Would it be unethical to claim affiliation when it was not made official yet? I received an acceptance letter to a Master's Program. The official enrollment will be in one month. Until then I am not officially in the program yet.

I am about to finish a paper and I want to submit it to a conference. Would it be unethical to claim affiliation in my paper in this situation?

Affiliation should indicate the institution with which you were affiliated while doing the work and writing the paper.  If the paper was already finished before you started at an institution, then don't list it; use your previous affiliation instead (or "none" if you weren't affiliated with any institution).

If you end up making significant revisions to the paper after enrolling at the new institution, then you could consider listing both it and your previous institution.

If it matters, I wouldn't necessarily use the "official enrollment" date to decide when affiliation starts, but rather the date when you actually started attending classes, using the institution's facilities, etc.


Former collaborator presenting joint research as his own Two years ago, I collaborated* (briefly) with a professor (whom I will call Professor Jim) on some research in mathematics. At the time, I was a PhD student and Prof. Jim was on my dissertation committee. I now work full time outside of academia and Professor Jim is looking for a new position. (Prof. Jim was denied tenure last year).

Because Prof. Jim is looking for a new position, he is interviewing for numerous positions around the United States. As part of these interviews, Prof. Jim gives a seminar talk on research. The only issue is that, instead of presenting research he performed himself, he is presenting research from my dissertation as if it was his own. No attribution is given to me on his slides (which are a direct copy of the slides I presented at my dissertation defense).** I feel that this is a clear instance of plagiarism.

My question is as follows:  Should I contact the universities where Prof. Jim presented this research?  Professor Jim has ignored my emails on the matter for three months now.

*I use the term collaborator very loosely here. Prof. Jim provided a data set for the data analysis. This was not a data set he himself had collected. Rather, it was a data set from the National Institute of Health (NIH) that he had been granted access to. Prof. Jim also attended (while nodding off to sleep at times) some of the early meetings where I presented my thoughts. He gave a few points of feedback and wedged his way onto the associated unpublished paper as an author. (Easy to do when you can leverage your authority over graduate students). I would not include him in a million years if I was in my current, unleveraged, position. The only published source of this research is my dissertation. He does not cite my dissertation in his presentation. In at least one seminar, he made no mention of either me or another colleague who actually did substantive work. (This is according to a contact I have at said university).

**Many universities publicly announce seminars on their website. Professor Jim has a rather unique real name and Google finds him relatively easily. I have traced several instances of Professor Jim presenting at seminars. Departments are usually happy to send you materials from old seminars if you just email and ask.

Short Answer

No, you should contact Prof Jim and request that he properly acknowledge the source of the work that he is presenting as being your dissertation research.

Longer Answer

You state the work is from your dissertation. You state that Prof Jim was a committee member, meaning he was not your primary advisor. Finally, you claim that Prof Jim is presenting your dissertation work as if it was his own. Let's leave aside how you know this.

First to the case of plagiarism. At its core, this will mean that Prof Jim is giving you absolutely no acknowledgement at all for the work AND that he is claiming explicitly that the work is his. This is plagiarism. What does absolutely mean? It means, not only do you not have any written notice on the presentation, you are not given any verbal acknowledgement during the presentation. Are you certain that Prof Jim does not start or end his talk with a verbal statement such as this: "All of the work that I am showing today was done by Vladhagen who was a graduate student at the time"? Alternatively, are you absolutely certain that Prof Jim is saying something such as this: "To explore this problem, I did this type of study". Absent such evidence, you cannot conclusively prove plagiarism. You can only state that Prof Jim is negligent and thereby potentially engaging in plagiarism.

In summary, your feelings aside, this is NOT a clear instance of plagiarism.

Your case is solely that Prof Jim gives no written acknowledgement anywhere in his written slides for your work. This borders on being dishonest to the extent that Prof Jim was not your primary advisor and the work was your dissertation research. But then, Prof Jim is co-author on a publication. So, Prof Jim does have a right during his presentation to demonstrate the work because it was done in collaboration and is already published as such.

Your case is therefore solely that Prof Jim is taking a negligent approach to acknowledge in writing in his slides that the work is your dissertation research.

At this point, your first approach must be to contact Prof Jim for clarification. You are at an equal footing here as a colleague. You need only state two things.

I know that you are presenting the research work that we did in collaboration for my dissertation during your interviews.
I am aware that my contributions to the work are being mis-represented because a written acknowledgment is not given on the slides to state that I was the principal contributor on the work.

You have already contacted Prof Jim by email and he has not responded. What does that mean? You have a responsibility now to contact him by phone or visit him directly. In addition, you might engage your primary dissertation advisor. He or she can apply a counter pressure to Prof Jim to drive the point home further. He or she should also be in the better position to inform the universities as needed when the contacts continue to go unanswered.

You are also within your bounds to ask for an official copy of the written presentation, since it represents work that you did.

Finally, as someone on the other side (responsible to do faculty interviews), I can say that faculty are not oblivious to cases such as this. When we interview, we have a CV that lists publications. We hear an oral presentation. We pay attention to whether the presentation fully acknowledges the records in the CV. When they do not, we ask questions. Specifically, when I hear an oral presentation that does not have a concluding list of students who contributed to the work, my alarm bells immediately start ringing. This is NOT NORMAL! In other words, rather than rushing to contact faculty for what you believe could be true, trust that WE will contact YOU should the case reach that level of seriousness (i.e. indications of plagiarism).


Can a person who once supported pseudoscience or conspiracy theories ever be considered a credible source again? All the sciences come across as merciless to me. If you make even one statement that turns out to be false, it seems you have no chance of recovering your career. I have heard of plenty of stories of accomplished scientists and academics losing their credentials after making claims that were either rejected from the start or later disproven. I have never heard one story of someone 'redeeming' themselves and gaining respect in any intellectual field. This all makes it look like even so much as a simple mistake can destroy your career forever.

So tell me, is there any route for someone who at some point in their lives supported conspiracy theories or something else obviously false can take to regain respect? I've noticed a lot of psychologists claiming that conspiracy theories are hopeless and impossible to 'cure'. Are the sciences just completely intolerant of imperfection or do they express some mercy?

Let me answer this by turning it around: just because somebody hasn't supported obvious bunk doesn't mean they are even vaguely right.

One of the beauties of science is that, at the end of the day, the people don't matter to the validity of the material.  As long as a document presents a clear argument, you can evaluate it for yourself, no matter whether it was presented by a known crackpot or  a heroically revered elder.

That means that somebody can be ridiculously wrong in one area---even to the degree of crazy conspiracy theories---and still well respected in another, through the magic of mental compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance.

I had a direct experience of this as a young graduate student: one of the early conferences that I attended was a complex systems meeting with a very loose policy for acceptance: you basically had to be sane to give a talk, but even crazies could join the poster session. I was all charged up from earlier listening to keynotes from seriously famous luminaries, when I walked into the poster session and met a respected mathematician with a poster explaining the connection between fractals and peace, supported by poems pleading for one to use the hypotenuse and not the legs of the triangle for the sake of peace. Complete gibberish.  This person, however, is apparently a well-respected researcher in their own field---they just go off and let their crazy flag fly in certain other places.

That said, if you know that somebody has gone to crazy-town, you certainly would be well advised to examine their arguments and citations quite carefully.  Still, at the end of the day, the only truly unrecoverable stain is falsification, because then people can no longer evaluate your arguments without wondering whether the data is simply fictional.


Master degree in 2 countries? I am looking for international master degrees which are offered in 2 different countries. For example first year in Singapore and second year in Brasil. How can I find such universities or programs? Is there a big database for such schools?

Such programs are rare enough that I don’t know any. I would look into universities that have campuses in multiple countries, and if they allow you to transfer campuses during the program or something along those lines. That would allow you to get the same effect without there being a specific program for it.


Can I pursue a master's degree and research career after taking 16 years to finish undergraduate? I've just finished my bachelor degree in Psychology as a second under-graduate degree. My first degree was in mathematics.

I am 37 years old and I would like to know if it's possible to pursue a master's degree program in Psychology. My under-graduate degree in psychology was unique for the following reasons:

I started it in 2003 and since then I did it very slowly (sometimes stopping for a few years) because I was doing my under-graduate degree and then a masters degree as well as working as a TA in another area (pure mathematics) for several years. Another reason for the extended time is because even if I hadn't stopped this undergraduate degree in Psychology several times and had done it full-time, it would have taken 6 years to finish (very long under-graduate degree).
My course was more focus oriented in humanities/arts.
Despite studying psychology as a second degree, I've always taken it seriously. My average grade for the entire course was 9 (10 is the maximum) and I always had a higher performance than the other students, maybe because of my mathematics background. I'm used to studying a lot with a high level of concentration.

So my question is: do you think it's possible for me to be accepted into a master's degree program in psychology? I'm afraid I wouldn't be considered a good student because of taking such a long time to finish the undergraduate course (maybe they would even laugh at me).

An additional problem is that I want to study in a more science-focused research in psychology. What are my options?

Extended periods on your CV are fine as long as you can explain why they are there.

