discussion of the field dependence of data manipulation. So, have there been explanations proposed about why these fields are "special"?

Your quotes from the Plos One meta analysis highlight problems in clinical, medical and pharmacological, but your question is about biomedicine and psychology. The meta analysis paper found no evidence for increased rates of reporting misconduct in either biomedicine or the social sciences suggesting that those fields are not "special". The authors then present a reasonable conjecture about why the reports of misconduct in medicine might be higher

  However, as all survey-based data, this finding is open to the
  alternative interpretation that respondents in the medical profession
  are simply more aware of the problem and more willing to report it.
  This could indeed be the case, because medical research is a preferred
  target of research and training programs in scientific integrity, and
  because the severe social and legal consequences of misconduct in
  medical research might motivate respondents to report it.

I think base on the meta analysis I would argue that data falsification is NOT more usual in some fields than others, but simply that reports and sensitivity to it is more usual when a field specifically trains individuals to recognize it.


what factors affect your admission in PhD in Biological Sciences I am a student with both Master's and Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology with a good aggregate. But, i have a low GRE score of 295. My TOEFL score is 107 along with a research project going on.

What do you think are my chances of getting in in a PhD program for Biological sciences?

I have had a good academic as well as extracurricular career.

Apart from GRE what factors should i be concerned about which might affect my admission?

At least in the US, graduate admissions committees tend to look at many factors. The three "big" areas tend to be your recommendation letters, personal statement, and standardized scores. They probably will look at your CV as well. You might be able to make up for a deficit in one area with strengths in other areas. For example, admissions committees might favor an applicant with at least one published paper prior to his/her application, even if he/she does not have the best GPA or GRE scores out of the entire applicant pool. I am less familiar with admissions outside of the US.Unfortunately, there isn't any one magic formula to guarantee admission to any program.

That being said, I think you are correct in wondering how your GRE score will impact your chances of admission. Assuming that you took the most updated form of the GRE (where the range is 130-170 instead of 200-800 for each section), your score is low since you scored 35 points above the absolute minimum score. Most competitive graduate programs claim that successful applicants have GRE scores in at least the 50th percentile. As such, your low GRE score would likely be a major red flag for these programs, unless you indeed scored above the median. However, other programs tend to overlook GRE scores entirely (they will say you don't need to submit them) or weight them fairly low.

Is there a way that you can postpone your applications and retake the GRE? If not, you need to put together the best application possible, which means putting extra effort and attention into the other parts of your application, like your personal statement. You might also consider applying to programs that explicitly do not require standardized scores or weigh them low, which means that if the GRE is the only weak point of your application, you're likely fine. A third option might be to talk to people at your university to see if you can turn your Master's degree into a PhD. Even if it's not in the same department (you seem to be going from Biotechnology to Biological Sciences), sometimes internal candidates can gain a slight edge over external candidates, particularly if they are doing good work and can carry their momentum over from the Master's degree to the PhD.

Again, there is no way of any of us knowing what you can do to guarantee admission, but in your situation, I would suggest that you make the things still within your control the best they can be.


Do universities prefer not to hire their own PhD graduates in faculty positions? I have heard that universities tend not to hire people who earned their PhD there for professorships (tenured or not). (I've read this question, but it's about postdocs: Is it normal that research institutes do not hire their own PhDs for postdoc positions?)

If one graduated from a university, and then did a few turns as a postdoc or non-tenured professor, would a university/department still be disinclined to hire them 10 years post-graduation?

I know there's a lot of factors that go into hiring professors, as well as many reasons to go to different universities/institutes (addressed in the linked question), so I'm mostly curious about this specific truism I've heard.

Although I live in the U.S., I'm curious about North American and European practices (so as not to invalidate answers already given).

At my university - or at least in my department - the norm seems to be that they prefer to hire externally for tenure-track jobs (speaking from experience serving on a search committee for a tenure-track position). The line of reasoning is, "if we're the ones who taught/mentored/molded Candidate X, then they're not bringing in anything new in terms of scholarship."

This is less applicable to non-tenure track jobs, as those faculty members are usually teaching lower level classes and don't have any research obligations. There are several PhD faculty members in my department that were hired internally who work as lecturers.

