Is it okay to refuse a laptop from a new university if you already have your own personal laptop? I got a postdoc position and I am moving to a new university. I was  contacted by my new professor about choosing a laptop that the department would buy for me.
The option they have is roughly the same model I have currently as my private machine, and the one that I have used to finish my grad school. Thus I find another laptop unnecessary, but also a hassle (having two computers means installing the same stuff twice, etc.).

My question: is it a bad idea to refuse their offer?

Additional information:

I don't have problems using my private computer for work, nor mixing personal and work stuff on the same machine. I did that during my graduate school.
But also I understand the pros of getting a work computer (e.g. if the laptop is broken or stolen it will get taken care of) and that my response of refusing their offer may be strange.

It surely matters where you are.

In the U.S., at many universities, "privileged information" of various sorts is supposedly not ever to be kept on "personal", as opposed to "institution-owned and maintained" machines. Or, as in some comments, as soon as you do have work-related data on your personal machine, that machine becomes liable to Freedom-of-Information warrants, and you yourself can get into various sorts of trouble for insufficiently guaranteeing security.

A similar issue exists (depending on jurisdiction, etc) with regard to email accounts. My (U.S. R1) university account is subject to search without too much probable cause. Some of my colleagues hesitate to have any substantive-sensitive discussion by email because the University's policy is that we are not to delete any such email, but preserve it indefinitely. That kind of thing. (No, it's not clear how this would be enforced, nor what the impact of "pleading ignorance/technical-incompetence" would result in. Maybe it's just CYA policy on the part of the institution.)


France/USA collaboration funding for young researcher? I am a French citizen, I defended my PhD in Paris in November 2014, and I am working as a post-doctoral researcher in the US since December 2014. I am working in between Astrophysics and Computer Science. I have already submitted several NSF proposals to get additional funding in the US (but I am waiting for the answers).

I am currently searching for European of French funding opportunities (1 year, 2 years, or 3 years programs) that would allow me to create my own collaboration plan between France and US. Ideally I would like to be able to travel back and forth both countries. I already have 1 lab in each country that would be interested, and if necessary I can also add one non-academic partner that is interested in my work.

To what programs should I look?

EDIT: The biggest list of potential programs, the better

A good option seems to be a Marie Curie Global Fellowship, funded by the European Commission. See http://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/about-msca/actions/if/index_en.htm for more information.

Note that this allows setting up a collaboration plan between any European with any non-European country, so it's more general than what you're looking for.


Professor I am working with asked for my code My postdoctoral adviser has a colleague (another professor) who she collaborated with occasionally. This professor has data that I was interested in. Together with my advisor, the three of us started a project for which I did all the modeling.

We have not finished the project yet, but the 'other professor' announced today that he will be moving to another university in the next six months or so (I am not sure exactly when). He asked me if I could share with him a copy of the source code that I wrote for the modeling and analysis of the data. I feel uncomfortable about this, since I don't know if I will be included on manuscripts, new projects, etc. that will be coming out of the current unfinished project. I talked to my postdoctoral advisor, but she is not very helpful and actually suggested to 'just give him a copy of the [source code]'. I am not against sharing code, but I am just afraid this other professor will be using (a modified version of) my code and then not include me on a any manuscript that will be resulting from the code.

You seem uncomfortable sharing interim results with  collaborators. That goes against the collaboration spirit and I implore you to share all results. In the future, don't start a collaboration with anyone who you aren't willing to share interim results with.

  I am just afraid this other professor will be using (a modified version of) my code and then not include me on a any manuscript that will be resulting from the code.

You are afraid this other professor will commit academic fraud, steal intellectual property, or both, seemingly without any basis for concern. Again, I implore you to share all results. (Although I think it is unnecessary, you could defend against this other professor by making interim results available online.)

Read the comments, they are excellent.


What can I do, if I don't like the proposed research subject by my potential supervisor? I am supposed to be admitted to a M.A.Sc.  graduate program in engineering at a reputable Canadian university. I am now communicating with my potential supervisor about the potential plans for my research...  and here is my concern:

My background and enthusiasm have been shaped around applications research and implementation of the acquired control techniques within the realm of robotics, whereas my supervisor has a more theoretical viewpoint. When we had started to communicate, he did assert that we would determine the research theme,  according to our common interests and overlapping subjects.  But today, I have received an email from him,  consisting of an idea for research that is considerably theoretical.

I am not really attracted by that subject, since it does not cover my desired research field, considerably.  I might notify my idea,  frankly,  but I am afraid of confronting him and creating any dissatisfaction from him.
He is eager to hear my viewpoint,  and I have no idea how to transfer my perspective,  efficiently,  such that any misunderstanding will be avoided.

Have I right in this case,  or have to do whatever my potential supervisor is saying?

I have not yet met him,  face to face,  but I know that he is,  amazingly,  kind and able to track what's going in my mind.  How should I declare my opinion about the concern,  such that he would not consider my clarification as a disobeying?

A successful project profits from both supervisor and candidate being interested in the same question. If you really dislike the topic, you should try to convince the supervisor to accept a different question. He will then, if he is amenable, try to convince you of a variation of his, you will amend it, etc. until - hopefully - convergence.

However, you may find that the supervisor is simply not interested in your direction. This can happen, even if he likes you. That's fine, and then you either have to find somebody closer to your question of interest or compromise.

That being said, it seems that you are talking about an MA Sc degree. This is considerably shorter than a PhD, so, depending on the details of the situation, it may be easier for you to find a compromise.

If topic really matters for you, however, you need to think hard whether you want to go into a field which you have qualms in.

I am not sure about what the ethical consideration of a "theoretical topic" as opposed to a practical one could possibly be; be is as it may, I would avoid bringing this up, as it may insinuate that you cast doubts about the ethics of your prospective supervisor.


How to include research done for masters thesis on CV? I am 3 semesters into a MS/PhD program (2 years MS + 3 years on PhD) currently working on my masters thesis based on research work. My research with my advisor is currently unpaid. It is also not for academic credit (besides the resulting thesis). I have been doing research for 9 months now.

How do I include this information on a CV for internship applications? This is not paid employment, nor is it strictly coursework, yet it is the most significant effort I've put in for the better part of a year.

Should it fall under Work Experience? Personal projects? I did a couple of research internships as an undergraduate. Should I lump this and them together under Research? Or should I overlook it altogether (albeit reluctantly)?

Normally, it goes under Education. You can list a separate bullet point under your MS (expected on ...) with some details on your thesis.

A separate group for Research seems fine too, as long as you can furnish it and your CV stays at 1 page (assuming you are looking for industry internships, academic CVs can run longer).


Where I can post a supplementary video for my published paper? I have a paper submitted and accepted in a journal (Biology and Environmental Sciences) and it has a supplementary file which is a short video coverage, however, the journal does not support this but I have uploaded the video to Vimeo. Do you have any suggestions where I can store the video and generate a DOI (like other journals) then attach it to my paper?

Videos are among the file types accepted by Figshare, which is an online digital repository operated by Macmillan Publishers. You can create an account for free, and you will get a DOI when uploading files which you can then cite in your paper.


What to do with a thesis adviser that doesn't respond to emails or offer any help? I am a master student in computational mathematics, my thesis adviser assigned me a problem in a subfield that is outside his expertise. He is lazy and doesn't know much about the problem he assigned to me that later, after few months, I found that it is even not posed properly, I redefined it myself and of course, I am doubtful. I need an opinion, a discussion and whenever I request a meeting, I don't benefit from it and he says wrong information because he is ignorant about this area he got me in and he avoids me intentionally because he knows I will ask him and he doesn't have answers. I stopped visiting him, he and the other adviser because I don't benefit from the stupid meetings.

Now, even that I am working all by myself, I am sending him emails and he ignores me completely. We are now in quarantine so I can't go to his office even.

Now, what do you advise me to do?
I really came too far now. I can't quit. I have tried to ask other authors who work in the same area, no one responds.
Should I continue anyway by myself? or not?

You are a bit stuck. It would be a shame to abandon work already done if it shows promise of successful completion.

But there are really two things that you should require from your advisor. First, they need to approve of your thesis when complete. Second they need to write you a good letter of recommendation for the next stage of your career.

Everything else is nice, but not essential. If you are capable of doing the work on your own and can achieve those two things, nothing else will matter.

I'm more concerned, actually, that no one responds to your request for help. Perhaps if you take a different approach with external professionals it would be more successful. My preference would be short introductions and very simple explanations about what you are working on. Make it easy for anyone to make the first response. If you send too much it is more likely to get ignored.

Quit and restart elsewhere only if no other option is open to you. Given the current pandemic (early 2020) no one will think poorly of you if you need to start over. It will delay your career, but not necessarily end it.