From my understanding, you took as long as you did because you did a full-time undergraduate degree in Mathematics followed by your Masters degree, while still doing TA duties on the side, and then also attempted to do the Psychology degree at the same time. This is a huge amount of work. You also stated that you had to pause the Psychology degree for a few years. Given that your full-time Mathematics path would have taken around 6 years (correct me if I am wrong) and the full-time Psychology undergrad would have taken 6 years, your situation makes sense.

All you need to do is be able to explain the timeline - and you can! I would not worry too much about applying. You have demonstrated that you are completely capable of higher-level study by getting your Masters in Mathematics (which isn't at all easy)!

Good luck! I really hope this works out for you!


Are faculty job applications evaluated on a computer or on a paper? How are faculty job positions in a US university evaluated? Do the committee members get to view (and discuss) electronic copies of a candidate's application before the hiring meeting (and possibly filter out some applications before the formal meeting), or is everything done in the meeting? I am asking because I think one needs to prepare the application differently in the two circumstances. If electronic copy of the application is emailed to the faculty members, then one can insert hyperlinks in the research statement E.g.:

  "blah blah blah [1]"

where clicking on "[1]" would take you to a website.
But if a printout is given to the committee members, one needs to make sure all the info you want to convey is in the printout e.g. web addresses will need to be spelled out instead of being embedded.

We've had a variety of practices. Some of it depends on the computer literacy of the admin assistant doing the application file processing. We've had cases of electronic material (PDFs) being printed out and then rescanned back in as the staff person did not know how to collate multiple PDFs into a single document.

[HEAD PALM] Sigh...

To be entirely fair, some of our faculty are also very visual-tactile and will prefer print out the dossier and read it there, rather than online.

In other words, you can't assume anything about how the files will be handled. You should be explicit in the URLs. If you have media files on disk or thumb drive (photographs, video, source code, simulations, etc.), then you should also post a visible link to an archive location.


Why do I have the "required reviews completed" status on my submission in Elsevier? I had submitted my paper in an Elsevier journal one year back. Now, status update on the submission tracking says "Required reviews completed." However, for the last two weeks still there is no change in the status.

Should I ask the editor what is going on with my submission?

To expand on Dirk's comment: The status you see means that the reviewers have submitted their reports to the online system, and the handling editor has received an email about this. Now she has to read the  comments (and likely look at your manuscript again to see if they comments are relevant), come to a decision, and write a corresponding letter to the author summarizing the comments and justifying the decision. This will in general not take more than an hour.

But you should keep in mind that yours is not the only manuscript (nor, in all likelihood, the only journal) the editor has to deal with. In addition, this is both the end of semester and conference season in many parts of the world, so it is reasonable to assume that the editor is just very busy with more urgent deadlines, or isn't even in office. (Remember, editors are unpaid, so this work is on top of the regular duties of teaching, advising and doing their own research.)
In some cases, the final decision even involves two editors (associate/managing editor and editor-in-chief/communicating editor), which doubles the chance of other things getting in the way.

In light of that, I would say two weeks is definitely too early to worry and start contacting the editor; give it at least a month.

(Although I know how stressful the wait at this stage of the publication process is...)


What are my obligations as an MSc holder? I hold two degrees, a BSc (2011) and an MSc (2013), from the University of Waterloo. I noticed recently that on my BSc it reads "[...] and has been granted admission to that degree with all the rights and privileges thereto appertaining.", whereas on my MSc it reads "[...] with all associated rights, privileges and obligations." I'm a bit curious about the difference. First of all, I wonder what these obligations might be. Off the top of my head I can think of a couple of rights and privileges that would apply to me as a degree holder, but nothing that I might be obligated to do occurs to me. A quick search for an explanation of the text didn't turn anything up either. I also wonder whether the association of obligations to the degree is peculiar to the MSc for some reason. Would also be curious about the ubiquity (or not) of such statements at other institutions.

Some insight can be gained from considering the Oxford degree day ceremony, which is still conducted in Latin and uses fairly traditional formulae in admitting graduands to degrees. The descriptions used indicate various rights and responsibilities (all translations from here):

Candidates for the DD, DCL, DM and MCh (all higher doctorates) swear to the following:

  Doctors (Masters or ladies/gentlemen), you shall swear
  to observe the statutes, privileges, customs and liberties
  of this University. Also when you shall have been
  admitted to the House of Congregation and to the House
  of Convocation you shall bear yourselves in them well
  and faithfully to the honour and profit of the University.
  And especially in those matters which concern Graces
  and Degrees you shall not impede the worthy or put
  forward the unworthy. Also at elections you shall record
  and nominate one only at one time and no more in each
  scrutiny, and nominate no one unless you know certainly
  or believe firmly that s/he is fit and proper.

For other higher degrees:

  You shall swear to observe the statutes, privileges, customs
  and liberties of the University, as far as they concern you.

They are then admitted to the degree by the Vice-Chancellor, with the wording (for the DD, DCL, DM and MCh):

  To the honour of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and for the profit
  of our Holy Mother Church, and of learning, I, by my
  own authority and that of the whole University, give you
  licence to incept [begin to teach] in the Faculty of Arts (or
  Faculty of Surgery, Medicine, Law or Theology) to lecture,
  to dispute and to do all the other things that pertain to
  the rank of Master (or Doctor) in the same Faculty, when
  those things have been completed which the Statutes
  require, in the name of the Lord – Father, and Son, and
  Holy Ghost.

(A non-Christian formula is available if graduands request).

Other higher degrees have a formula either conferring permission to incept (begin to teach) in the faculty, or just admitting them to the degree.

For the MA, graduands swear an oath "binding them to
be loyal, obedient and faithful to the University and its
interests, and to comport themselves circumspectly at
elections to University offices" before being admitted by the Vice-Chancellor.

Finally, BA graduands are admitted with the following formula:

  Ladies/gentlemen, I admit you to the degree of Bachelor
  of Arts: furthermore by my own authority and that of the
  whole University, I give you the power of lecturing, and of
  doing all the other things which concern the said degree.

To summarize, traditionally degrees were about membership in a Faculty of the university, and came with responsibilities to uphold the rules of the university, and participate fairly in elections. (These aren't empty words at Oxford, where they still confer 'MA status' on faculty members who do not have an Oxford MA so that they can participate in the governing bodies, and which still allows all graduates to vote on the Chancellorship and Professorship of Poetry). It may be that something similar is indicated in the University of Waterloo's ceremony or statutes, although it's also possible it's just traditional phrasing without anything formal behind it nowadays.


Submitting an unsolved-problem paper to open access journals If a person without good records and with bad records (many flawed papers on arxiv) submits a paper which claims a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis to a traditional journal, then will it be ignored certainly?

If so, then will it make any good for him to submit it to an open-access journal
which accepts articles in two weeks?

I would like to know if the International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences is still active or not. I think they used to receive many submissions but now they seem not. I, for one, like their special interests in publishing unsolved problems.

Thanks.

If a person without good records and with bad records (many flawed papers on arxiv) submits a paper which claims a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis to a traditional journal, then will it be ignored certainly?

This person will have to make a very, very, very convincing case in order to be taken seriously. See I believe I have solved a famous open problem. How do I convince people in the field that I am not a crank?, especially the answer by Kaveh.

  If so, then will it make any good for him to submit it to an open-access journal which accepts articles in two weeks?

This will not lead to the paper being taken seriously by the research community. If that is your goal, don't waste your money.


How to introduce myself briefly in a get together for new faculty members? For the new faculty orientation, there is a get together where they will ask every new faculty member of all departments to say a few words about him/her self.

What are the best practices regarding that? any advice/examples/templates of how to do that briefly, eloquently and professionally?

Partly, you'll want to copy what others are doing.  If everyone else only talks for 15 or 20 seconds, then almost anything that you say in a 3-minute monologue will be poorly received.  Information that you'll likely want to mention includes: name, department, research interests, possibly where you've just moved from, and maybe a bit about you personally (I enjoy triathlons; married with two kids; active in a barbershop quartet; etc.)  One point about your research interests: keep it very nontechnical.  Rather than give many details, say something like I write computer programs to help blind people use computers, or I study 18th century literature, particularly the works of SoandSo.  Most likely, this activity will be pretty informal.  If you're still a little nervous about it, you might ask another junior faculty member in your department.


Is there any problem with students seeing faculty naked in university gym? This is a strange one. I have been going to the gym 2-3 times per week for stress management. Before summer, our university made some nice offer for staff to register to the on-campus gym. So, I switched. Compared to my previous gym, I pay less money, it's more modern, and it's more convenient.

Over summer, everything was fine. I usually go at 07:30 and it's quiet. Now that the students are back, I realised that many of my graduate and undergraduate students go at the same time as well.

The showers are sex-segregated, but the problem is that the gym showers are open. Meaning that I'm bound to meet one of my students "butt-naked" in the shower. I've never been conscious about this before and I'm used to using shared showers since I was a kid (camping, sports, etc.). However, I've started thinking that meeting your PhD advisor or first year lecturer naked in the shower might lead to a slightly disturbed dynamics in the Professor-Student relationship.