Anecdotal, of course, but I've studied at/worked at a few universities over the years, and this is the pattern I've tended to see. Tenure-track: external. Non-tenure-track: internal OK.


how to specify 'pseudo-random seed' in publication, any reference? Following suggestions for my post here "Should results of a journal paper always be reproducible?", I have done the simulation using a particular seed in the first part of my result section. Now the issues are, how to mention that particular seed in the paper. I have not come across any particular paper doing so. For this reason, I am uncertain about mentioning it.

Any reference of how people do this would be highly appreciable.

Meanwhile, following is what I am writing

  In practice, nodes can be distributed in a large number of topologies.
  However, the results in Fig. 2,3, and
  4 follow a fixed topology generated by pseudo-random
  seed (1010) to validate the scheme. Later, a more comprehensive
  analysis is shown in Fig. 5 and Table
  I.

If you are aiming for your results to be completely reproducible, you will need the random-generator seed, however you will also need the source code (unless you use only one predefined method in a very clear way) and sometimes even other information such as the version of employed software, operating system, and hardware specs. The random seed is of no use to the reader on its own, and hence there is no point in mentioning it here.

In most contexts, I would only state in the main text which realisations are identical.
That you control this with seeds (instead of say saving and loading them) is a technical detail that should have no relevance to your results.
I would put the seeds together with the source code and other relevant details in a supplement (or similar).
At most I would mention the specific seed when referencing this supplement in a way that makes clear to the reader that this information only makes sense together with the supplement:

  The results in Fig. 2, 3, and 4 were obtained for the same realisation of the topology (Supplement A, seed 1010) to validate the scheme.


Should I mention a mistake made by a third person? A professor asked from me to send one of his books I've had. Because I've had to leave for some days from the country I've arranged with a relative to send the book. However, he ignore it and now the professor sent me an email asking for what happened. In my reply should I mention that the fault is not mine?

It was your task to ensure the book gets returned. You need to take responsibility and apologize. You can mention that you had made arrangements, which failed unfortunately.

It's unlikely that the professor cares about the details. What he cares about is that he didn't get the book (that's why you apologize) and that he can rely on and trust you (that's why you promise it doesn't happen again and make sure it doesn't). This is a learning experience, i.e., you know now that your relative is not reliable and as a consequence your professor trusts you slightly less (but that's not permanent damage). Obviously, make sure he gets the book as soon as possible.


How can PhD student repair relationship with supervisor after PhD student engages in independent research without supervisor? When I had just started my PhD in Computer Science in Korea, a Physics PhD student in the EU proposed a collaboration. He and I wrote one paper for a conference. I learned last week that the paper was accepted. He is first author. I am second author.

I did not tell my professor about this project even though he was my supervisor then. I mentioned it to my professor recently. He became very angry. He asked me to remove my name from the paper. He said that all my work represents his lab and my university. I shouldn't conduct other work.

My professor's points

The collaboration should be done between supervisors. (My professor's background and interest do not fit with my coauthor.)
Another issue is none of us can present the paper at that time, asking someone for authorship is acceptable for this situation?

My question

How can I mend things with my professor and continue to collaborate with my coauthor?

It's reasonable for your professor to want some input as to how you spend your time, and it's customary for students to keep their advisors informed about other things they are working on. You have perhaps committed a slight breach of etiquette by not telling him about this project earlier.

However, in my view, it is deeply inappropriate for him to ask you to take your name off the paper. He is your advisor but he doesn't own your life. You have done the work and as an academic it is your right to publish it. An interaction like this would have me thinking about looking for a new advisor, quick.

If the professor has technical concerns about the quality of the paper itself and thinks that it is not ready to appear in the scientific/academic record, then he should discuss this with you, and you should share those concerns with your coauthor and come to a decision on their merits. But I feel it's not appropriate for your professor's reputation to be part of that conversation - just decide whether the paper is good and publishable or not.

Your second question is unrelated but I'll address it here anyway. Do not add another person as author (your advisor or anyone  else) just so they can present it at the conference. In order to be an author, a person must have made a significant intellectual contribution to the work, and it's unethical to "gift" authorship for any other reason.