Should I submit a mixed theory-experimental paper to a computer science conference where most papers do not appear to include experimental results? I am considering submitting a (Computer Science) research paper to a conference. The paper contains both theoretical and experimental results. The call for papers of the conference that I am considering sending the paper to, says that it welcomes papers related to "theory, design, implementation, modeling, analysis, or application". But when I look through the papers submitted in the previous years (in order to better understand the sort of papers that get accepted), I do not find a single paper with experimental results. The results are all theoretical.

Does this mean that papers with experiments are not a good fit for this conference?

Different communities mean different things by "application."  In a very mathematical community, "application" may mean "figuring out what relevance this idea might have to something in the real world.  In a very industrial community, "application" may mean "has been deployed at industrial scale."  The relative scale of theory and application is also nicely illustrated in this XKCD comic.

I think that you are doing the right thing by looking at past proceedings and asking, "Are these people interested in talking about work like mine?"  This is important not just for getting your paper accepted, but also for the value that you will get out of the meeting, both in terms of the feedback you get and also in terms of what you can learn and the connections that you can build.

For a more efficient route to finding a good community, you can also talk to your advisor or other mentors you may have, who will likely know the communities better and readily be able to provide good suggestions about where to send your paper.


What are the consequences if I cut ties with my former PhD supervisor? Background

I did my Master's and PhD with my former PhD advisor in an Australian university. Coming from the experimental biology background, my advisor switched to the field of bioinformatics around the time when I started my Master's.

For my Master's project, I mainly used Graphic User Interface (GUI)-based programs and platforms such as Galaxy. During my Master's I started learning several computer languages without any support from my advisor. After six month into my PhD program, my advisor decided the whole lab would focus on a newly emerged sub-field which relies heavily on command-line-executed programs for data analysis. I have successfully completed a couple of projects and graduated by a series of publications last year and my degree was conferred in Nov 2018.

My former advisor was not the most knowledgeable person in programming language and statistics.  Likewise, my fellow students in the lab all had the same level of statistical and programming proficiency. As a result, I had to provide support to each single fellow student from data downloading to differential testing and many micro tasks in-between, even after my graduation in Nov last year. I've shared online resources on programming and basic statistics with the lab, however there was little improvement or progress. Six months after my official graduation, I find myself answering emails from fellow students and former advisor on a weekly basis, sometimes ten emails a week; many times I had to rerun their analysis or debug their codes, a good amount of my time went to my former lab. Lately my former advisor even introduced to me via email a new honours (an undergraduate-level research year) student who has just started this year, hoping I could teach the student to generate a specific type of plot for their honours project. Either teaching the student via email or generate the plot by myself will be very time-consuming as the program has a steep learning curve and requires a lot of pre-process of input data, all for a non-essential plot for an undergraduate level thesis.

Reasons that cutting tiers with my former advisor seems inevitable:

I can't see an end to my current situation as a free labour for my former lab. The more support I offered, the more demanding they become. I've decided to stop replying to the students' emails altogether. However, very likely my former advisor will eventually step in since I am the only person they know who could solve their problems, but I am unwilling to do any more work for them. They have no funding currently so hiring a post-doc or a bioinformatician is out of question. That being said, I don't think the burden is on me. Frankly, having been exploited by them (Should I decline unrelated work assigned by PhD advisor?), I am not particularly grateful to my former advisor and just want to stay away from them.

Questions:

1) Am I obligated to teach other students even I have developed the necessary skills by myself without my advisor's support and that I have graduated almost six months ago?

2) What are the consequences if I choose to cut ties entirely with my former advisor?

I plan to work as a freelance bioinformatician therefore their recommendation letters don't really matter right now. If I want to go back to academia later, I figured the price I have to pay (in labour) will be overly high anyway so I will probably try applying jobs without their recommendation letter.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

ad 1) Once you have graduated and you are not employed in the lab anymore nobody can force you to do work.

That being said there are a few options for you that might be interesting (but it depends what you actually want):

If you are interested in a publication record then agree with your
former PhD supervisor that you co-author all papers you gave support
for (even if it was only an email or two).
If you are interested in    the financial aspects then write him a
friendly email saying that you    would be happy to further help if
you are being employed an paid by    him (e.g. on an hourly basis using standard market freelancer rates).

ad 2) He will not be happy (but this is not your problem). If you do not plan any further academic career there shouldn't be any real consequence. If you plan an academic career then (1) see the first point above (2) he might be on certain panels about funding/positions etc (3) he might be reviewer (4) he might have friends in points 2 and 3. But if you do not plan to continue in academia then these points do not matter to you.

In any case I would recommend not to just stop answering but write him a clear email with whatever decision you make (and then stop answering if you want).


Where to send my research work for evaluation? I have been doing some research (not connected to any university) on my own and written articles on different theories and models and hypotheses of management based on the application on maritime fiels. Some of the articles are only few pages and some are incomplete and I am still adding to them. These are my own work in the field but this is research-oriented and relates to the existing knowledge (not new knowledge) on the research topic that I have selected but it is totally my view. It may not contribute new knowledge beyond what’s currently available.

Now my question is: How do I know what is the value of my write-ups. Do my articles really mean anything? Who can tell? Where to send them to get an idea of these papers’ worth?

It seems that what you are looking for is a peer review. This is the first step after you submitted your work to a scientific journal that covers your field of work. Its purpose is to ensure the quality of your work and the contribution it makes to ongoing research. This said, in order to publish something in a scientific journal, you should have brought "something new" to the table. Nonetheless submitting your article will certainly lead to some feedback.

The second option I see and that you should consider first is finding a person on a close by university, who might help you out by reading part of your article and giving you some feedback.


Citation in examination In a course, the professor sets an open book exam with the restriction that students can use only class notes and textbook in any electronic device(mobile, laptop, etc). In short, no internet during exam.

A student came across few previous year exams from another university which has exact same syllabus for the course. The student went through these exams(with solutions) one day before the exam and the student could remember most of it. It turned out that the exact same questions appeared in that student's exam next day. The student wrote down similar answers.

Now the professor accuses the student for academic dishonesty and says that the answers should have been cited in the exam.

Questions:

Should the answers be cited by the student in exam? With no internet access how would the student get the link of reference.
Should the questions be cited as well by the professor in the exam. Even these are taken from another university exams (word-by-word) ?
Does academic integrity apply to only students or can it apply to even professors? Can any action be taken on the professor if any student happens to have lots of evidence that not just exam questions but all of the coursework including slides of powerpoint are copied from another university coursework with no sign of citation?

If the case is fairly stated then the professor is not being reasonable. Students shouldn't have to cite what they study prior to the exam. In fact, in order to provide a proper citation the student might actually have to return to the site to get the proper citation, breaking the rule in order to uphold it - Catch 22.

However, since "innocent until proven guilty" may not be the operative standard (sadly) it may be difficult for the student to make the case. But it is worth making and should be made forcefully. Appeal to higher authority if necessary.

I will leave your last two questions unanswered as they are treated elsewhere on this site and don't really affect the outcome for the student, which I treat as paramount here.


Publishing a paper in an academic conference being someone who works in the industry I have been working in the industry of software engineering for 5 years so far. Lately, I am planning to take a PHD, I am interested in software architecture and quality, something that started fascinating me after experiencing failing/successful projects because of bad/good architecture mainly.
After doing some search about the matter, I see that most of PHD positions demand some publications so my plan B is to get something published to have the courage to email some possible advisors, especially that my master thesis was done in artificial intelligence, something that would be funny to tell a software-architecture-advisor about.
My question is, would an academic conference accept a paper written by me, alone, no advisor and no university to belong to?
Thank you all.

There is no requirement that a person be employed in academia to publish papers or submit them to academic venues, including conferences. Papers are supposed to be reviewed for their own qualities and insights, not the position or reputation of the authors (though some abuses occur).
But before submitting to any venue, you should spend some effort looking at the sorts of things that get published there, so that you style isn't too different and the quality of your results is at a similar level as that of successful submissions. There is no real bar, but, like most things, first attempts aren't always successful.
You don't even need to associate yourself with your employer for this. Independent Researcher is fine as an "affiliation".

You should, however, also explore whether your assumptions about how to get accepted are valid. It would probably be worth the effort to talk to some potential advisors and see if your current qualifications are sufficient.


Ask opinion about situations in which researchers/non-researchers get involved in projects (externally) and the best way to avoid strange situations I'm junior researcher so I'll appreciate your understanding on my very short 'experience' for the things I'm going to explain:

I'd appreciate your comments regarding two relatively similar situations I've experienced recently:

Situation 1)
Recently I was contacted by a professor who asked me to give him a hand with a student who would be working on one of the topics of my expertise. While I'm not affiliated to the University where they work, I'll be collaborating with them in few months (all fixed already), so I agreed thinking that the experience would be useful for me and to build some good relationship with them from now. From the firsts conversations with the student, an idea for a working plan came up, even if they had some previous idea of 'what they wanted to do', I definitely helped them to define the main plan. After the 'draft' of the plan was set, few days of silence went by, later on, I received an email from the student telling that from now on, he would be working with Researcher-A and Researcher-B in this project and he would ’probably' contact me for some questions in the future.  Since this is a multidisciplinary project, I knew that Researchers A and B would eventually have to join, but, I also had a bitter taste since I was 'kindly' kicked out of the whole thing.  I guess the best I can do now is to track the progress of this study and eventually request to be part of any publication that they plan to do.