Am I overthinking this? Should I just pretend I don't see anyone? I've thought of switching back to my old gym or go home to shower, but it would be very invconvenient.

I think that if this is a shared student/faculty gym with open showers, there’s an expectation of seeing some of your fellow university goers naked. I wouldn’t worry about it. Your students are adults and this is the norm at the gym.


Is an engineering PhD enough to publish math stats research? I'm in the second half of an electrical engineering doctorate but have come to realize that mathematical statistics and the theoretical side of information theory might be more my calling. I am too far along in my research to pivot my doctoral thesis to this abstract of an area, especially considering I am in the engineering department.

I am relatively strong in math (Tall for a hobbit... taking the grad functional analysis sequence, albeit late relative to when math students see it) and have a (very conservative) original math side project, so I believe I am at least capable of understanding math research. However my environment is still most conducive to studying engineering problems, not math/stats ones.

If someone in this position wanted to research and publish in mathematical statistics later on, would an engineering doctorate be enough credentials to do so?

There are several reasons I ask:

The amount of math knowledge implied by a typical engineering doctorate is not anywhere near the amount necessary to do research in statistics theory.  (Not to say the EEs I have met here aren't extremely capable in their field,  just most aren't focused on research level math).
The direction my adviser and I are headed with my current thesis is interesting and useful. I'm not about to drop my engineering degree.
If it isn't necessary I would rather not jump through all the hoops of getting a PhD all over again.

No formal credential is required for scientific publication in any discipline.

What is required is good work, presented well in a context in which the reviewers can understand your results and their significance to the community with which you are communicating.

That often strongly correlates with having a Ph.D. in the discipline in which you are publishing, since that is the most straight-forward manner in which to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for effectively engaging with such a community.  There are many other ways to get engaged with a scientific discipline, however.

For example, you're coming up on another good opportunity for shifting between communities, however, which is getting a postdoc in the area in which you work.  Given what you have described of your situation, I would suggest following through to completion with your Ph.D. work, while simultaneously continuing to explore your alternate interests and looking for a good postdoc to help you shift.


When to apply for NSF funding? At what stage of the project should you apply for NSF funding? Before working on it at all? Once you have a working paper? I'm mostly thinking in terms of economics or similar social sciences without large lab costs.

You should apply for grants at the beginning of the funding cycle. Most funding agencies provide specific dates during which they accept grant applications. Depending on the subject, there can be a funding cycle every 6 months, 8 months, or a year. For the NSF, as far as I know, the funding cycle for the Social Sciences and Economics is an annual cycle, with the deadline in August.

If your research is around halfway through by that time, I think it would be best to apply, because if you choose to wait for the completion of the work, you might have to wait for a long time. However, if you have just started your research, maybe it would be a good idea to wait and apply for funding in the next cycle. So basically, I would recommend preparing for grants application once you have enough clarity about the direction in which your study is heading.


Is it normal for math grad students to be required to take summer classes to work? My mathematics department apparently gets pressured by the university to have more people take courses during the summer.  We are also encouraged to take on TA responsibilities to make extra cash during the summer which is great.... except that they have this rule that if we want to teach/grade (or do any paid work during the summer) we have to enroll  in courses.  The options are slim and so is the stipend; I'm a grad student currently trying to prepare for my final prelim exam and do some research during the summer; I'd like to make a little extra cash.... but I crunched the numbers and it looks like I'll net about $600 for an entire summer, not exactly a living wage.

I should also add that our department (mathematics) brings more funds (in course work and its associated tuition) than any other department (I'm sure biology/chemistry pulls more in research grants), .... so it seems very tawdry of them to "get money back" by forcing us to enroll in classes.

So my question is: Is this normal?  I've spoken with some of my professors and they said it is not; but just curious what this community has to say and if this is ethical or are there any statistics on this sort of thing.

Having observed several places in several different decades: summer funding is always weird and maybe non-existent or not-a-good-deal.

During the 9-month academic year, in the U.S., yes, indeed, people working as TAs/RAs have to be registered as students (because as other people said, these are student jobs), and this entails fees. Most often, tuition is included in the "benefits", but not invariably.

At every university I've been, grad students registered in the 9-month academic year did not have to explicitly register, nor pay tuition, in the summer, in order to work as summer TAs/RAs. This part is quite anomalous, and looks like a way for some layer of the institution to suck money out of people.

My experience indicates that there's never enough summer support to go around, which effectively creates a labor surplus, which, predictably, leads to certain abuses. For that matter, the usual double-time rate of summer classes is pretty nasty, and not fun to see. A bit taxing to teach, but almost uniformly near-disastrous for the students, who cannot simply "decide" to assimilate things twice as fast.

In some cases, the funding and flow of money for summer teaching/classes is different from the 9-month year, so it is not necessarily deliberately abusive, though possibly irresponsible or negligent, of your dept to not tell you your net pay. If it's really just 600 dollars, it's a ridiculous situation, yes.

But the net pay should be substantial, not next-to-nothing. That aspect strikes me as odd.

In summary, the situation you describe is unusual in that the net pay is so low. Having to sign up for courses and pay summer fees (or, worse, tuition) is unusual. The vagueness is less atypical, since sometimes control of summer classes is not in the hands of the department.


Making business out of Ph.D. thesis Would advisors and universities generally support Ph.D. students who have an applicable thesis, to make contracts with the public sector in the US?

And, will it bring a good share for the student and advisor or mostly the university?

The answer really depends on the university you're in and the kind of agreement that you have. In most cases any intellectual property developed during your studies at an academic institution would entail signing off some rights to them. From my experience this is not a significant amount (less than 15%) but YMMV. You have to be aware that if you have any coauthors from other institutions this may complicate things - those coauthors have rights to the idea as well and that needs to be negotiated. Note that even coauthors that express no interest in joining your venture may have rights to some of the IP, and as a result to the potential profits. There are also funding agencies that may want a piece of the action (if you were supported by an industry grant for example).

In any case, your first step is to talk to your advisor/coauthors. Step two would be to contact the legal department of your university. They may ask that you remove any code you have made public (say on GitHub), and that you patent your work, a long and annoying process. I would not contact anyone about commercializing your software before a long discussion with the legal department.

This could get you in trouble, and most likely any company with a semi-competent legal team would not allow this anyway without you going through the proper channels.

Good luck!


New postdoc and I am asked to draft a whole plan I am a new postdoc at a very good university, a fresh PhD graduate. Since I passed my 2 round interviews and I was the best among the other applicants, I was appointed, and in fact, I don't know why they chose me. long story short, I am asked to draft 3 pages of research and project acquisition as well as what skills I need to improve in the following 6 months. I am serious that I feel I don't know anything or how to write. I was reading here and there, asked a lot around here, and now I can simply describe my status to be a "Confusion". I kindly ask experts here to give me some pieces of advice or some solid resources that can be helpful. what skills would you like to improve in 2 years of a postdoc position? if you are new to project acquisition, from where will you start?

Thank You.

I'm writing a partial answer initially; if you provide some more information I might be able to expand.

Some hopefully-useful suggestions / points to ponder, ordered from harsher to mellower:

It's your post-doc - you (mostly) decide. (In principle, anyway). You are a capable independent researcher - which is what your Ph.D. attests to. Perhaps that's not entirely true and you were hand-held more, or you don't feel mature enough as a person to lead research? That happens, no shame in it; but you will need to step up, for your own good and regardless of what you're asked/required to write. You yourself need to formulate plans of what you intend to investigate, what you want to self-study, which skills you are missing and want to acquire, which/what kind of people/groups you want to strike up collaborations with and so on - even if no-one were to ask you to put any of that in writing.
Work on being able to write anything and everything. Writing is a skill of critical importance for an academic. Of course there's academic-paper-writing, but expressing yourself in written form is something your're going to be doing a whole lot of, in many ways. If you feel you're not proficient enough or not experienced enough, definitely put that as one of your skills to improve - and talk to the senior group member with whom you're closest, explaining that you've had limited writing experience and you want to work on that first of all. Alternatively, you could go ask personnel, or some secretarial entity, whether there's a writing workshop/course for graduate students which you could take without credit.

Also, writing your research plan is an opportunity to improve your writing in general. Have a friend from inside or outside the group read a pre-draft of yours and give you comments on your language and writing style rather than the academic content.
Nobody said you had to come up with the plans alone. Schedule a meeting with one or more tenured researchers in the group, to discuss research ideas and directions. No need to hide the fact that you're doing it also for writing that plan - you can say that outright. Especially the "acquisition" part is a hook for getting their input, since, after all, nobody expects you to know how acquisitions work in a new workplace, or what budget is available etc. For these meetings you need to prepare, of course, but not by writing drafts; rather, think of ideas you want to pursue and the reasons you applied for a post-doc in this group.

It might also be useful to talk to other post-docs or PhD candidates to see if what they're doing is something that you want to augment or complement with your own work (before or between or after meetings with the more senior researchers).
Stand on the shoulders of midgets (or giants, whatever). Other people have been in your exact position and were asked something similar, right? Well, ask for other people's plans as an example of what these look like.