In many cases, conferences allow a paper to be presented by someone other than an author. So if you know someone who is attending the conference and willing to present your paper, they may be able to do it without you unethically making them an author. But if the conference really requires one of the authors to attend and neither of you can, then I suppose all you can do is withdraw your paper and resubmit to a conference which you can attend.


Master thesis: emails to a dissertation supervisor i have finished all my classes and now I should start my master thesis.
But first of all, I need to write an email to prof. and ask him about the available topic for the master thesis.
How to write this email?
does anyone have experience with that?

This is better handled in person, rather than by email. You will get a more useful answer and be able to explore options. I would only use email if there were no face-to-face options available. Bring a printed CV to any such meeting in case the professor wants more information on your background. Mention in the CV any projects you have done. And make sure you know at least a bit about the professor's research interests before you meet.

But if you need an email structure it so that you give some information, but don't make it difficult to read or necessary to read everything. First ask, then say something about yourself and your background and interests. Try to keep it short and it will be more likely to be read. Anything very long (like a CV) can be an attachment, but probably isn't necessary for an initial contact. I assume that the professor will, if interested, ask for a face to face meeting in most cases. Again, make sure you have an understanding of the research interests of the professor and that they match your own.


Name of section dedicated for explaining subjects that are not 100% related to main subject of thesis I am not sure this is the place to ask this question.

I am writing my master thesis and I have sections in preliminaries that don't have anything to do with the main topic of thesis but they further explain things mentioned in preliminaries. My advisor is saying that I should delete those sections but I am thinking maybe there is a better approach.

So, my thesis subject is comparing two cryptography protocols and in preliminaries I explained tools that enables us to understand how powerful these tools are (i.e. if this tool breaks this protocol then this protocol is bad!). But I also added some extra information like this tool also breaks this old protocol so it is a powerful tool.

The extra part that my advisor wants to remove is about 5 pages which includes algorithm as well. I am wondering is there a way to explain thing that are not directly related to main subject of thesis but knowing them would be great. Like a specific section in the end of thesis dedicated for this random stuff. Like an appendix or something. But I believe appendix are for long tables or large figures. I am not sure.

The reason I am asking is that maybe deleting a 5 pages single spaced is not a wise approach knowing that I have spent time writing them and learning them was good too.

Any help would be appreciated.

If it helps the reader understand your process or your findings then the material should remain. That being said, an extra five pages of material not clearly related to your central concept may be distracting. Placing this material in its own appendix section sounds like a great idea though you do risk having the reader not realize it exists. So, for the sake of overall clarity, introduce the additional material briefly in your introduction or background sections - perhaps for a paragraph at most - then refer to the appendix section for the remaining details.


Realizing possible academic misconduct after degree award A few days ago, I was notified of my degree award, and my imposter syndrome kicked in - trying to see if I've done anything to not warrant earning it. I found myself looking through good academic practice guidelines and noticed something I'd previously overlooked -- that it was considered exam cheating to attempt to look at another candidate's exam paper even if nothing was gained from it. I'm pretty sure that on at least one occasion I've looked at another person's script while they were taking an exam. To be honest, I have no clue which exam(s) I would've done this on (although I know this wasn't a very common behavior of mine) and, again, I've never been able to benefit from it as I've never been able to actually read anything from anyone's papers (My conscience wouldn't have let me forget this) -- so all my work on my exams are my own knowledge and not gained from anyone's scripts. I also can't remember precisely if my intentions in doing so were to try and get answer from him/her or to see which part of the exam script they were on to judge whether I was behind or not and should pick up the pace (although there must've been some instance where I actually tried to get an answer but couldn't make anything out) - I just have a feeling that I've looked at a person's script before and specifics are pretty hazy.
What should I do about this? My friend told me that he himself and friends he knows (who I know as well and are high achieving students) have been guilty of this and most students are and that this isn't a big deal. I also fail to recollect when this would've happened, and how often (although it couldn't have happened more than a few times as I think I would remember an incident more clearly if it happened more often). Should I tell the college about this, or take it as a learning experience and move on? Part of me doesn't want to penalize myself if this is a fairly common thing, and I worked very hard to get the degree award I have.