Situation 2)
I had to contact a group of 'computer scientists' (a group 'devoted' to innovation, who offer their services to researchers independently -not belonging to any university-), to help me to build up a part of a project in which I'm not really expert (basically setting some experiment using computer devices and programming).  They said they knew somebody doing similar things and asked me to send them my working plan to get a better idea of the whole thing. Of course I just sent them a short & very basic description of the plan, with mostly the things that I'd need from them and some general explanation to help them understand the project. After that, I had no news from them for weeks, I tried to contact them several times and there was always something getting on the way (unexpected meetings and trips, incoming second calls…I never got a call back).  Later on, I saw in their website that they were recruiting students to help them to do something very similar to what I requested but with few variations. I don’t think that this was an advance of my work since they never reached to me to work on the details, I never received news from them about when were we going to start, what was the plan or anything! I’m confident that eventually I'll get them to help me if I push some buttons with the main bosses there, but again bitter taste here.

Regarding both situations: Is this common? What can one do to avoid these problems? How can a researcher (especially those not-yet affiliated) protect his/her ideas/work from people who would be somehow involved. I try not to judge, not in all cases there is bad intention, but in some way, they seem to bump into random situations and behave in tricky ways. I don’t know how both stories will end up, I trust that there will be someone in the head of both offices that will show some common sense, but I want to learn something from these experiences, what to do to prevent these kind of ‘bad moments’.

Thank you in advance.

Situation A is more or less common specially it comes to publications.

Generally in such situation,

Both the parties should have clear cut understanding of role of each other before starting working on the project.
Ethically, that researcher SHOULD knowledge you for your contribution in the project if she/he want's to get it published or submit to any grant agency.
If you have contributed sufficiently and you think you should be part of their publication, you can just express your opinion to professor and make it clear.
Do not 'assume' that they have kicked you out. There might be changes in their project direction and they might need some other set of skills.
Inform regarding this to your adviser. It is important to keep him/her in loop.

However also remember, sometimes whatever you have decided may not work out because experiments/analysis might need to get more help or reduce existing resources etc. Best thing to do in this case is talk to professor and see what is your role in this project. To avoid further such situations, always be clear about your role in project. Sometimes your role might change depending on direction or project or results you got. You should be flexible enough to handle such cases.

In the case of situation B, try to contact their organization/institute regarding this. See what is the purpose of that advertisement. As you had not provided them any details, they could have come up with similar thing by their own. See their website /publications if they had working on similar thing before. Be patient and contact them again regarding this.


How to handle the particular situation when mind goes blank during a presentation? Does anyone experience a situation of blank mind during their presentation?

I had a presentation in last month in USA. My presentation was going very well, probably due to enough practice, but during the presentation my mind suddenly went blank at a point. The situation became so worse that I could not even complete my sentence. The sentence was actually:

  The reason could be due to the  fact that stronger events have higher increasing rates.

The word "higher" didn't come to my mind and suddenly my mind went blank. So I just repeated 2-3 times "stronger events have.... have... stronger events have..." and finally stopped saying. Though few other words like "rapid, more or larger" were coming to my mind to complete the sentence, but the appropriate word "higher" or any similar word did not come. Moreover, I was telling this sentence from my mind completely, so I could not take help from my slides also. Finally I changed my sentence in a different way:

  The reason could be due to the  fact that the rate of stronger events increases more rapidly compare to weaker events.

It again surprised me that I could not even able to remind the word "higher" until I heard the same word in my next presenter's talk. This is not the first time, but not often.

So I am wondering does it happen due to some particular lacks in me  that I need to develop? e.g., I am not a native English speaker. I am also wondering the proper way to handle similar situations when you don't find a suitable word to complete your sentence just because mind goes blank?

You may be experiencing what is called "mind blanks".

Before I answer, remember that every individual is unique and many factors could be the cause of the mind blanks you are experiencing.

It may be fatigue, let's say you may have been doing your presentation for already half an hour, and it is natural, if you aren't too passionate about your subject, to get tired or have your brain pull the plug for a brief moment, as random thoughts run through your head.
To remedy this, I personally try to get a coffee/espresso half an hour before doing a presentation. Caffeine can help connections between those gray cells.
You may get distracted, sometimes when looking through the room, you may notice something about one of the people that sets you off and it completely shatters your concentration, and trying to get back to your topic can be challenging.
Whenever that happens, try going a step or two backwards, ask yourself "what did I say before I lose track of my speech?", it's okay to start over from a previous sentence and it will also reduce your stuttering or "uhhh"-ing.
Lack of self confidence may also be a factor of disruption in your speeches. Thoughts rushing through your head may interrupt your speech and before you know it you focus on that one point, making you feel like your short-term memory completely failed registering what you were just saying.
Fear and feeling exposed can completely freeze some people.
Make sure to remain structured in your presentations, if you happen to use your slides to help yourself, remember that slide unicity is crucial, one slide should contain one and only one message. It'll be better for your audience and for yourself. Audience often forgets anything you had said 30s earlier if you deliver a poor presentation.

All that being said, my personal experience has taught me this :

One thing/trick I noticed that is crucial to a "perfectly" fluid presentation, is to be completely passionate about your subject. Whenever I knew my topic by heart, and was wholeheartedly implied in it, I would actually have a hard time to remain concise and synthetic, simply because I knew so much about the subject that I wanted to explain every single aspect and each of these aspects would also pull another string of 10 micro-subjects.

Unfortunately, in corporate environments, you don't always choose your topic and it can be hard feeling implied and dedicated in it.

If it happens again, try to relax, take it slow, I suggest to not put pressure on yourself as it will only make things worse. Another crippling event that happens along these mind blanks is caring about what people think, so be aware of that as well.

Now to handle this situation towards your audience, do not hesitate to apologize or even ask somebody in the room what you were saying just before, that way you might even be able to add a touch of humor behind this and be like "just making sure everyone's still with me". This is a common joke amongst teachers.


Negotiating for higher compensation TT position Let's say you have a TT position at a good university A. Year 2 in the position, you receive an offer with higher salary from another university B with considerably higher salary.

You want to stay in A for several reasons but you also want to ask for a salary increase. How would you approach this, given that you are pre-tenure?

My thinking would be to let your (A) department head know.  "I've gotten an offer to move to B for higher pay.  I am considering it, but wanted to give you a chance to counter."  Then just leave it with him.

If he asks for "what do you want", just say "a counteroffer".  Then let him and A huddle and see what they can do.  (If you get some kerfuffle about "we need to know what you want to put the offer together", say "your best offer".  Don't worry about them possibly having to tweak the offer after extended.  Everything is negotiable and it is easy to change an offer letter.  Just get them moving.

If you get a nice counter, fine.  I have seen departments work to keep young superstars.

If it's halfway there, than at that point, negotiate specifics upwards.  But it's always better to get them moving first, versus telling them what you want exactly (will "converge"...negotiating salary is like buying cars, always make other person go first to name a number--helps get a higher number.  Also gets them psychologically committed, since they've extended themselves.

If they don't counter at all, you probably need to leave.

I'm not sure if salary is the only thing they can offer.  Maybe tenure or teaching load or what have you.  Just let them see what they can do.  You can ask for specifics after they've made an initial counter.

Note:  there are others here with much more experience than I who can advise you.  I just would be careful to make sure it is in your interest, versus "be fair to the department".  It's not like you will have opportunities or leverage like this always.

Also, I'm curious if the B position is post tenure.  If so, then if A feels they can't extend tenure (being fair, following process, etc.) they probably need to do something good on money to make up for the tenure difference.

Note, if B is a significant step down in prestige, the leverage is less, but still credible.  And you need to consider it if B is post tenure.

(Good luck.)


Is increasing the DPI of a low resolution image a good idea? Today after a paper of mine got accepted I received this from the publisher (Elsevier):

  We have received the above article for publication, unfortunately
  figures x1, x2 and x3 are of low resolution and of insufficient quality
  to reproduce well.

  The minimum resolution requirements are 1200 dpi for black and white
  figures and 300 dpi for colour figures. If you are converting your
  figures to TIFF files, please ensure that the resolution is correct
  before scanning them.

The figures are digital 512×512 gray-scale images in the PNG format. The source of the images is not me. I had converted them to EPS files using Inkscape. The source of some of the images is: https://github.com/cszn/DnCNN/tree/master/testsets/Set12.

How do I resolve the issue? Should I just save the same images using 1200 DPI in EPS format and send it to the publisher?