Mathematics undergrad to theoretical physics phd I'm a Second year math undergrad with another year left. I want to continue my academics further. Really interested in theoretical physics and Applied mathematics. Can I get into a   theoretical physics Phd with math undergrad degree if I ace Physics GRE?

Yes (you might not even need the Physics GRE). Example:

  The usual minimum entry requirement is a first-class honours degree, awarded after a four-year course in physics, mathematics or engineering, or a three-year degree together with a one-year postgraduate course on advanced mathematics and theoretical physics. Part III (MMath/MASt) of the Mathematical Tripos provides such a course. Note, however, that entry is competitive and a higher level of preparation may be required for research in some subject areas.


How do you determine whether a case study is fraudulent? I had recently read an interesting anthropological case study composed of interviews of Iranians before and after the Iranian Revolution. But after reading the case study, I started wondering whether the interviews actually happened. The case study does not mention the city where the anthropological case study took place, nor does it give the "true name" of the interviewees (instead "nicknames" were used). However, the anthropological case study instead provided a deep description of the city's history as well as biographical information about the interviewees...so it didn't seem that protecting privacy was really important for this author.

I don't want to assume that the case study is a lie purely on gut instinct. So what would be the steps I would need to do in order to verify that the anthropological case study actually took place, and that the author didn't simply make up all the details?

Contact the author and ask for the primary data. Offer to sign any required non-disclosure agreements. I fail to see though how providing information on the history of a city means that protecting privacy was not important to the author. The same for certain biographical information. Indeed, you appear to be adding 2+2 and coming up with 7.  If you have evidence of fraud then contact the journal. Many famous examples of "fake cases" have come to light in the last few years but your reasons for questioning the validity of these interviews (as stated in the question) appears flawed.

EDIT FROM COMMENTS

Do you really think this will be effective?
Sometimes yes,often no. But if you get a flat-out refusal this does give you some additional useful information.

Looking from the point of view of the author, suppose you have pledged confidentiality to your participants, are you really going to be comfortable voluntarily sharing your data with someone you have never met? (Is it even ethical for you to do so?)
You are making the incorrect assumption my answer says the author will reveal the identities of those interviewed. They should not and will not. What I would like to see are the notebooks or audio files with the interviews that should not contain the names if standard interviewed protocols are followed. For any interview I have done I would gladly give out the redacted transcripts.

*Would any NDA offer sufficient protection? (How would you enforce it, if the requester is in another jurisdiction?) Is it worth your time (and money) to get university counsel to draw up the NDA? *
Your NDA comment is based on the miss-assumption  I am saying the author will give out the names of those interviewed. I did not nor would I condone this. university counsel need not be involved to give out redacted transcripts of interview notes. This is just academic legal-speak. I would just draw something up asking for my notes to not be used for anything I do not want them to be used for.

Wouldn't it be much simpler and safer to just say "No"? Yes, but isn't it always when someone makes a request of your data or similar. In my experience quality academics have always made an effort when I asked for something.


Do I have recourse if one professor's section has a higher average grade and "easier time" than my course's section? From my observations comparing syllabi, grades, and coursework with a few of my peers, their professor's section of the same class has a significantly lighter work-load, more lenient grading policy, and a higher overall class-average (we're talking a letter-grade higher).

Do I have a case for a legitimate grievance?

I'm certain your university has some sort of student affairs or advising.  That's who you should talk to.

I teach a class that has another section taught by another professor, and we've worked hard to align the workload and grading.  We did so initially at the behest of the department and our own student advising dean.  Both of us found the request perfectly fair.

A few points to consider though:

Are the classes really identical?  It sounds like they are from what you wrote, but be sure.
Has this been a long-time situation?  If it has been, it's possible the department is well aware of the issue and has been unable to bring about change.  In that case there's no harm in adding your voice to it, but temper your expectations.
Is one of the instructors a new professor/post doc/grad student?  It's possible they're new to this and aren't aware that the difference is a problem.
If you're unable to get anything changed it may just be something you have to accept (or change sections) - tenured faculty often get a lot of leeway in how they handle their classes.

Regardless, if you're going to do anything, don't confront the professors until you've spoken with student affairs or advising.  This isn't something you should be putting your own reputation on the line for, and certainly not with anything like a formal grievance.


How should an independent researcher introduce him/herself in his/her to be submitted articles? As we all know, all academic professors or students who want to submit an article (research or review) to a journal should write their affiliations (their institute name and job there) on the first page of the article.
All of the articles I have read till now were from academic authors and I haven't met a single article from an independent researcher yet.

The linked questions provide good answers ("Unaffiliated Scholar" / "Independent Scholar"), but another question might be what do you hope to accomplish with your paper?
Are you trying to simply make a contribution to the academic literature? In this case, Unaffiliated Scholar might be the best approach. Are you interested in establishing your bona fides for a corporate career or consulting business? In this case, I have seen plenty of independent researchers publish with their personal consulting company as their affiliation. The paper then presumably adds to the academic literature while providing a track record to use in advertising for future consulting gigs. In this case you may need to incorporate yourself, which is beyond the scope of Academia SE.


Is Robotics and Automation Letters Open Access or Traditional Journal? I recently completed a paper and I am considering applying for the Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). Before submission, the paper plaza had a few guidelines which said

  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) is a hybrid access journal, allowing either traditional or Open Access ("golden", or author-pays OA) manuscript submission. According to the IEEE policy, you will only be able to select the Open Access option after acceptance, at the time of final submission. By selecting that option, you commit to pay the $1,950 OA fee in order to enable unrestricted public access.

I am confused with what this means? Does it mean that I will only be able to select the Open Access Option? Does it mean that I can choose the traditional option, but in case I prefer Open Access it will only be after acceptance.

"Only" means that you don't have the ability to choose traditional vs Open Access until after acceptance.


Applying for grad school without undergraduate background Is it possible to apply for a graduate program in theoretical physics without having a bachelor's degree in physics or mathematics?
I'm completely self-taught. I'm half way through Jackson electrodynamics and Peskin QFT. These books are taught to students at a graduate level, let's say that I can pass the GRE exam and graduate level examinations. Is it possible that this would substitute for an undergraduate degree?

I agree with the other answers — admitting a student without formal academic background is very risky.

As a first step, I suggest contacting graduate programs asking if they allow non-degree students to take their classes.  If so, taking classes as a non-degree student will let you build up a formal academic background and strong recommendation letters in your chosen field, making your case for admission much stronger.  And if you're admitted to the PhD program at the same university, you may be able to use the classes you've already taken toward your degree.

Taking classes will also give you a sanity check on your self-assessment.  From personal experience, it can be really hard to spot gaps in the knowledge you build from self-study, simply because you don't know enough to ask the right questions.

But once you get your foot in the door, do not just take classes; do whatever you can to get involved in research!

One significant downside to non-degree classes is that you'll almost certainly have to pay for them out of your own pocket.


What are the stages for pursuing medical sciences in America I am not an American citizen but wish to pursue my degree in America. I am currently enrolled in a bachelor's program and I am expected to graduate in 2020. Do I need do a master's program in America to pursue PhD ? Or there is direct enrollment ? (In my country the understanding is first you do a bachelors then a masters and then pursue PhD. My area of interest is Virology.

For a student in the U.S. system, the common academic route to PhD admission in biomedical sciences is to obtain a bachelors degree and then to apply directly for PhD programs. For competitive programs, research experience is very important for applications, and so many applicants do additional research in between their bachelors degree and PhD applications: working in academic labs, participating in post-baccalaureate programs, or sometimes participating in a program that offers a masters degree (particularly if you are taking a more interdisciplinary route), but the masters degree is not usually a strict requirement for a PhD program in biomedical sciences.

Masters degrees are uncommon as a goal in biomedical sciences, and many institutions do not even offer them as a program that accepts applicants. Instead, masters degrees are sometimes awarded to PhD candidates who choose to end their studies early, or they consist of add-on programs (almost like a more developed 'minor') meant to accompany a PhD and are applied for simultaneously. Of course this can vary with the exact institution, and varies in other fields.

For a student outside the U.S. system, things can be more complicated. As discussed in the comments by BrianBorchers, U.S. institutions vary in how they treat bachelors degrees completed in other countries. A 3 year program (an actual 3 year program, not a 4 year program completed early) may not qualify. In that case, your best option may be to get a masters degree in the educational system you got your bachelors degree in, but this is something you should discuss with individual programs you may be interested in applying to in order to find out their specific rules: there is no guideline that will apply to every school or every program. Alternatively, programs may instead have a course of study in mind that you will have to have completed before your application is considered: it will be more important that you can show you have completed those courses in your studies rather than the specific length of your degree.

Most major PhD programs in the U.S. are going to have a web presence with rules and admissions requirements posted, as well as support staff for the program. You should read these as thoroughly as you can, and then ask additional questions to the staff.


I want to write a historical research paper I apologize if this isn't the place to post a question like this. Feel free to close it if that's the case.

