Do all universities have a minimum required GPA for graduate school application? I am a senior undergraduate (electrical) engineering student, exceedingly interested in physics. 4 years ago when entering university, for some reasons (better: illusions) I chose engineering as my major, while I was interested (and also really knowledgeable) in physics . Soon after the first semester I realized that I've decided wrong, and I must have chosen physics.

Since our university is a technical institute and does not have a strong physics department I decided to study physics on my own, without changing my major.But I took and passed the basic graduate physics courses (advanced quantum mechanics, advanced statistical mechanics, electrodynamics I & II), have done a few research projects and had a paper published (maybe 1 more in the future). I have explored lots of research areas in physics and I think I have a good potential for doing research.

While concentrating on physics, I was inattentive to EE courses. Today, while searching for graduate programs, I saw that some schools require a minimum GPA, usually 3. I just calculated my GPA and found out that it is 2.95!

Do all universities have a GPA threshold?
Since I'm changing my major and also have a good GPA in graduate physics courses, is there any way I can compensate for my (very) low electrical engineering GPA? (like by taking subject GRE, etc.)
If I first (somehow) get a masters degree in physics and then apply for a PhD, can I throw away this electrical engineering GPA in my PhD application ?

Any other suggestion is warmly appreciated.

I can't say "all" for sure, but I think you'll find that many if not most schools do have a minimum GPA requirement.

Whether you can compensate for a low GPA depends on how the school handles it.  In some cases it may be difficult, as admissions committees may literally scan apps for GPA and put all that do not meet the standard in a "reject" pile without even reading the rest of the application.  In other cases the minimum may be "soft" and they will read the app.  My advice would be to: A) get advice from a professor at your school you have a rapport with; and B) contact faculty at the schools you're applying to (or considering applying to).  I would not just bluntly ask the GPA question on its own, but email them in general saying you're interested in the program, and mention the GPA issue along with whatever else you ask them about the program.

You almost certainly cannot "throw away" your undergrad GPA in a PhD application.  Even if you have an MA, most schools will want to see all your college transcripts.

You should also take advantage of the time you still have during the year to bring your GPA up as much as possible.  Even consider doing this by taking easy classes that you might not otherwise take.  Personally, if I were in your situation, I would even consider delaying graduation by a year or part of a year, if it's financially feasible and your school will allow it, just to have more time to take classes and bring up your overall GPA.

You have already made a significant blunder in letting your GPA get that low, as a GPA below 3.0 will be a red flag to many graduate programs.  However, from what you say, you would be a strong candidate in other regards.  If you can get people to look at your app long enough to read your statement of purpose and see your grad coursework, then you probably have a decent shot.  To do that, you should leverage your strengths.  If you have taken many grad classes, done research, and published a paper, you presumably have good contacts in the physics department.  Lean on those people to write you glowing letters of rec.


Does better learning affect teaching evaluations? If so, how? Arum and Roksa (p. 7) say:

  Research on course evaluations by Valen Johnson has convincingly demonstrated that "higher grades do lead to better course evaluations" and "student course evaluations are not very good indicators of how much students have learned. "

I don't have access to Johnson's book, but a review states:

  [Johnson] found the "grade-attribution" theory the most useful: "Students attribute success in academic work to themselves, but attribute failure to external sources" (96). Regardless of the reason, the analysis provides "conclusive evidence of a biasing effect of student grades on student evaluations of teaching" (118).

Johnson did his work in the US. If I'm understanding correctly based on the fairly brief descriptions I have available, he managed to get permission to spy on students' actions over time, so that he could actually detect not just correlations but the time-ordering of events, which could help to tease apart questions of causation.

Johnson says that evaluations are "not very good" indicators of learning. My question is basically on what the available evidence is as to what "not very good" means. It's possible that someone could answer this simply by having access to Johnson's book and flipping to p. 118.

If "not very good" means low correlation, then it would be interesting to know whether the correlation is statistically different from zero, and, if so, what its sign is. My guess, which encountered a very skeptical reaction in comments here, was that the correlation might be negative, since improved learning might require higher standards, which would tend to result in lower grades.

If the correlation is nonzero, it would also be interesting to understand whether one can infer that learning has any causal effect on evaluations. These two variables could be correlated due to the grade-attribution effect, but that wouldn't mean higher learning caused higher evaluations; it could just mean that better students learn more, and better students also give higher evaluations.