The comment you received is aimed at obtaining images of higher quality for publication.
Processing the files you sent them will not solve this issue.
If it did, the typesetters would already have done this themselves – this is what “insufficient quality to reproduce well” hints at.

In your specific case, the images seem to be digitalisations of historic photographs.
Thus, the only way to improve the quality is to obtain higher-resolution digitalisations of these photographs.
If you cannot do this, write exactly this to the publisher; they are most likely going to accept this.
Also note that if those images are test cases for some image-processing algorithm or similar, they should be printed exactly as they are, and this is what you should write the publisher.

The entire remark about the resolution probably doesn’t apply to you but was made for illustrations, plots, and similar.
These are almost always best provided in a vector format (which has infinite resolution, if you so wish) and even if using a pixel format, they can be produced at arbitrary resolution.
The resolution requirements are aimed at those researchers who insist on working with pixels in this case.


Is it dishonest to start a PhD with intent to leave it and transfer to another program? I just finished my master and am about to start a funded PhD in October. Thing is that the reason I am doing this PhD is because I missed the deadlines for the PhDs that I am truly interested in. I was thinking that it would be better to do something academic this year and get paid than to do nothing until the next application cycle.

Is this extremely dishonest to start a PhD without the intention to finish it? Will this put me on some blacklist at that university?
How should I portray my position in my other PhD applications? I was thinking of saying that I was doing a funded student placement program or something?

Is this extremely dishonest to start a phd without the intention to finish it?

It depends if you talk about your situation with your current advisor. If you clearly stated "I'm more interested in another position, but I couldn't get it, and it's likely I'll try next year", then, no, it's not dishonest. If you said you were interested in doing a full PhD there, while you actually were not, then, yes, it's dishonest. You're taking a funding opportunity for someone who would be interested, and in some cases, for instance when the funding is associated with a project, you will leave your current advisor with a partial funding, that cannot be used to hire a new PhD student.

  Will this put me on some blacklist at that university?

Again, it depends how you explained the situation, but I would not hope much for any recommendation letter from your current advisor (which is a shame, because recommendation letters can be very useful later on).

  How should I portray my position in my other phd applications? I was thinking of saying that I was doing a funded student placement program or something?

As I said here, lying is always a bad idea. Academia is a very small world. If you want to change position, then you have to explain why.


Professor ignoring emails and not attending office hours I recently received back an exam, and noticed after reviewing it a few days later a serious grading discrepancy. I sent my professor an email to confirm that he would be available in his next office hour, but received no reply. I then stopped by his office at the beginning of office hours but found that he was not in his office and remained absent for the entirety of the office hour.

After several days of no reply, I sent another email, which has also received no reply after several more days. I am unsure how to proceed, as the semester is nearly over and grades will be finalized within about a week. I am wondering if I need to escalate this in order to have my score corrected as the error could seriously impact my final grade in the course. Is there someone that I should contact to discuss this? If so, who should I contact? Otherwise, what is the best course of action to take? Thank you for any advice.

If you are feeling desperate, go to the department office and tell them you need to contact the professor over a grading issue that you are afraid will slip through the cracks at end of term. Ask to have them have the professor contact you, leaving contact information. You could even write a note for the office to pass to the professor detailing your concerns. The office is likely to see the professor before you do.

The prof may still not respond, but you have left a marker that establishes your timely concern.

Don't be overly concerned about lack of response at end of term. There may be a lot on the professor's plate also. There are also ways to work things out that don't require immediate action, as long as you leave a trail of effort to contact and resolve the issue.

But don't increase the "noise" going directly to the professor. It probably won't help and might hurt.


Selling of monuments: What does it mean? I am watching the documentary "Free to Choose, Part 6: What's Wrong With Our Schools" at this link

At 20:08, Friedman says:

  Many of the buildings and facilities at Dartmouth have been donated by
  private individuals and foundations. Like other private universities,
  Dartmouth has combined the selling of monuments with the provision of
  education and the one activity reinforces the other.

The transcript seems to confirm that this is what he said.

Since I am in Europe and I don't have any experience with US education, what is the "selling of monuments"? Is Dartmouth College really selling monuments like bronze statues? How does it make a profit doing that?

Many private schools and other private institutions ask donors for money. Often what they offer in return is naming rights to a classroom or a lecture series. The big items are football stadiums and such.

When I was a kid and our church wanted to build a new school they offered naming rights to things, such as classrooms. The donor would get a plaque. One local library "sells" bricks with brass plaques that are arrayed around the entrance to the building.

Of course, this is in addition to the major donors who put up an entire building or fund a professorial chair.

Usually the "monument" isn't a big thing taking up space, just a visual recognition of a donation. Nor is it usually a donation big enough to actually fund the thing in question. It adds a bit of revenue at little cost. It gives "bragging rights" to donors.

Some publicly funded institutions do the same thing, of course.


What counts as a research experience in mathematics? I am applying for some scholarship that requires applicants to write about previous research experience.  As the application will be reviewed by the people of my field (mathematics), I would like to understand what do people count as research experience.  I have heard some people mentioning that research experience in the undergraduate level does not require original research, it could be of the form of summer projects (reading papers/books), dissertations (with/without original materials), going to conferences, organizing learning seminars and presentations etc.

Are all of the things I mentioned research experience?

Thanks in advance.

As you say, some people accept those as research experience, but would you be expected to have completed novel or original research - most likely not at this point.

But perhaps what they are looking for is relevant activity in the field, and if you are active with attending or organizing seminars etc etc then that may be what tips the balance in your favor compared to some other application.


Do I have to Cite an Image I have edited? I have received an Image from a source I am not sure about, I have edited it to suit my own project, now do I have to cite the main source?

Of course, should you cite the original sources (just use the golden rule: think how you would like to be treated if you were the author of the original source). You may say something like

 adapted from < Figure X of original source >

However, as indicated in the comments, you should make sure that you have the right to do so. Note that sometimes it is possible to "read" the data values from an image and create your own image from those (but you still need to quote the source of the data).


Future studies on CV In a week I will start attending classes at another university as an exchange student. In the meantime, I am applying to grad school, and I am debating putting said university in my CV. I know that adding future experience on one's CV is generally frowned upon, but in my case I think that it might make sense, as:

The contact information will include my address at the exchange university,
By the time they get to my CV, I will probably have studied there for at least a month,
It's really a matter of days.

Unfortunately I cannot wait until classes start to submit my CV as the deadline is approaching.

If you have documentable evidence of registration when asked to produce it, it should not be a problem. This is especially true in your case, where we're talking about a period of a week and you're representing your current address.


Is there a research honeymoon phase? I am an undergraduate in the U.S. and have worked part time (~15-20 hrs/week) for a research group at my institution for about 5 months now. Since beginning the research I have enjoyed every aspect of it. I have gotten to read literature, submit an abstract to a conference and even work on an open source software project. I love what we have been doing so far,  and can not imagine not doing research in my future. Therefore, I am considering applying for a Phd in the next application cycle.

However, it worries me that I am in a honeymoon phase of research, using the definition from here:

  The short amount of time at the beginning of a new relationship, activity, or pursuit when everything goes well and seems to be free of problems.

I am a very passionate person and, as a computer scientist, know all too well the love of starting a new project only to become deflated and uninterested after the preliminary work.

There are numerous posts on this site similar to "Is a Phd/research right for me?" ([1], [2]) and "How to deal with burnout/loss of interest in research?" ([3], [4]). The existence of the latter questions seems to suggest that a honeymoon phase exists in research.

So my questions are:

Is this sort of phase common in research? Should I be worried about it?

How can I assure myself that this is not a fleeting pursuit? That I will still enjoy research in 5 years?

I understand the latter question might be difficult to answer, but are there any objective tasks I can carry to further explore if research is right for me (i.e. more breadth in research-based tasks)? Also personal anecdotes of how you decided your love of research was permanent would help.

Is this sort of phase common in research? Should I be worried about
  it?

It is common. Whether you should be worried about it depends on you. For example, can you imagine enjoying this even if you aren't "in love" with this. Getting a PhD, even in something you love, will be hard. There will be petty, stupid things that still require time (formatting one's thesis...). Does that strike you as a cost you're willing to bear, or do you only really see enjoying things if they're going well, there's a clear trajectory, etc.

  How can I assure myself that this is not a fleeting pursuit? That I
  will still enjoy research in 5 years?

There's no real way to be sure this is true if for no other reason than people change in 5 years. But one way I dealt with it was to switch labs for a semester, to disambiguate if I liked all research or just the particular research I was doing. In my case, I discovered that no, I really enjoyed this thing and was not actually just enamored with the idea of research.


A trivial correction to my currently-under-review paper - What to do? I have several small corrections to apply to a paper which is currently under review. The errors are - as far as I can say - not very significant. There is a citation which it would be good to include, but maybe is not crucial (I only recently discovered a paper which deals with a somewhat related problem), plus a number of typos that I recently discovered.