So I want to write a historical research paper on a particular event in a past U.S. president's life. However, I'm not in academia. In fact I only have a high school education. Writing the paper isn't my problem, but I'm not sure what to do with it afterwards. Should I even try to publish it or just keep it to myself as a personal exercise?

There is no requirement to be in academia in order to be able to publish. You need to find a "suitable" journal for your work and figure out how to submit to them. Now a days it is mostly via an online form. They may ask for some background on you, such as affiliation, but that is more for informational purposes than anything. Independent Researcher is a valid "affiliation", generally.

But you may want to get some advice from someone in the field if you have any doubts about the quality or relevance of your work. You may need to decide whether the academic or popular press is more appropriate for your work, and a pro may be able to help you with that.

But, hopefully, your research took you through papers written in reputable journals. Those are the ones to consider first.


How to define methodology for two different approaches? I am working on my Master Thesis and I am exploring two different approaches to the same problem. I am having trouble deciding on how to structure the Methodology section to divide these two approaches, since they share some components.

The best way to go about this is to be very clear about what you're doing. Label one as Methodology A and the other as Methodology B. Write them up separately and if then if you feel it necessary, write how they are similar.

When moving forward in your thesis be sure then to refer to each methodology explicitly in the context of what results were achieved et cetera.

As long as the reader is fully aware of what you're doing throughout, it shouldn't be a problem.


How to thank or apologize to an associate editor of a journal? Suppose that when submitting a paper to a journal I made a mistake that resulted in some rule violation. No one detected this rule violation until the decision was announced. Once the decision was announced, the associate editor sent me an email to warn me for future submission.

I would like to reply to him/her. What should I write? An apology? A thanking?

I would simply write a brief email along the lines of "Thanks for notifying me of the mistake, I will bear that in mind for future submissions. Apologies that I didn't catch it sooner."


How should I thank this person who wrote a letter of rec for me (but to a different school than the one I'm attending?) I've poked around the answers here and I think my situation is unusual enough to warrant a new question. In short, I applied to graduate programs for this fall, and I did the rounds asking my professors to write letters for me. Four of them agreed, and I ended up dividing them amongst the schools that I had selected. The thing is, though, that each professor thought I was applying only to the schools that they were writing letters for.

Fast-forward past application season. I get into my schools and pick one, and I've written thank-you letters already to the three who wrote letters for my chosen school. That leaves the fourth professor, though, who might be confused (or worse, offended!) that I will end up attending a school that he knew absolutely nothing about. How should I handle this situation? I guess I could just say a generic "thanks for writing letters", but a natural segue from that is "and I got into X school", which is the awkward bit here.

Directly, as if they were an actual human being.

"Thank you for providing letters of recommendation for my graduate school applications.  I will be joining the musicology PhD program at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople next fall.  Although I did not need your letter for my USNDH application, I still very much appreciate your support through the application process."


Why use version control systems for writing a paper? I am following the advice of @Piotr Migdal in Is there an internet Git-like repository for collaboration on a paper?, and I want to ask about version controls: how beneficial are they (specially under LaTeX settings) for writing papers compared to Dropbox and SugarSync?

I have been using SugarSync for almost a year with no pain.
Usually, I create the paper folder and invite other authors to join, so we can see and edit the last version of the paper.

tl;dr: Version control is harder to set up, but makes it safe to work on the same file, and makes it easy to track history (i.e. previous versions).

Pros and cons of syncing files

Yes, the biggest advantage of things like Dropbox (I use it as well for backuping and synchronizing my files) and SugarSync is their easiness.

They may work for collaboration on files, but:

they are not meant for two people editing the same file at once (no merge functionalities - so one guy changing a file can overwrite changes made by other guy, even without knowing that),
you get no history, i.e.:

did anyone worked on that file I want to work know?
did anyone added or modified any other files?
which changes were made?
can I go to a previous version, the one I sent to my supervisor?

Depending what you do, it may not be an issue. For example, if only one is editing tex file, while others are only reading or uploading figures - it's perfectly fine.

And also, look at my answer on Simplest way to jointly write a manuscript? with a not technically-inclined collaborators.

Version control

Version control systems require some technical skills.

Two the most common version control systems are Git and Mercurial (with the second one being more Windows-friendly and, arguably, easier to start).

Both by standard comes only with command line access, but there are some graphical interfaces as well (I really recommend starting with SourceTree).

So, if the collaborators are techie, just teach them how to use it. If not - there is a way around.

You can keep track of version control by yourself, without engaging others (I'm doing it just now with 2 collaborators).

Just you start a repository inside folder you share (the examples are with Git):

cd ~/path/to/the/folder
git init                    // start git repository inside this folder
git add .                   // say git to track all files inside it

Now, every time you or your collaborator make some changes (e.g. add some files, correct typos, revise a chapter, ...) you do:

git commit -a -m "Fixed typos in Seciton 3"

Later, you will be able to go back to this version; and also compare, e.g. the current version of your file with the previous one (by default - by line, here - by words):

git diff HEAD~1 --color-words my_file.tex

See also:

Got 15 minutes and want to learn Git?
git + LaTeX workflow at StackOverflow
Writing the PhD thesis: the tools Part I
Collaborating with LaTeX and git at ShareLaTeX blog - a great and comprehensive tutorial
What are the advantages of using version control (git, CVS etc) in LaTeX documents - TeX.SE
https://tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=version+control

And real world example from using diff (it makes my life so much easier :)); commit messages in Polish, but I guess you get the idea:

Otherwise (a strip from PhD Comics):


second on campus interview for TT faculty position (3rd interview total) I have a question for anyone who might be a department chair or on a search committee. What does it mean if you get invited for a second on-campus interview? I have already been there once for a standard on campus interview. For context, this is for a tenure track assistant professor position in the sciences.

I have been a department chair (math department, large US university) and nonetheless find your situation completely baffling. I have literally never heard of a TT job candidate being invited to a second on-campus interview. This is so unusual that I can’t really come up with a plausible guess for why the department that invited you thinks they need you to visit again; moreover, I think this may potentially bring the competence of the people who came up with this plan into question.

Please don’t rely on idle speculation by strangers online. My advice is to email the people who invited you and ask them to clarify what their plan is for the second visit and why they think it is needed. In my opinion, if you already had one on-campus interview, at least in a normal situation they should have all the information about you that they need in order to make a hiring decision. So I’m guessing their explanation may not be the most logical one. But at least you will have a sense of where they’re coming from.


Use of theses after their completion Can a student expect their completed thesis – undergraduate or master’s – to be used by the supervisor once in a while after its completion? Or are they mostly just stored on some thesis shelf?

The fate of a thesis is much the same as any other scientific publication: many will never be used again and will lie forgotten where they are published.  Some will be useful to somebody and will be cited or built upon.  And a few of those will actually be truly significant.


What Is A Typical Computer Science Ph.D. Interview Like? I had my very first-ever interview for a Ph.D. position (program analysis) in computer science in Germany today. Well, after sending my application, I was asked to prepare a two-page research statement which I was given positive feedback on and, consequently, was invited to take an interview so that "[...] You will be asked some non-technical and some technical questions, including some programming questions". In the interview, and after saying hi, how are you, and tell me a little about yourself, the professor started firing algorithmic questions towards me. He even asked me to implement an algorithm for a string manipulation question in firepad.
Well, I wasn't prepared to be asked directly about coding and finding working algorithms for specific problems and, unfortunately, my mind went completely blank. I thought an interview would include conceptual technical questions like tell us about your ideas in our field of research or tell us about your master's thesis or at least I'd expected to be asked some programming questions like what is the difference between this and that in Java or tell us about collections in Java. My question is now:
Does a typical Ph.D. interview in computer science really include such detailed questions? or I was a very unlucky person that my first ever interview went this way?

There really is no "typical" interview protocol for CS PhD positions. The kinds of questions asked will mostly depend on the qualities and skills that the PI deems relevant for the position. If the work requires specialized technical knowledge, it's possible that the PI will try to test this knowledge, and programming tasks are a valid way of doing that.
In your case, one could argue that the PI slightly miscommunicated the contents of the interview, since a programming task is arguably not a programming question.


Possible reasons for an author to withdraw authorship from an almost ready paper What can be some possible reasons for an author to request his name be removed from an almost ready paper?

The authors consist of 4 students and our professor. A few days before the submission deadline, the professor told us to remove his name from the paper for "personal reasons".  This makes me wonder if he thinks the paper is of very low quality. Is there any other possible reason?

The field is computer science. The supervisor contributed a lot and the paper was written for a conference.

In general coauthors should communicate with each other about what they're doing and why.  It is strange to withdraw as an author for "personal reasons," as this is a purely professional decision.

A supervisor of a graduate student has much more responsibility: they have a mentoring role on the project and they are training the student both intellectually and professionally.  In my opinion it is not acceptable for an advisor to take their name off a paper without offering any real explanation.