What you should do, is precisely nothing. Take a deep breath. Have a culturally appropriate beverage and celebrate your finishing.
We are human. None of us is perfect. We fall. We get up. We move on. The past is past. Most of us here would probably not like to see a complete rerunning of our past selves in every respect.
But, since it bothers your conscience, vow to do better in the future so you have less to be worried about.


Is it ethical/legal to publish Master thesis manuscript as a journal paper? I have submitted my Master thesis manuscript to the university library. It is completely new work (never published before to any journal or conference). Now, I want to submit my Master thesis to a journal (as a paper) without modifying it much/anything. Is it ethical/legal to publish your Master thesis manuscript as a journal paper? Should I mention this to the editor of the journal? Because, in the journal guidelines, it says: we accept the manuscript only if it is not published before to any journal or conference. It does not mention anything about other publication sources (like: Master or PhD thesis submitted to the university library). Will I face any problem in future if I do so?

PS: I am thinking to submit it in IEEE Transactions on Computers journal. I talked with the university librarians. They told me they do not have any problem if it is published elsewhere. They just keep a copy in the university library (including online library - which I can also keep 'private'). I am asking if the journal has any problem or not? For my university, it does not really matter (since I have already given the manuscript to them and they have accepted it). My university is in Republic of Korea.

It is perfectly Okay to make a paper out of a master's thesis. Many aspiring PhD candidates do.

However, an MSc thesis is typically 50-100 pages long. A paper is (in a dense journal format) typically 8-12 pages long. Let's make a generous estimate for 20 pages in the thesis layout.

So either your thesis is very thin, or the journal is very generous, both of which seems unlikely.

Next issue is that you write a thesis in a very different manner than a research paper.

Hence, you would definitely need to rewrite the paper. And you have one issue less to worry about. The copyright might still be a concern for figures, for example, but from your comments I recon that this is not a problem. (It should not have been one, but it was proper to check before.)


Asking authors for details of algorithm implementation when no explanation is provided I am reading a paper where they cite "Apply the X Algorithm on the result" after a series of operations on "result" in the algorithm. The rest of the algorithm is clear in what it asks to do, but the "X Algorithm" and "applying" it are not clear in what is supposed to be done. Also, there is no other place in the paper, nor any citation to another paper, where the algorithm is cited.

Looking up "X Algorithm" online does give an explanation to how it works, but the result does not seem close to what the expected results are. For example, the explanation online gives results that are always integers, when the result is supposed to be a real number normally distributed between 0 and 1.

Is it suitable to contact the author(s) of the paper directly and get an explanation/access to implementation of the algorithm because it is not explained in the paper?

This is a perfect example of a case in which one should:

contact the authors with a polite request for additional information, and
fiercely and privately curse to yourself about the inadequacies of peer review.


Is it polite to ask for an attachment from the recipient? I applied for a Summer Programme, but l forgot to save the attachment I have sent. Now I need the attachment. Should I do the work again or ask for it from the recipient?

There shouldn't really be any problem with this other than a bit of embarrassment. Just explain what happened and ask if it is still possible to have a copy back. Worth a chuckle, but no more. I don't see how it should affect your application provided that the institution is ethical. Humans make mistakes.


Quality of an image for publication reproduced from another source I have my paper back from a reviewer. The main point is that a quality of the image is not good enough for the publication. I reproduced this image from another paper (with permission) but the only thing I could do, was a print screen of the original and paste into graphical software. I improved the quality by smoothing, but it is still not good enough for the publisher.

The reviewer comment:

  The quality of the figures 1 and 2 is still not good. I recommend authors convert the schematics into vector graphics.

I can't find what and how to do it. Did you have a similar problem and solved it?

EDIT to explain what is on the figure:
The figure shows elements of a vehicle with dimensions (numbers), different coordinate systems, force... it is rather complicated and maybe I could redraw the arrows (alhough many of them) but the background is a photo of the element.

It is difficult to provide a detailed reply without knowing more about the figure, for example if it is a photograph or a line graph. I will therefore concentrate on the general aspects.