What is the correct way to proceed? Should I update the paper and send the corrected version to the publisher, or would it be better to wait for the referee reports and apply these corrections together with the ones the referees request? Or have I lost my chance to correct the paper when I sent it for publication, and have to accept that I can't apply the corrections I want?

There is a similar question where the accepted suggestion is to send in the corrections; however that is a significantly more serious correction than in my case. My field is mathematics, if this matters.

Edit: This question is very similar to this question with the slight difference that there they consider an error in a paper and worry about a possible rejection, and here I'm mostly concerned about modifying a paper in a way that (in my opinion) makes it better but not necessarily more correct.

As you indicated, usually a paper is accepted with some suggestions - that is, the referee has a list of suggestions/errors. The author then addresses those suggestions/errors, and sends the edited manuscript back to the journal with a list of changes. This version is the one that officially gets accepted (I guess it's possible to go through multiple rounds of this, but I've never heard of this occurring in practice).

Since the errors/omissions you found are minor, I would just wait to hear back from the referee, since they don't truly affect your paper in any significant way, and in fact the referee might find most of them. (If your paper is on the arxiv, you might consider updating it there).

For what it's worth, you'll get the opportunity to correct typos even after the refereeing process; there is usually some editing for typos from the journal's side, and you'll also get a chance to make small changes to proofs before publication.


Should I add references to a conference poster I read the "Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation" article by Thomas C. Erren and Philip E. Bourne. It gives me the general idea of how to prepare a poster.

However, I wonder whether I should add references to the poster as many parts have strong (advanced) knowledge acquired from other works? If yes, where is recommended for references in a portrait A0 poster. Thanks.

This may be a somewhat discipline-dependent question (and you don't specify yours), but I can say that I have often seen references on posters -- and just about as often not. When I have seen them, they have generally been in the lower right-hand corner (for most left-to-right languages, the last place anyone generally looks). Not uncommonly they are in smaller type than the rest of the poster, to save space.


Elsevier's article class for submission vs. the published version I'm submitting a paper to the journal Elsevier journal "Nonlinear Analysis: Theory, Methods & Applications" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0362546X).

They told me to use the elsearticle document to prepare my submission. The problem is the margins are huge and the line spacing is huge, so my document has doubled in size under this class. So I thought: ok, I need to cut down on my calculations etc. But then I looked at some published articles under that journal, and they do not resemble the elsearticle class at all! The margins are much smaller and the line spacing is much nicer, so much more text fits in.

What is the point of them telling us to use that awful style file? Why should I spend hours reducing my paper when it won't be published in that style and so the changes I make may be entirely unnecessary!

It is very rare (in mathematics) that a journal really makes using their style necessary for submission, even for the journal making that claim in their guide to authors. My advice is to never adjust the style of a paper for submission, and simply submit the version you originally produced.
The reason is that formatting for each submission turns out to be a waste of time, all the more so that journal styles are rarely that much more readable for the referee than any standard style. (Note that unless you really know about typesetting you should not depart from standard style too much, e.g. do not use the fullpage package. Large margins have a purpose.)

In fact, most of the time this is not even mandatory to use the journal's style after acceptance, because the journal will do the job of adapting the article to their class. I try to do it for reasonably cheap journals (e.g. MSP journals), but I never do that for Springer and Elsevier.

Also, unless strictly mandatory (e.g. page limit) you should never change the content of an article in function of the formatting style (of course you can resolve overfulls and other warnings): the content is driven by what you have to say, period.


What if your advisor does not know anything about your research field? I  am a PhD student in Mathematics. I have found one advisor in my local University who does not know my research field at all, but  has allowed me to choose my own problems and solve them independently.
Initially, I was quite happy as I didn't need to switch places (which I don't want at all). The problem started when my advisor could not assist me in solving the problems I chose. It even happened that I chose a problem to work on and when I told him about it, he said that's an excellent problem and I should solve it.Later on after meeting another professor  in this field he told me that it has been solved long before and hence I had no point working on that again.
He does listen to me when I say something about the problems but fails to give me any critical feedback in my topic. I searched the web but there are so many directions of the topic I am working on, I am feeling puzzled which way to go. Moreover there is no research group existing in this field in my local University with whom I can discuss or get some inputs abut my problems.
I am unable to answer the following questions of mine which is affecting my research considerably:

1.Has my decision to stay in my hometown and not go to reputed institutes and talking to experienced professors backfired on me? How can I come out of this situation?
2.Is  PhD done in this way only without any help from anyone ?At least my advisor says so.

Any comments/advice will be helpful.

Well, then go and find another advisor. Do not get me wrong, I don't mean a new one, I just mean someone else to talk to. With a PhD, you are supposed to show that you are able to do independent research, that you are able to do more than just work on minor problems that dropped out of some paper/publication by your advisor (as it is often the case in Bachelor or Master thesises).

I think a PhD (at least in Mathematics, I don't know that much about other fields) where you only worked with a single advisor for multiple years is really uncommon. Go find other people, other professors, etc. to talk to.
Your advisor should help you with the following points in case you get stuck there (list might not be complete...):

How and where to find research material, maybe giving you access to institute libraries that are normally closed to regular students or access to the universities subscriptions to online journals.
Establishing contacts to other researchers on the field, giving you advice on who to talk to, maybe even recommending you for a research stay of a few months at another university for a project related to your research.
Administrative processes. That also includes questions on "How and where to best publish this result I came up with?" or "Which conferences should I visit, should I maybe even present something there?"

During a PhD, it is not the advisors job to do your research. You yourself have to decide what you look into, what you do, how much time you spend on one problem until you deem it too hard and move on, etc. If your professor could answer all your questions, then that would mean that your research is not really original and/or rather trivial and thus might not yield a PhD (or at least not an excellent one, and I'm sure you are aiming for that :) ).

So don't worry if the professor can't help you solve your problems. Maybe they will turn up to stay unsolved for centuries, who knows? Try to rephrase your questions, don't go and ask "How can I solve this?" but rather "Do you know of experts on this topic that might be willing to talk to me (maybe even at the same university)? Can you put us into contact?" or maybe asked more generally like "Do you have a suggestion on which direction to look from here on? Should I continue down this path or maybe try a different approach?".

So long story short: Even if the professor knew your research field, he would not be able to always assist you with your problems.

PS: As I am also writing a PhD in math just now I'm a little curious: What is your research field, for which there are no research groups and your professor has no idea about? :)


How to comfortably interact with famous professors? I know that they are "just as human as we are", but I feel somewhat uncomfortable to talk nonchalantly with the top-notch math researchers and professors in my department because of their social position, their extremely superior knowledge and talent, and also because of their age.

Still, I feel that it is like a waste to have such interesting mind-expanding people around and not to interact properly and talk about maths when I meet them in the department (outside the lecture hall).

So my question is: according to your experience, what is the best (where best means: most polite, appropriate, acceptable, but also profitable) way to interact and make the most of the presence of such awesome professors? Can I discuss "lower" [mathematical and non-mathematical] subjects with them even though their actual (research) interests lie in much more abstruse topics?

Any suggestion (even in the form of a comment) is really appreciated.

From a student's point of view, here is how I tackle the situation. You can break it down by the circumstances in which you meet, and thus guesstimate how much time the professor has for you.

Asking "may I talk to / email you later about...?" can be useful if it's not the right time and place for a useful discussion.

DTK's answer has good points about how you should approach a conversation.

Of course there will be some variations depending on the culture and environment of your department, and how well you know the prof you're talking to.

Hallway / elevator encounters

If they look busy or rushed, perhaps best save it till later. Otherwise, keep questions very brief, concisely answerable, and related to something you know they're interested in (i.e. their own research field).

Discussions at semi-social occasions, such as at a gathering after a seminar, or breaks at a conference

Here, the professor probably has no immediate obligations or things urgently pressing on his or her mind (or else they'd have disappeared by now). This is a better opportunity to ask broader or more complicated questions, or if they work in a related field you could ask for an opinion on a problem you've been thinking about.

Social occasions such as at lunchtime, conference dinner, etc.

As above, but they may even prefer to talk about something other than their own field of expertise -- sports, politics, an interesting paper from a completely unrelated discipline that you read whilst procrastinating, etc. If you don't know the professor very well, you might want to wait for him or her to initiate steering the conversation in that direction.


What does 'substantial similarity' really mean? I got puzzled by the definition of 'substantial similarity'.

Here is the case. I dealt with two related problems, say P1 and P2, that could be treated in the same mathematical framework. I aimed to show optimal appoaches to both problems. Perhaps more details:

P1: the optimality criterion was already there (which alone was an open problem for quite a long time, like tens of years) and the tool was also ready. So I'd like to say, if one realized the criterion and the tool, the problem could be solved easily following some standard techniques. But no one recognized this before.  In the paper, we examined three different approaches, with different preprocessing before applying the basic idea.