Of course this puts you in an awkward position.  I would nevertheless recommend trying to talk to your supervisor about this, preferably in person. If you have your own concerns regarding the quality of the paper, then I'm sorry to say that you should think very carefully before going ahead with the submission.  It might be appropriate to tell your supervisor that you will delay submission until after discussing the reasons for their withdrawal, but I leave that decision up to you.


Does a recommender need information about my current job? I have asked my PhD supervisor to write a letter of recommendation for me for faculty positions. He has asked me to first write three paragraphs about my research in my current postdoc studies. Is this normal? Why would he need to know about my postdoc research?

Yes, it's normal and very good for him to have this information.

Think about it.  Which of the following letters (slightly exaggerated) seems stronger?

  I was Adamia's PhD supervisor.  She wrote her dissertation on XYZ and obtained nice results on P, Q and R. Since then she has been a postdoc at ABC.  I have no idea what she's doing there and I really don't care, it's probably not that interesting.

It shows that you used to be doing good work, but doesn't establish a continuing record.  Compare with:

  I was Adamia's PhD supervisor.  She wrote her dissertation on XYZ and obtained nice results on P, Q and R. Since then she has been a postdoc at ABC, where she has been working on J, K and L, and published two papers in top journals.

If he can address your current work in your letter, he can assert with more conviction that you have an ongoing pattern of success that is likely to continue into a new job.


Differences in student load at liberal arts colleges vs. research universities Do students at liberal arts universities have 'harder' courses than students at research universities?

Computer Science curricula at large research universities have 5 to 6 courses per semester. The Liberal Arts model dictates roughly 4 courses per semester. If the load on the student is considered to be equivalent, there must be something special to the teaching in the Liberal Arts model.

How is it that a 4 course Liberal Arts semester is as intensive as a 6 course research university semester?

UPDATE: Many of the comments below say the course load I mention above is inaccurate. I have obtained the figures as follows.

The Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium (LACS) has released 3 LACS curricula in response to ACM/IEEE CS curriculum recommendations. The first in 1986 in response to the 1978 recommendation, next in 1996 in response to the 1991 recommendation and the most recent in 2007 in response to the 2001 recommendation. The 4 year course breakdown in all the LACS recommendations is roughly the same:

4 courses per semester
30-35% CS courses, 10% math, 5% science, and the rest, i.e. 50% or more courses on arts, humanities and social sciences.

A typical graduation requirement at a research university is at least 120 credits, which comes to 5 3-credit courses per semester. Many require more than 120 so 6 course semesters are not uncommon.

As with other commenters, I think the premise here is flawed.

I teach at a public liberal arts college which is typical of many. (Certainly our curriculum and requirements are in line with other schools in the COPLAC Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges.)

Our students are required to complete 120 credits to graduate, which over four years averages to 15 credits a semester, or five 3-credit courses. I don't believe there is any serious difference in student course load when compared to large research universities (but maybe someone will prove me wrong).

The main distinction about teaching at a liberal arts college is that the overall curriculum is broader, and students do not focus on specialization as much as integration of diverse subject areas. Instead of taking 70 or 80 credits of (say) computer science, our students take only 40-45, with the other two-thirds of their degree consisting of courses in other areas. In this way, students build a broad, integrated perspective which incorporates their major into a study of the world at large. The focus at liberal arts colleges is to help students become better critical thinkers, decision makers, and problem solvers, rather than becoming subject matter experts in a narrow discipline.


How to avoid thinking about research in free time? I work on research, trying to get grants and publish papers and the like, I really like my job, could not think about doing anything else. When the weekend comes, or just free time I have the problem that I can not stop thinking on research, it does not matter what. Sometimes it is that I feel so relaxed during the weekend that new ideas come to my mind and then I can not avoid to write them down or think a bit more about them. My wife obviously does not like this, but I try my best.

Do you experience the same and do you know how to avoid this?

I agree with @PeterJanson's answer, but I'd like to add my 2 cents on it:

Often, I find myself "constantly" thinking about a problem when I'm stuck or I'm not sure how to approach it.  Often, it's because I've got tunnel vision on the problem.  That is, I'm only thinking about it from a limited number of perspectives and can't think of other possible approaches to the problem.  I used to spend long hours thinking about a problem (even outside of normal work hours) without ever really getting anywhere on it.

When that happens, I find it's good to pursue other activities that stimulate my brain to think outside of the box.  That could be anything from reading semi-related research papers to playing video games to engaging in stand up comedy!  When I challenge my brain to approach other problems from new perspectives, I find those same skills help loosen my brain to engage in research in new ways as well.

While I never really stop thinking about research, I find these other activities help me engage in research with fresh eyes and renewed energy.  And ultimately, that has lead me to better research results and liberates me from "overthinking" the problem during my leisure time.


What kind of Visa is required to work in Academia in Japan? As from title. What kind of visa class do I have to apply for, in order to work as an academic in Japan ?

This might help or this. Here is the crux of the information:

The period of stay is quoted as 3 years/1 year with the following documents needed:

Passport
One visa application form (nationals of Russia or NIS countries need to submit two visa application forms)
One photograph (nationals of Russia or NIS countries need to submit two photographs)
Certificate of Eligibility (Note) - the original and one copy

This visa applied for Long-term stay for the following occupations:

Working visa: professor, artist, religious activities, journalist, investor/business manager, legal/accounting services, medical services, researcher, instructor, engineer, specialist in humanities/International Services

The algorithm for obtaining the visa is given on the first link I added.


Is this rejection rude? Should I apply to another position in the same University? I applied for an adjunct position and never heard back from the school. I emailed them to learn about the status of my application and this is the response I received: Your resume is competitive but doesn't meet our needs. Am I overreacting for thinking that this is a rude rejection letter (well, one sentence!)? There is another position open, but I am hesitant to apply. What would you do if you were me?
p.s.1 Sorry, I know this is a petty question, but I have become very picky since I want to work in a healthy environment.
p.s.2 I am pretty confident I am not underqualified for the position.

This seems to me like a normal rejection letter.  They normally don't really contain any information except "you didn't get the job".  Some letters do go on for longer about "we had so many great candidates and we wish we could hire them all, blah blah blah" but I wouldn't really say that makes them more polite.

In particular, I certainly would not draw any conclusions about the "healthiness" of the environment from this letter.  It might be a good department or a bad one, but this letter doesn't help you to determine which; you'll need to investigate that in other ways.  See:

How can I detect a toxic environment while on the interview circuit?
"Warning signs" that candidates should be aware of during an academic job interview
What things can I do as a job market candidate to gauge the internal political culture of a department that is hiring?


How are suitable epigraphs in books found? Sometimes we see some scientific books (for example in the fields of computer science, game theory, ...) start their chapters (mostly the first chapter) with epigraphs from famous people, movies, an important event like famous conferences....
How the writers find these sentences? Since they are more or less related to the subject of the book's (or chapter) discussion, it seems that they can't be found accidentally by watching a movie during the writing process, or just the nice sentences be gathered during the time.
Is it practically possible to search on the internet for a suitable quote just at the time of preparing that specific writing/book/presentation? What should be searched for? Could anyone please give me some practical directions?

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
― Mark Twain

Read a lot and remember.  Write quotable quotes in a notebook if you feel you might be able to use them in the future.


Is it possible to get a PhD with personal research? I'm a master computer science student. I decided to leave the academia after graduation, but I'm still into research and would like to do personal research independently for like 10 years. Suppose I publish a lot of papers in valuable journals, is it possible to get a PhD after that somehow?

Some universities offer the option of a 'PhD by published works'.  See this question for more information.  Is that the sort of thing you're looking for?


How should I begin my meeting with my former teacher whom I haven't been in contact with for three years? I am going to meet my former teacher in my former school. We have some interests and hobbies in common, but we had not been in contact for several years.

I want to be careful about etiquette and manner. I don't want her to think me impolite by beginning the conversation with sentences like "Hello Prof. ABC. How was your recent journey in Japan? Had you brought me a souvenir of Tokyo?"

She has agreed to write a few recommendation letters for me to apply for multiple programs at several universities. Should I say "Can we talk about my recommendation letters first because you have agreed to help me..." I am a bit nervous for the meeting with her this Friday.

If she has already agreed to write you a recommendation letter, I would think the most nerve-wracking part is over. At least for me, meeting with professors and not knowing with 100% certainty that they would write a letter for me was the source of most of my anxiety over the meetings.

I would definitely not ask if she brought you a souvenir from Japan (or anywhere else) unless this is a culturally acceptable thing (at least in the US, such a question would likely be considered strange at best and rude at worst). I would also avoid questions/topics that can be considered personal, like her living situation, love life, et cetera.

I think it would be fine to ask her about her travels (e.g., "tell me about Japan"), or ask her about her current research or experience at the school. At least to me, those are innocent questions that also show that you have an interest in what she has been doing. From there, you can lead the conversation to what you have been doing and what you plan on doing in graduate school, and this naturally leads to a discussion of the recommendation letter.