First, the best would be if you could get some form of original from the author (or whoever) has the copyright). Screen dumps are clearly not sufficient since printing requires high resolution (300 dpi in final reproduction size is a commonly quoted resolution in journals)

Second, if it is a line graph, and it sounds as if that is the case, I would argue that the best way is to put the image in the background of a vector-based drawing program such as Inkscape/Illustrator/Corel Draw and manually redraw the figure. This is done by placing the illustration in a background layer and then draw lines in the program to reproduce the background. This requires learning a vector-based software and is a tough solution for the short-term but one I strongly recommend for the long-term. If the plot is based on data, for example a scatter graph, then you could digitize the data and re-plot it as long as you think of the re-plot as a version of the original plot and not use data points for additional analysis.

There are of course numerous kinds of complicated plots where the second approach will not work so trying to get the source would be the first choice. Screen dump quality bitmaps will be rejected by most if not all journals.


Thought Exercises in Deciding Whether to Stay in PhD Program or Leave? TL;DR: Thinking about leaving my PhD program after 6 months.
1.) The program is not what I imagined it would be.
2.) I'm not positive I need a PhD to do what I want to do.
3.) I've been offered a pretty great opportunity that would put me back on a track that I was happy with prior to my program.
4.) However, I do not want to burn bridges with faculty/people that have invested time and resources in me.

I would love to hear any thought exercises or lines of self-inquiry that people have found useful in making a decision of this nature! tl;dr/close

I will keep details in the following fairly vague to avoid identifiers.

I am a 1st year PhD Student (6 months in). I've spent several years in "the real world" in between my Masters and my current position. I was achieving just about everything I wanted to during this time, but felt that a little more access to independence and/or creative discretion in designing projects would be nice.  I decided to pursue a PhD, visualizing 4-5 years of independent research in a free-thinking environment, and then returning to an applied position outside of the academic arena.

Without getting stuck in the weeds, I'll just say that my program, and academia in general, is not what I had built up in my mind, and I am now incredibly disillusioned with the work of my cohort.  I feel as though the end result of my research ideas will simply be research products that remain one or two steps removed from being applied in practice, whereas prior to this work I was taking ideas and just implementing. Creativity realized. I'm not sure a PhD is necessary for what I ultimately want to do. In the end I'd rather share my ideas with a broad audience of practitioners, researchers, as well as lay communities. No textbooks. "Regular books" with complex ideas distilled into elegant simplicity that even the public could ponder.

I have recently been offered a pretty great position that would place me back in an applied position and on the track I was on previously.  My intuition tells me to find a graceful way to exit my program, but I also know that I am new. I would give the decision more time, but the external opportunity requires fairly immediate action, and I'd hate to become more ingrained in a current team project and have folks invest more resources in me.

I would love to hear any thought exercises or lines of self-inquiry that people have found useful in making a decision of this nature!

Thanks in advance!

Been to similar situation. Here couple of points:

Decision and Responsibility: You have enough personal reasons to leave. In fact, I'm impressed you figured it out in the first 6 months, which is a good thing. Here is the thing: You need to make a decision, and take the full responsibility for it. Other people in your research group, might have different agendas, and therefore might give you the answer which is good for them. Probably your supervisor spent decades in research and does not get you, or doesn't want you to leave, because he/she spent time and energy in the last couple of months to guide you through your early PhD stage. you see what I'm trying to say here?

Burning Bridges: If you decide to leave, this is your answer to your current situation, and other side effects are out of your hands. They are not your wife/husband that you need to take to your consideration. It is a professional decision you made for yourself. Good thing is, you are a PhD student and not a supervisor to leave number of students and their future behind.

Interaction To Your Supervisor: First have a meeting with your supervisor, and tell him/her, your decision. Tell him/her sorry for the situation created but you have to do what you have to do.

Interaction With Friends: You can also let others know about this, and wish them best of luck.


Postdoc Letter of recommendation same school or different school I am going on the postdoc market this year (mathematics). I am now looking into who I should ask for a letter of recommendation. I think my advisor will give me a good one, and there is another faculty who I think will give me a good letter.
I am trying to decide who I should ask for a third letter. I have been told that it is a good idea to get someone from a different university to write you a letter if you can. There is one person who I think would write me a letter, and I think it would be alright. There is someone else, however, at my university who I think would write me a very good letter based on comments he has made to me and other faculty about me. I do not know which would be better, and was looking for general advice about how much having a LoR from someone from a different institution was.