P2: the optimality criterion was not recognized. We proved it, which turned out to be of the same sense of P1 but still different. The tool for solving this problem was also not ready, and we proved it almost from scratch (like 5 pages long), which we thought as the most significant contribution. Some discussions and applications were also involved in the paper.

We did not find a unifying theme to put the two into a page-limited conference submission, while stating related aspects in a clear manner. We also believed each had enough contributions. So we submitted two papers to the same conference. Following the conference guidelines, we tried to rephrase some common preliminary in the two papers, and cited P1 in P2 for some common issues  and also for clearly stating the contribution of P2 over P1.

However, the two papers were deemed to be 'substantially similar' to each other. I searched for what it really means and what is a criterion, but failed. So can anyone share any experience on this? Maybe I just should not submit two related works to the same conference?

Thanks.

It seems to me that they have decided, for whatever reason, that they could not justify publishing both papers. The two papers are are too 'similar', the alternate method is not sufficient to justify publishing the same result twice (and it is really hard to argue agains this even in the case where the difference between P1 and P2 is significant and offers some interesting insights).

It may be simply poor/unclear presentation on your part or their failure to see the 'difference' you describe (Maybe you needed to `convince them' by giving explicit reasons on why both should be published, and why both methods are interesting).

Perhaps, depending on the field and topic, they were more or exclusively interested in the 'end result' and the 'interesting' background and detail regarding P1 versus P2 was beyond their interest.

It is possible that you could have chosen one or P1 and P2 and briefly discussed the other.


Is there a canonical paper to cite the benefits of active learning in post secondary education? I would like to reference the benefits of active learning in my teaching philosophy. I have been to a variety of talks discussing the researched benefits (eg. increased class averages) of active learning but I do not know if there is a specific paper people are referencing. Is there a canonical paper that is usually referenced or is it more common to reference any paper on the subject. If it makes a difference, I am in Mathematics.

A Very widely cited meta-analysis of studies on this topic is:

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415.


What is an acceptable failure rate in an entry level programming course? I'm teaching an entry level programming course at a local college.  About 2/3 of the class is getting a b or higher.  The last 1/3 are getting f's.  I attribute most of the f's to failure to do assignments and pay attention in class.  Is it okay to fail a third of the class?  Are there any strategies anyone has that could help me out? Thanks in advance.

It seems too late to do anything about it now: You need something to base a grade on, and if no assignments are handed in, than that is that for that student. However, for the future, you need to ask why so many students did not participate. Maybe they weren't the intended audience anyhow. In that case, you may want to change the description of the course, so they find that out before joining the class. Maybe they were overwhelmed, and lost hope. In that case you can think of ways of catching them early, so you can help them before the problems become too big.

If failing one third is too much (or too little) depends on the circumstances. Experienced educators in your department can tell you that. Depending on your department you may want to talk to the department head, or the person coordinating the teaching duties.


Is it common to allow professional compulsory activities over personal activities? Professional compulsory activities I am referring here falls into the following two classes:

The activities that need to be done very quickly.

Activities given by supervisor to participate in a voluntary activity.

I frequently encounter the professional compulsory activities. Former are more frequent than later.
Examples for first one includes: Evaluating copies of students within a day, preparing teaching material for students of a course took by my supervisor within a day, preparing grade sheets within half day etc.,
Examples for second one includes: Attending to an outstation workshop for a few days, attending webinars at non-lab timings etc.,
The issue involved in allowing them is break in my personal time table and sacrifice in my personal activities etc., I am not at all comfortable with them as I want to spend time according to my own preferences in non-lab hours.
Those professional compulsory activities always break my productive cycle of work and forces me to spend time.
Is this a common phenomenon in academia or am I entertaining those activities instead of saying a strong NO?
Note: The announcement for first class of activities are not in my hands. Superior authorities announces deadlines by personal calling, mailing etc.,

This is a US specific answer, perhaps, but yes, some of the things you describe are done, but it requires some perspective. For example, if you are working as a TA in a course there may be requirements on the timing of getting grading done so that feedback can be given to the students in a timely way. These may be university requirements, actually, but could be made by an individual. But I would expect to be told of these requirements early on so that I could schedule my other activities, work and life, around them.
The second kind are also done, if less frequently, but I'd expect to have some notice and I'd expect them to be rare. While you describe them as "voluntary", others would call them "professional". They take time and effort, but can pay you dividends as well. A professor may treat them as part of your professional training.
But imposing chaos on your life is bad. You need advance notice and the opportunity to schedule.
I'll note also, that professors have such requirements thrust on them as well, especially until they earn tenure. And even afterwards, the educational mission of the university has to be kept moving forward.


Why don't universities reveal the extra time they give to students with disabilities when taking exams? Many (most?) universities have a system of allowances for students with particular medical conditions/learning difficulties including dyslexia, dyspraxia and others.  The most common allowance is extra time in exams.  Sometimes this can be an extra half or whole hour but in other cases can be, for example, 8 hours allowed for a 3 hour exam.

There are various arguments in favor of giving this extra time but of course the merits of doing so can also be debated.

When the student graduates, as far as I know no universities include a record of this extra time on their official transcript.  This appears to hide an important piece of information from a potential employer and also makes it very hard to compare one set of grades with another or to interpret the significance of any particular set of grades.  Of course an employer might not care how long it takes a student to solve a problem or write an essay as as long as they do it well. But for some employers it might make a crucial difference.

Why don't universities provide this information on the official grade transcript that a student gets?

You already gave the actual reason: to hide it from employers. Why? Because it is irrelevant.

Diplomas/grades from university are the same, for all students. Period. It does not matter how you acquired it, the university recognised you meet the criteria (skills, know-how, ...) for having this diploma. That's all the employer needs to know.

Edit from comments:

The employer just has to know the grades/diplomas are assumed to be given objectively.

Time is irrelevant, because extra time allowance is here to level the student impairments to give him a fair chance at proving his/her skill on the subject. Time is usually a factor because there has to be a point where it's finished. The duration is not a factor of evaluation. Diplomas and grades are the same for all students because they evaluate the skills/knowledge of the students and not his/her performance.

If an employer needs someone who can do things in some timely manner, they are the one who needs to test candidates on that criteria. Universities just don't do this.


Why are the registration fees for academic conferences so high? I was actually thinking about submitting one of my papers in a conference which is to be held in Spain (LATA 2014) but alas I might not be able to do so since the registration fees for this conference is 400 Euros (discounted since I'm a student) which is virtually impossible to afford (since in addition to the registration fees I will have to travel to Spain as well). In fact just to get a sense of how much money this is, this 400 Euros is almost equivalent to half the salary (in terms of basic pay) a senior professor earns in my country (India) and I see that this conference is not the only one when it comes to such high fees. What are the real reasons behind such high fees? Isn't this in some away discouraging genuine contributions in academia?

Typically the fees are to cover the facilities of the meeting including services attached to the venue. In addition there may be administrative costs for the conveners to be added to that. My experience says that everytime you let a professional conference center and staff organize a meeting it becomes very expensive. this may seem like a bad ideabut what is often not seen is the work volounteers would have to put in if you tried to organize a large conference without such help. Free help is usually not easy to muster these days.

So while I agree that conference fees may seem ridiculously high at times the reason is that it would be hard to organize them otherwise. It may be easier for recurring conferences since they can build a knowledge base and tools to help but for a one-off the ask can be too large without professional help.

By keeping a discussion open about these costs we can perhaps put the spotlight on the problems and realize that we cannot both have the cake and eat it. In order to reduce costs meetings may have to be organized in simpler venues and by more volounteers from the community.


In case of multiple job offers, should school name or offer letter be revealed? In case of multiple job offers, should candidates reveal schools names or show offer letters?

Some say do not name the competing institutions in either of these initial emails
Others say "there are too many crazies in departments--you never know what someone might do to interfere with the other institution's perspective. I've seen it happen, and it ain't pretty. On the other hand, it made the choice easier."
Some say do: "Just to let you know, I do have another offer that came in from Midwest State U. They have initially set my salary at ... "

I do not see any reason to show the offer letter. If the school you are negotiating with does not believe you, then that is not a good sign. As for mentioning the other university, it depends on if you can pitch it as a selling point that makes the other offer better. While you should always tell the truth, you can be somewhat selective and play both sides of the coin.

For example, if you get offers from both Stanford and Harvard and you grew up on in the Bay area, but are currently doing a post doc at MIT, you could tell Stanford that you have an offer from Harvard and that you are really happy in Boston, so they will have to beat Harvard's offer. Similarly, you can tell Harvard that you have an offer from Stanford and that your family is in the area so Harvard will have to beat Stanford's offer.