Is it okay to have an additional authors for majority of my work in my undergrad thesis? Background: My undergrad thesis primarily consists of 4 Methods converted into individual chapters (excluding intro, results, conclusion etc.). One chapter dedicates one specific idea. Each chapter is based on a published/to be published/pre-pint "work". Basically, I have converted each "work" into a chapter.
Now, 3 out of the 4 chapters has 2 additional authors (plus my advisor) but I am the first author in all of them with the major contribution.
Questions:

Is this okay? Should I just leave this as separate papers and leave the thesis altogether? (I don't have the time to develop a separate research and form a thesis out of it.)
Should undergrad thesis work only be based on one author plus advisor?
How does this look front of a PhD CS admit panel? (Say USA).

Additional Reason to build the thesis: The 4 papers are bound by a core specific domain and are quite inter-related in there work.
Note: I have no constraint for course requirements from my university. The thesis is optional. I can drop it anytime. Even at the last second. My university if fine with point 1 and 2. I am asking in terms of phd admit panels and just "in the eyes of other academics" in general.

Since you are not asking about the legalities of handing in such a thesis, I will assume that you have checked that there are no problems obtaining your qualifying degree after handing it in. My answer is contingent on that. I am not in CS, but I don't think the answer is field specific. (in fact it is probably not even specific to academia, but also holds for industry to some degree)
The main question I want answered when I look at PhD applications is:

Can this person independently perform high quality work? Or do I have a reasonable expectation that it will be easy to teach the person to do so?

Strong indicators for this are:

Consistently good performance in courses.
A well-written undergraduate thesis which reflects independent work.
A publication based on thesis work, where it is clear that the student was a driving force.
Independent projects performed at eg. summer schools.

Weaker, but still good, indicators are:

Recommendation letters highlighting the candidate's independence.
Publications where it is clear that everything was completely driven by a supervisor, and the student was just along for the ride.
Experience working with different supervisors.

Red flags:

A weak thesis, not reflecting independent work at all.
Poor performance in courses.

If I got an application from a person with essentially no undergraduate thesis, but a compilation of pre-prints with co-authors, my natural question would be if the person has actually done any of this work themselves. I am not hiring the full team who published these papers - I am hiring one student, who is likely the most junior person on those teams. I would need to be convinced that these papers are the product of your work. You could do that by:

Specifying your contribution to the individual papers in your application.
Actually writing a full thesis, and not a compilation, at mark the papers as "based on thesis X". This would come off very strong, especially if they eventually get published.
Having a supervisor write a recommendation letter saying that, yes, you did a lot of work.


Can I do research at the university without acceptance to the university Is it possible to do research at the university without acceptance to the university? What I mean that if I have free time and desire to help with projects, can I join some reseach group.

The question is not a legal stuff (I suppose that's legal :) ), but what are the chances that some university lab accept me?

I do not want to search for work position as little afraid about strict timelines. At the end I hope to get few articles that will help me to get to grad school and nice spent time.

Desired field is robotics.

Thanks for ideas and opinions.

I believe that this is usually up to the faculty member that is running the research project. A couple of my friends in grad school contributed to our research group prior to their actual grad-school application, so that the faculty would know them better when the application came around.

(My area of research is compilers, different specialty, but still in the Computer Science/Computer Engineering department.)

When/if you do contact faculty members, try to have some concrete ideas and thoughts (and mention that you are looking for experience only for future grad-school applications, not a paid position.) Professors get bombarded with emails about grad students wanting TA/grader/RA positions every day, so you won't get a second thought if you send something generic. If you're very new to robotics, then instead of a concrete research topic, you could say something concrete about your experience and send your resume.

Contributing to a project, especially if it leads to a paper (but even if it doesn't) will definitely improve your grad-school application. It's a good strategy!


Hypotheses that cannot be sufficiently tested My understanding is that a hypothesis is not scientific unless there is a way to sufficiently test it.

Is it ever acceptable to present a hypothesis that cannot be sufficiently tested?

I can imagine a situation where one has a hypothesis (A) that can be sufficiently tested via available research methods (e.g. a questionnaire) and another (B) that can only be sufficiently tested via other research methods that you do not have the resources to conduct (e.g. face-to-face interviews).

Would it be acceptable to partially test for hypothesis B and collect some preliminary data for it in this fictitious questionnaire, despite knowing that this would be an imperfect test? But then, if the testing method is imperfect, would this truly be considered a hypothesis or something else?

Bose-Einstein condensation was predicted in 1924 and only actually seen in 1995.

Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein in 1916. It was proved that they followed from general relativity in 1958. They were observed indirectly in 1974, and observed directly in 2015.

If "science" had been restricted to hypotheses which could be tested in the near future with available methods, then these predictions would not have been considered science, and it would have set physics back by decades.

I would agree that hypotheses which cannot be tested in principle are unscientific.


Does living in university housing mean that they will own intellectual property you create there? So I was wondering. Most IP policies at Universities state that you must work on inventions, software, etc. on your own time in order to keep your rights to it. Most also say that you can't use University facilities in the process. But if you live in student housing, wouldn't this count as a "University facility." So wouldn't it technically be impossible to patent something while keeping your rights?

University IP policies generally have a separate category for intellectual property created using resources "usually and customarily provided" by the university. In every policy I've ever seen, even if the university generally retains ownership of IP created using university facilities, this excludes the above category (which would certainly include standard university housing).

For example, at the University of Illinois:

  Traditional academic copyrightable works created using university resources usually and customarily provided are owned by the creators. Such works need not be licensed to the University.

  When determining ownership and license rights in copyrightable works, "University resources usually and customarily provided" includes office space, library facilities, ordinary access to computers and networks, or salary.

At the University of Arkansas:

  Creator is entitled to copyright ownership and right to revenues subject to compliance with conflict of interest and commitment policies.

  This category applies when the faculty or staff member constructs the materials using nothing more than university resources usually and customarily provided. These include but may not be limited to office space, library facilities, ordinary access to computers and networks, faculty development workshops, or salary.

  The author owns the copyright and is entitled to receive all revenues for commercialization, subject to the conflict of interest and commitment policies.

An alternative terminology for the same concept is to distinguish between "substantial" and non-substantial use of resources. For example, at Minnesota State:

  Substantial Use of Resources. Substantial use exists when resources are provided beyond the normal professional, technology, and technical support supplied by the college, university, and/or system office to an individual or individuals for development of a project or program.

Or at CMU:

  Substantial use of university facilities means extensive unreimbursed use of major university laboratory, studio or computational facilities, or human resources. The use of these facilities must be important to the creation of the intellectual property; merely incidental use of a facility does not constitute substantial use, nor does extensive use of a facility commonly available to all faculty or professional staff (such as libraries and offices), nor does extensive use of a specialized facility for routine tasks.


Why is PhD GPA considered irrelevant? The importance of a recent PhD’s GPA was recently dismissed in another question (What does an industry recruiter want to know my Ph.D. GPA for?).

Why isn’t GPA considered relevant for graduate study?

Simple: a graduate degree (esp. PhD) is about research. GPA doesn't measure research ability to any extent.


Publishing a framework review I have been examining a novel machine-learning framework for a seminar at uni.
After some people asked me whether I would publish the results in a paper so they could see them as well, I thought I might as well put some more effort into it and make a publication out of it.

However:

I am not sure whether this adds any research value since I did not really do something new, I just summarized the key concepts of the framework and took example use-cases to compare their implementation with and without the framework (implementations without the comparison have been done in blog posts).
I have recently been told that publications in a non-high-ranking journal can actually hurt your career. I do not want this to negatively affect my PhD application later this year.

My question is thus: Is it worth publishing a paper that is only an examination of a framework and a comparison with not using it?

Some technical background: the framework in question is Google's TensorFlow and I am comparing plain Python implementations of machine learning algorithms with the implementation utilizing the framework.
I wanted to also briefly summarize the framework and compare it with other machine learning frameworks already out there - this is only half a page regarding performance, capability etc though, no code is compared here.
Ultimately, the paper aims at people currently using Python who are not sure whether they should switch.

I think that there are two questions in here that it may be useful to separate out:

Should you spend the time to prepare a well-written analysis that you make publicly available to others?
Should you make your analysis available in the form of a peer-reviewed paper?

For the first, it seems that you've done much of the analytical work already, and that there are people who will appreciate it.  I thus see no reason not to produce a good write-up and publish it.

Whether you should publish it as a peer-reviewed paper, on the other hand, is not so clear to me.  I don't think that you need to worry about being looked down upon for publishing such a paper: that concern is more about bad work, not work with a clear, intentionally limited scope.  I just don't think there's much to gain from going through a formal peer review process here unless your work involved more experimentation and surprises than it sounds like it did.

Instead, I would recommend posting your analysis as a technical memo (many institutions have a mechanism of this sort), a whitepaper, an arXiv pre-print, or other such semi-formal document.  A semi-formal publication of this sort can place your work in a permanent archive with a DOI and clear means of citing if people find it useful, yet also is fast, easy, and need not be a significant distraction from the main thrust of your research.


Alternative title for research assistant I’m taking a (non-student) job as a full time research assistant in a university engineering department, and am wondering what alternate title I could use for this on my resume that isn’t misleading.