Opinion only.
I think the primary goal is to have the strongest possible letters. So I would opt for a very good local letter over an alright one from somewhere else. Only if the recommendations were similar would the geography matter for me.
You might be able to work your connection to the other writer into your cover letter.


What do I do about an unfixable F when I am applying for a graduate program? I studied three years as a History major, and I received many bad grades. So I transferred out to a different school in its computer science program.

I have completed up to third year (and a little bit more) of my CS degree in the last two years. I recently looked up the available course listing from my previous school and, once again, they are not offering the course that I received an F in.

It is a third year elective course in philosophy and they haven't offered it in the last two years. The school does not offer any course that is similar, and no one (including many advisers I spoke to at both schools) can really say that there is an alternative course that is equivalent to that course.

Basically, I can't fix it. I've retaken some courses that I did poorly in from my previous school, and gotten back positive results. My current GPA (exclusively from my current school) is close to 3.9.

But that F is really freaking me out. I'm not even hopeful that I can get into a top graduate school, but I would at least like to get into a decent one.

What can I do about this?

Computer science professors don't care what grades you got in philosophy. Even more so because this was an advanced philosophy class, not an entry-level course. And even more so because this was 3+ years ago before you started computer science, so it doesn't show an inability to reason or communicate or manage your time.

Better yet, you have a very clear narrative. When your application isn't perfect, it's nice to have a simple, clean, verifiable reason for the imperfection. In your case, it's very simple: you were terrible at philosophy, you're great at computer science. This is a great narrative, and the F only adds to it.

You should focus on computer science. Here's what's going to happen: the committee will look at your transcript and very quickly figure out that you were terrible at philosophy and good at computer science. Then they're going to want to know how good at computer science you are -- merely average? Or amazing? This is where your research, publications, letters of recommendation, advanced coursework, etc. comes in. Further, you should be very careful when writing your statement of purpose -- you'll need to address your previous major, but there's no need to make excuses for it, just say that it wasn't a good fit and then focus on your current work.

Even if you could retake that class and get rid of the F, you shouldn't bother. It just doesn't gain you anything, and there are better uses for your time.


Is it better to have a strong letter of recommendation from a professor in a different area of study or a weaker letter from the same area of study? I want to apply for a graduate electrical engineering program next fall. I have one engineering professor who has written letters of recommendation for me in the past, however I only know her from more generic courses which I didn't always do well in (hence why I know her from office hours).
The other letter I could get would be from a business professor. I took two courses with him which I got A's in, spoke to him about a startup I cofounded, and was in a student community he chaperoned. He could likely give me a stronger letter of recommendation, however he was a professor for business management (specifically entrepreneurship), and knows little about engineering.
Although I do have one letter from another engineering professor I'll submit regardless (and one from another cofounder of the startup), is it better to have a stronger letter of recommendation from a professor in a different department, or is it better to have a weaker letter from a professor within my area of study?

If you have your engineering side covered already with strong letters, you can get a strong letter from outside of the field.
However, you are applying to an engineering program, so first and foremost, you must make sure that the program managers understand that you are strong in engineering, not business. It is no harm, of course, to demonstrate that you also can do business.
I cannot tell you whether just one support letter from your core field is sufficient, probably you need at least two.


Does the managerial title of a LoR writter matter? In the past I have seen students eager to get a recommendation from a proffesor from the upper management like the dean of the faculty. Especially for academic endevours such as grad. school applications. Or similarly a letter from the superindendant of the highschool for undergraduate applications. Would it be relevant that the LoR writer is in the upper management of the university or would the writer be recognized by their academic standing and nothing else. Please note that I am asking this question for student level research oriented applications.

I would rather get a letter from a professor, even a lowly assistant professor, who knows you well and can attest to your ability and potential, than I would from a higher level person who may have little experience in what your research area entails. The purpose of such letters is to give the reader an assessment of your likelihood of success. If it can't do that then it will be discounted, no matter the position of the writer.

However, in case the letter is just a general statement of your character and (easily found) accomplishments, then the dean's or superintendent's letter might be useful.