Alternatively, if you have offers from both Stanford and Bunker Hill Community College and you grew up, were educated, and are currently in the Bay area, you would not want to mention the name (bunker Hill) when talking to Stanford, unless you can explain to Stanford what benefits Bunker Hill uniquely provides. You probably want to specifically mention Stanford when talking to Bunker Hill.

If, however, you grew up, were educated, and are currently in the Boston area, then you are in a gray area and may want to mention Bunker Hill to Stanford. Given the difference in the ranking of the two universities, it might be a hard sell to convince Stanford that the Bunker Hill offer is really competitive to the Stanford offer.


How to condense a full journal paper to a two-page conference abstract? I am in the field of biomedical engineering and have some results for a full paper, trying to submit as a two-page abstract. I figured I could reuse the text I prepared from the full paper, but not sure how to organize the two pager. Would the following plan work?

Abstract - A very brief summary of the question, the methods and main results.
Introduction - Not a full literature review, but only enough to point out the gap for the question I am trying to answer.
Results - I try to briefly summarize the methods in the results section, and highlight the qualitative findings.
Conclusions - I would skip the Discussion section, and put the take-home message here.

I'd probably put one figure to help the readers, if there is a good one.

What do you think of this plan?

PS: I was intending to present a "finding" paper, not a "methods" paper that developed a new technique. In that case, I cannot skip the methods section for sure.

The usual advice for this type of question is:

  Do not shorten, but rewrite.

This will not only produce a smoother text, but also will be quicker. Squeezing eight pages to two is a tremendous headache and time consuming. Usually it also results in an awkward text. Writing two pages for something that you understand thoroughly is quicker. Make a good plan what you want to tell in two pages and write the two pages from scratch.

Edit: I just saw, that this advice is the same as the most upvoted comment for this question. In essence, this question is a duplicate…


Can I share my results published results/research on my personal website or Medium blog post? Is it OK to share my results on Medium blog post or my personal website when I have signed a copyright form with IEEE or IET?

In the paper submission, I only shared the method and results. But I want to share the exact codes that I used to produce the result. Will it violate the copyright?

The second question is if I publish my result on my blog post before submitting my paper, will it cause any trouble with the reviewers or reviewing process?

In most cases, yes you can, but you should ask your university if they have rules regarding hosting on websites/blogs with research products. Some places for example require that such a site is university hosted, can not be hosted abroad etc.

Should you do it? Absolutely, with the proviso that you should publish your paper first, or together with the code. With scientific results becoming more and more complex, it is often necessary to have access to various codes, for the purpose of reproduction. If your code is useful, it can also be quite profitable in terms of citations - remember to require people to cite your paper when they use your code.
Note that there are several journals (depending on your field) that actually specialize in publishing manuals for such public codes. CPC is a prominent example for physics (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-physics-communications)


Graduate School Topic I am an undergraduate student with math and physics majors and I plan to go to graduate school. I am interested in both math and physics, but I want the stuff I work on to have some practical / tangible side. If I go for math graduate school, what are some potential topics should I study. As I stated before, I want to work on something that is a blend of pure and applied mathematics (perhaps with some applications in theortical physics). What are some fields in math that I should look into?
Similarly, if I go to physics graduate school, what are some specific and general topics I should look into?

Let me encourage you to think more broadly and longer term. Contributing to math and science, even in the purest of pure fields, is a contribution to humanity. The effects may not be seen for a long time, but they will come.
If you think too narrowly then you may choose a problem that is intractable and you won't find a solution (though something may come of it later, after you've left the scene).
The obvious answer to your direct question would be to study applied math and/or something in, say, zero emissions power generation. Nuclear Fusion power would be a benefit, of course, at the moment.
But longer term, think of the contributions of Newton and Leibniz to the creation of the Calculus. It was pretty useless at the time, but enables much of engineering today. I worked in a field like that. It was so esoteric that I predicted at the time that no one would ever find a practical use for it. Well, guess what? About ten years later someone told me that my thesis work had been applied.
My advice is to choose something interesting and do a good job of extending knowledge in that area. If it is applied in some way, fine. If not, then eventually it will be. And pick something for which you will get good faculty support as you get started.
Another example is the Standard Model in physics. Hardly anything is more pure or theoretical than that. There are a few known holes in it, which if plugged will give a better idea of how "Life, the Universe, and Everything" actually works. Over time, that should lead to tremendous advances in, well, life, the universe, and everything.
To continue my advice, in working on what you love, provided you have the opportunity, as not many do, and you find some opportunity to do something practical and short term with what you and your colleagues know, then take it on as a project, or encourage others to do so.


Do arxiv moderators not work on Sundays? I have noticed one thing that whenever I submit a paper in arxiv  on Friday, they keep "on hold" from  Saturday to Sunday and then accept it later Monday or Tuesday.  On the other hand, it happened that when I submit a paper during Monday, Tuesday etc,  then process of submission becomes much faster. On Sunday and Saturday, the system seems to stop.
Thus: do the arxiv moderators not work on Sundays?

Yes, arXiv staff are not working on weekends. They also do not work on major holidays in the USA.


How Good Is A Recommendation Letter For MS in CS From A Workplace If It's Coming From A Mentor? I have 3 years of work experience in cloud computing and virtualization and am intending to illuminate this in my SOP. With what degree of credibility will the above mentioned work experience be accepted by admissions committees if I do not have any letter from my workplace at all? Also, since it is difficult for me to get a recommendation from my immediate manager at my workplace, if at all I do get one from my company, it may be from a colleague who was my mentor (no managerial role). How good will such a recommendation be? I already have two recommendations from my college professors, each of which highlight one of my two research publications. It is for the third recommendation that I have the choice between this letter from my mentor at my workplace and from an assistant professor at my college who had taught me in a number of courses and labs. Which recommendation should I go forward with? Please advise on these matters.

Unless the MS is very applied, I'd think that an additional academic recommendation would be better. That is especially true if they can speak to different aspects of your work.

But a letter from a mentor should, in general, be fine. It might even be better than one from a manager as the person likely has more knowledge of you and your contributions. The letter from a manager is likely to be a bit pro forma. The recommender should be clear about the relationship (i.e. mentor, not manager).


Political Topic all (most) students would agree on For a class demonstration, I am seeking a political topic that all of my students (US undergraduate class) would pretty much hold the same opinion on. The original topic from the research I'm basing the demo on was support for the Castro regime in Cuba (study was conducted in the 1960s) - everyone was against it. I have used support for ISIS (ISIL) in the past (again, everyone against it), but I have often had to explain who ISIS was to students. I'm teaching asynchronously this semester, so won't have the opportunity to do that.
I would greatly appreciate ideas.

Poverty is bad.
Polluting the environment is bad.
Murdering people because of their race or religion is bad.


Is it true that almost everyone who starts a PhD and sticks around long enough can get one? Not referring to degree mills here, but genuine PhDs.

This claim comes from this blog post by Cardiff University psychologist and neuroscientist Chris Chambers:

  A PhD is essentially a test. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you pass this test by passing your PhD. Wrong. The fact is that passing a PhD is like getting a certificate of participation. Why? Because almost everyone who starts a PhD and sticks around long enough ends up getting one. No, the real test is what happens after your PhD. That's when you’ll know whether you’ve really passed. Do well and it will open the door to a career of unparalleled intellectual freedom.

(emphasis mine)

The claim sounds fantastic to me. Is it true? Are there any statistics that indicate it to be so? Chris Chamber's post links to a source, but unfortunately it appears to no longer be available.

From what I have seen, this is pretty much the case for PhD programs in Europe. PhD programs in Europe tend to work a bit differently than in the US. It is typically expected that you have already completed a Master's degree before starting a PhD. The PhD program itself tends to have little or no coursework requirements, and no examinations other than the thesis defense at the end.

A lot of filtering that is done in US programs through exams during the program, is instead done at the selection stage. Consequently, landing a PhD position in Europe can be more difficult than in the US. But once you got the position, it is very rare for people not to get their PhD in the end. People on occasion may drop out of the program. Much more rarely, a program may decide to drop a candidate if things are really not working out. If that happens, it typical happens in the first year. But overall in the various locations I have been, at least 80% of people who start PhDs in Europe end up with a PhD.

Some actual data:

According to this article in the Times Higher Education, PhD completions rates in the UK are about 73% after 7 years, grow up to just over 80% eventually.
This post by the Dutch association of Universities shows similar numbers.


Should I email my professor's colleague? I'd really love to have your valuable advice!

I have a professor who I respect very much and he adores me as his student, often says I'm his best student. And we kept in touch even after I graduated recently. I email him a lot about grad school and he usually responds really fast, like within 3 hours after I sent the email.

About two weeks ago, I wrote him an email about grad school, but he didn't reply. It was unusual but I waited for a week, and wrote two more emails to him and sent to both his email addresses, he still didn't reply. Now it's been two weeks. It's really unusual that he doesn't respond at all, and I normally CC myself in those emails, and I received my own emails, so I know it's not the problem of email delivery.