Research assistant has a connotation of being a lower level student job, and I have a MS degree and ten years of work experience, so I’m hesitant to put that title on my resume.  If this was in industry I could use research engineer, but in academia, that has a connotation of someone who is a principle investigator and has a PhD.

My job description is a hybrid between these: I’ll be doing research and publishing, but in support of someone else’s project.  Also some departmental work setting up labs, learning and maintaining the equipment and helping teach students to use it.  Most of my time will be spent on research activities.  Suggestions for an alternate job title?

Since you are in the US, I think "Research Assistant" is actually not as inappropriate a title for your position as you suggest. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_assistant

"Research Assistant" is typically the job title a PhD student would hold if they are compensated for work on a professor's research, whether or not they have a masters degree. It is differentiated from "Research Associate" which suggests the person has a PhD ('postdocs' often have a job title of Research Associate, though they may also be referred to as Postdoctoral Research Assistants). Your years of experience on the outside aren't particularly relevant to the title.

You write:

  I’ll be doing research and publishing, but in support of someone else’s project

That's roughly the job description of a graduate student with a research assistantship.

Undergraduates may also have a "research assistant" title but in my experience that is not the most common use/connotation of the term, so I disagree with that statement at least within academia. People outside of academia may be misinformed, of course, but it's up to the rest of your resume to inform potential employers of your responsibilities and accomplishments besides your particular job title. You could be an independent consultant and name yourself CEO if you wanted, or Grand Emperor for that matter. It may be harder to change your official job title in a rigid university bureaucracy than you think - I'd concern yourself with other aspects of your resume instead.


When listing refereed papers in a CV, should I highlight my name in authors lists? I am experimental physics grad student updating my CV / publications/talks list in preparation for applying to postdoctoral positions.

In my refereed publications list, while a few of the most recent papers have me as the first author, the majority do not. So my question is as follows: Should I highlight my name in the lists somehow? If so, italics, boldface, or something else?

I do not generally see people highlighting their name in a CV in this way, and I do not think that it is necessary (though perhaps the culture in experimental physics is different).  In a CV, you are by definition an author of every listed paper, and papers where you are first author leap out pretty easily to the eye already---unless you've got lots of papers, in which case, why worry about it?  If you highlight your name, on the other hand, I think that it could come across as insecure, since it is not normally done.


Are there any good strategies for conveying the true significance of the results that look obvious post factum? In nearly any field there is a number of important results which look obvious to experts post factum but somehow are not that easy to come by in the first place (e.g. in mathematics some important definitions look exactly like this). Unfortunately, this apparent post factum simplicity makes conveying the importance of the idea to expert audience (and in particular to the journals' editors and referees) very difficult. To make things worse, sometimes the author is unable to illustrate the application of the idea by sufficiently striking examples.

  The question is whether it is possible (and if yes, how) to mitigate this apparent post factum simplicity in the talks and research articles, i.e., what can be done to adequately convey the significance of "post-factum-obvious" results to the audience and, in particular, to get these results to the journals they truly deserve?

I am particularly interested in the advice applicable to mathematics/mathematical physics but the suggestions suitable for other fields are very welcome too, as the situation in question does not seem to be all that field-specific.

The best approach may be to address the issue head-on: include a paragraph in the cover letter, in the introduction or discussion sections of a manuscript, and explicitly in the conclusions section of a talk, that sets up a "straw man" critique. Something like: this result may seem obvious because of (expectations in the field; the beguiling simplicity of the final proof; the incorrect assumption that the problem was already solved; etc). But actually that assumption is flawed (and say or show why). Our result is not obvious because (state reasons).


What should you consider before upload a revision to your arXiv paper when you spot an error? I am in process of uploading a paper for arXiv. I have looked over the paper for several weeks now and it seems that there are no major issues, however, the paper is 24 pages long so I have accepted the possibility of having a few (non-trivial) typos and grammar mistakes here and there.

My question is, what should you consider before uploading a revision to your already uploaded paper, should you spot a mistake?

I am only asking because it seems that the people I have came across in my field rarely upload a revision, whether or not there are mistakes in their paper. One, for example, contained a glaring mistake in an important part of a proof, but the mistake is still there; I can see it now. The paper has been there for a year now, it has gone through a formal revision at a conference (where the mistake was corrected). But why not simply correct their arXiv copy?

Should I wait until more feedback is received before uploading a new revision? If so, how long? Is it okay to upload the revised version immediately or is there some arXiv mechanism that prevents me from doing so?

Is there a catch for uploading revisions?

Some journal policies can prevent people from uploading new versions of a paper based on feedback from their review process, at least for a certain time period.  Some journals in some fields will even consider an arxiv version a "prior publication" of the paper, and as such won't bother to even review it.

Even if there's only a time delay, it's entirely possible that the author(s) simply forgot, as after 6+ months they are probably swamped in new projects, new semesters, etc.  This can be compounded if the corrected version uses journal specific styles, and so would have to be edited to be suitable for the Arxiv.

Individual authors also use the Arxiv differently.  Some of them use it simply as a way to announce their results once they've advanced far enough for a preprint. Such people are unlikely to bother with updating, especially if the paper gets accepted by the first journal it is submitted to.  Others go further and view it as a paywall free way to maintain an accurate and up-to-date record of their work.  These people are likely to update with corrected and published versions whenever possible, and may view doing so as an important (or even necessary) service to the research community.  Many sit in between: they may update when significant changes in the results have been made, but won't bother with grammar and typo fixes alone.

In short: it's a matter of personal taste and preference.  You don't want to submit an update for each typo you find, but you should at some point have a sense of "meaningful amounts of change has occurred, and I do not think I'll be making any more changes in the near future", at which point it would be appropriate to update if so desired.


Is it impossible to find a PhD position for someone who has failed courses during their master's degree? Suppose a computer science student who has had lots of life problems and failed courses during their master's degree, but eventually defended successfully with an excellent score, seeks PhD positions.
Is it impossible for him to get accepted into a PhD position and a professor who's willing to work with the student or is there still a chance, even a little?
The student is from Iran, seeking PhD positions in Canada or Germany.

I will answer specifically for the German system, as that is one of the two countries the OP expressed interest in in the comments.
To enroll in a German PhD programme, you need the agreement of a professor to supervise you and (typically) an MSc in a related subject with (often) grades exceeding some threshold. Only the overall grade on your MSc certificate matters, not the individual modules.
Thus, the fact that you have some failed modules on your transscript will only matter for your admission to a German PhD programme indirectly, by impacting your ability to convince a professor to take you on as a student. There might be some professors for whom this is a deal-breaker, but there will also be some who don't much care; and certainly many who see it as a negative which can be overcome by other strengths.
It is worth pointing that failing modules is very common [or at least, used to be until not too long ago] in the German system (eg the math exam in computer science often have failure rates of 50%+). So I expect much less of a stigma carried by it than it seems to have in the US, for instance.


In American universities, do teaching assistants and adjuncts get paid for holding office hours? I'm reading a contract for my teaching assignments this semester, and it seems that my office hours weren't counted as "contact hours".

Should I be getting paid for the hours that I hold office hours for students?

Your university should have a written policy, something like this. They may also have a published TA pay scale, something like this. Hopefully these kinds of resources can provide an answer to your question, however it is not uncommon that such positions (and their responsibilities/pay) are worked out between the TA and the course master on a per-course basis. If this is the case then you'll need to talk to the person who hired you.

My experience is that TA positions are usually a salaried position, and that specific course responsibilities are worked out between the TA and the course master. In a salaried position you don't get paid by how many hours you work. Office hours are considered a normal of part a TA's responsibilities, and if you're salaried then you don't get paid per hour. (This is a good thing- if I got paid only when students showed up I'd earn no money for two weeks and then work 24 hours straight before deadlines.)

The term "contact hours" will have a specific definition at your university, but where I've seen it used before it only applies to teaching in a scheduled group setting, not for office hours. Doing a scheduled recitation section for six students counts as a contact hour, but having a busy afternoon in office hours with six students in your office does not. For me, contact hours are scheduled lectures and recitations, not office hours.

If you feel like you are overworked or underpaid, there are a few suggestions:

Set an office hours schedule and don't feel bad about enforcing it. Most universities, if they have a policy, expect around 4-6 hours of office hours per week. Schedule them, make them known to students, and then don't feel bad about kicking people out when they're over.
If you feel like TA'ing is taking up too much of your time, go talk to the course master. If you have documented that there are too many students for you to handle individually, it is often possible to get funding approved for another TA.
If you feel like you're not being paid enough for your time, you're probably right. Welcome to the club... you'll graduate someday.


Is it okay if a student wears a mask to class to conceal scars? Like a halloween mask to conceal injuries of a burn?

Of course. If there's a medical reason for it and the student can produce an appropriate doctor's certificate or what not. You would need to check the regulations.

It probably depends on what sort of mask it is. If the mask is distracting for other students  or plain silly, then I can imagine that it is reasonable to object to it. So, 'halloween mask' may not be the best description of an appropriate mask.