My concern right now is that he's old and I'm worried about his health; because him not responding is not like him. I'm in a different country now, so I can't physically check up on him, but I have his colleague's email. Would it be rude if I sent his colleague an email to ask if everything is okay with my professor? Do they have any news about him? What if my professor was just busy and didn'r reply? Would I be overboard on this issue by asking his collegue?

Also since he was gonna write me recommendation letters, would it seem like I'm only asking about him to make sure that I have my LOR? (WHICH ISN'T WHY I'M CONCERNED.) I don't know if it's appropriate to email his colleague and ask about how's he doing and if anything happened.

What should I do?  Thank you so much!

I'm a professor, and two weeks is not a particularly long time for me to get around to replying to a non-urgent e-mail.  That said, I'm not generally as good at replying to e-mails (particularly those from former students, which you now are) as you describe your professor as being.

In your situation, I would do one or both of two things:

E-mail him again.  Say directly something like "I sent you a couple of e-mails over the past few weeks, but I haven't received a reply yet.  Could you please reply and let me know that you're all right, to put my mind at ease?"  A phrasing like this is less likely to come across as demanding, and more likely to come across as simply concerned.
E-mail his administrative assistant (not another faculty member) and ask whether Prof. X has been in to the department recently, or whether he is traveling or on vacation or the like.  You can say that you haven't heard from him in a while and you're starting to get concerned.  Administrative assistants are much more likely to know whether a particular professor is in town or out of town.  A random faculty member, on the other hand, is much less likely keep track of where your professor is;  I couldn't tell you what the details of my colleagues' schedules are.


Academic life in China I was offered a tenure track assistant professor position in China. However, I am not familiar with the admin culture and academic environment of China. Is it difficult to cope with the university admin in China? Does the acadmics 'interact' with peers and students differently in China? More importantly, is it going to be a very steep transition in migrating to a Chinese university?

Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!

I think you have a few important questions.  Foremost, I am assuming you know the language -- to what extent do you know Chinese culture?  The transition will be very steep if you do not understand the cultural nuances of all aspects of living and working in China.  Indeed, from a Western standpoint, the interactions between students and faculty are much different.  And, the interactions between faculty and staff are also different.  As you consider the options, I would find out what criteria are used for promotion, and whether you must publish in certain journals on certain lists.  I don't know where you have done your training.  If your training is in a Western university, you may experience a very steep transition if you are unfamiliar with Chinese culture, practices, and norms.


Would it be possible to publish a journal paper about data-visualization website? I am graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. I want to know whether is that possible to publish a paper about my final-year project? The final-year project was about a website which contains data visualization of one company’s data. This works had done by help of my supervisor during my bachelor time. Does anyone know about it?

This would entirely depend on the contribution your website and techniques involved add to the state of the art. Is any element of it new and novel? I.e. something done nowhere else. It may be worthy of a conference paper for example, if he contribution is weaker.

What is your supervisors opinion? Have they hinted at this possibility?

Edit: The company's data may also feature as an issue during publication. Would they be happy for it to be used and if not can you describe your work well enough without it? i.e. if you use a figure in your paper that shows their data, such as a screenshot.


Academic alternatives to a Ph.D "You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a
  Ph.D. You seem almost proud of that fact.

  Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system
  is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German
  professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those
  conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going
  to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of
  union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s
  being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for
  that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of
  pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In
  the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified,
  but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long
  and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a
  great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success
  at all.

  How is it that you were able to escape that requirement?

  I was lucky because I got educated in World War II and everything was
  screwed up so that I could get through without a Ph.D. and finish up
  as a professor. Now that’s quite impossible. So, I’m very proud that I
  don’t have a Ph.D. and I raised six children and none of them has a
  Ph.D., so that’s my contribution."

(From [1])

Which are the Academic alternatives to a Ph.D.? (Actively participate in seminars, write papers,) being supervised without earning a degree? How you become deeply involved in the community of your research interests without a Ph.D.? How you become known in your field? How do you write to a professor for supervision without earning a degree?

[1]: A 'rebel' without a Ph.D. A conversation with the mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson on quantum electrodynamics, climate change, and his latest pet project.

Freeman Dyson had two advantages on his side: (i) He was brilliant. (ii) He was educated at a time when, as he put it, everything was "screwed up".

(ii) is no longer the case for any of us, or at least not in any of the countries where I take it that you want to be a professor. (i) may be true for you, but statistically speaking is not true for all but a very very small number of people; consequently, (i) also does not provide a route to becoming a professor, and certainly is not something anyone should bank upon.

In other words: Forget about becoming a professor without a PhD. While it may not be completely impossible, it is so unlikely that nobody could reasonably advise anyone to take that route. In actual practice, almost all professor job ads contain a phrase similar to "PhD in X or a related field is required", and there truly have to be exceptional reasons for a hiring committee to ignore this.

[I will add that all of the above specifically only applies to the sciences and mathematics; professors are frequently hired out of industry in engineering, education, and business departments, and I would not be surprised if other criteria apply in such cases.]


Career options in scientific/academic publishing for PhDs and Postdocs I finished my PhD a few months ago and am now settling into a postdoc position. The last 6-8 months of my PhD had been quite stressful (well, nothing unusual there, of course) and when it came to thinking about the next career step, all I knew was that I was a bit more inclined towards staying in academia than moving to the industry. So as soon as the offer for this postdoc came, I accepted. Just to prevent any confusion before I go any further: I am certainly not regretting that decision. As in, I am happy with my research work, one reason being its multidisciplinary nature (both physics & electronics are heavily involved). It is likely therefore that I continue on this career path.

But one never knows what life brings, so it is good to keep one's options open. So this is more about obtaining knowledge/collecting information for alternative career avenues.

In that regard, one area that sort of intrigues me is academic publishing. I have tried (by means of web-search, talking to the employees of scientific journals I met at a conference booth, etc.) to find out on how it is to be involved with the scientific-publishing industry, e.g., what does a typical day at the office look like, what are the challenges they face, what kind of freedom is possible in the various tasks, etc. But I somehow haven't received any concrete information based on which I could assess this as a potential career option.

So below are my main questions, asked from the perspective of a PhD/Postdoc. As such, any references (books/articles/memoirs) that may serve as a good introduction to this topic would be very much appreciated. Even more, if someone on this stackexchange community comes from a similar background, then it would be really great if he/she could share their experiences.

Q1. What kind of full-time career paths can be envisaged in the publishing industry?

(This is one advertisment that I recently saw. It sounds nice but I'd like a detailed description about the job role, for example).

Q2. How is the career progression? What kind of challenges does one typically face in this profession?

Q3. Are there any short-term jobs or internships suitable for PhDs/Postdocs in this field?

Q4. What are the typical exit options? For instance,

Is it easy to switch back to your research career (postdoc/professorship)?
What kind of secondary and tertiary industries, if any, be interested in hiring someone with an experience in the world of publishing?

I'm in a similar situation, meaning that I'm also a recent (less than two months) Ph.D. graduate and currently focus my effort on a job search (both in industry and academia). The differences between you and me include the discipline (not essential) and my lack of postdoctoral (or any other, for that matter) job offers at the moment. Since I briefly have been considering a temporary career move toward a scientific publishing world, while I do not have a direct work experience in the scientific publishing industry, I think that I have browsed through enough job advertisements to form and share my opinion on the subject, as follows (certainly, take it with a grain of salt).

I consider the temporary career move toward scientific publishing that I've mentioned mostly as an industry career option and not an academic one. While in the context of scientific publishing, there is an intersection between classifying such career option as one of industry or academia, I believe that a career in scientific publishing cannot be considered as an academic career. Therefore, my first point is that, if you, as myself, consider academia as your main ultimate career avenue, going the scientific publishing route is not a good option (unless it is very short-term and due to circumstances). Continuing my road terminology analogy, the above-mentioned avenue and route are not parallel, thus, after some time traveling the scientific publishing career route, one can find themselves too far from the academia career avenue. That will most likely make returning back to academia very difficult, if not impossible.

Based on various job descriptions that I've looked at, a career in scientific publishing seems to involve much less scholarly activities at the expense of much more project management, marketing and operational ones (especially, for non-senior editorial roles). Moreover, internal organizational politics, tight deadlines and other time-related issues, as well as stress of juggling multiple publication projects add insult to injury.

Finally, I personally dislike the scientific publishing industry's negative role due to lack of openness in dissemination of scientific information and corresponding strategies and tactics they use (that includes their "implementation" of the open access paradigm). Therefore, it would make even more difficult for me to work in such environment and organizational culture.

Considering all the above, I would not go the scientific publishing route, even temporarily, but, instead, would try my best to join academia as a postdoc or junior faculty member and progress there or, alternatively, go the real science-related industry route (less perfect, considering the ultimate goal, but, can be either temporary, or long-term, combined - in a form of consulting - with academic positions).