If we had, for example, a study in which students were randomly assigned to different sections of a course, we might be able to tell whether differences between sections in learning were correlated with differences between sections in evaluations. However, my understanding is that most of these "value added" analyses (which are often done in K-12 education) are statistically bogus. Basically you're subtracting two measurements from one another, and the difference is very small compared to the random and systematic errors.

My anecdotal experience is that when I first started teaching, I was a relatively easy grader, I got very high teaching evaluations, and my students did badly on an internationally standardized test that I gave at the end of the term. Over time, I got confident enough to raise my standards, my teaching evaluations went down, and my students' learning got dramatically better, as measured by this test.

References

Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

Valen Johnson, Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, 2003

related: Do teaching evaluations lead to lower standards in class?

The answer, from new research approaches dating from 2010, seems to be that increased learning tends to cause lower scores on students' evaluations of teaching (SET), but this is a complicated issue that has historically been a bone of contention.

There is a huge literature on this topic. The people who study this kind of thing the most intensely are psychometricians. There are many things on which they seem to agree universally, and many of these areas simply represent the consensus view of professional psychometricians on their field in general:

The surveys used for students' evaluations of teaching (SET) should be designed by professionals, and are basically useless if created by people who lack professional expertise in psychometrics. Certain common practices, such as treating evaluation scores as if they were linear (and can therefore meaningfully be averaged), show a lack of competence in measurement.
It's a terrible idea to use SETs as the sole measure of a teacher's effectiveness. Multiple measures are always better than a single measure. But, as is often the case, administrators tend to prefer a single measure that is cheap to administer and superficially appears impartial and scientific.
SETs are increasingly being given online rather than being administered in class on paper. This is a disaster, because the response rates for the online evaluations are extremely low (usually 20-40%), so the resulting data are basically worthless.
The difficulty of a course or the workload, as measured by SET scores, has nearly zero correlation with achievement.
SET scores are multidimensional measures of multidimensional traits, but they seem to break down into two main dimensions, professional and personal, which are weighted about the same. The personal dimension is subject to biases based on sex, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation (Calkins).

Getting down to the main question: does better learning affect teaching evaluations?

Before 2010, the best studies on this topic were ones in which students were randomly assigned to different sections of the same course, and then given an identical test at the end to measure achievement. These studies tended to show that SET ratings had correlations with achievement of about +0.30 to +0.44. But Cohen says, "There is one study finding of a strong negative relationship between ratings and the highest rated instructors had the lowest performing students. There is also one study finding showing the opposite, a near perfect positive relationship between ratings and achievement." This lack of consistency is not surprising, because we're talking about different fields of education and different SET forms. A typical positive correlation of +0.4 would indicate that 16% of the variance in students' performance could be attributed to differences between teachers that could be measured by SETs. Although 16% isn't very high, the sign of the correlation in most of the studies is positive and statistically significant.

But starting in 2010, new evidence arrived that turned this whole picture upside-down (Carrell, Braga). In these newer studies, students were randomly assigned to different sections of a class such as calculus, but they were then followed later in their career as they took required follow-up classes such as aeronautical engineering. The Carrell study was done at the US Air Force Academy, and due to the academy's structure, there was low attrition, and students could be forced to take the follow-up courses.

Carrell constructed a measure of added value for each teacher based on their students' performance on a test given at the end of the class (contemporaneous value-added), and a different measure (follow-on course value-added) based on performance in the later, required follow-on courses.

  Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value-added but positively correlated with follow-on course value-added.

  We find that less experienced and less qualified professors produce students who perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course being taught, whereas more experienced and highly qualified professors produce students who perform better in the follow-on related curriculum.

Braga's study at Bocconi University in Italy produces similar findings:

  [We] find that our measure of teacher effectiveness is negatively correlated with the students' evaluations: in other words, teachers who are associated with better subsequent performance receive worst evaluations from their students. We rationalize these results with a simple model where teachers can either engage in real teaching or in teaching-to-the-test, the former requiring higher students' effort than the latter.

References

Abrami, d'Apollonia, and Rosenfield, "The dimensionality of student ratings of instruction: what we know and what we do not," in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: An Evidence-Based Perspective, eds. Perry and Smart, Springer 2007 - link

Braga, Paccagnella, and Pellizzari, "Evaluating Students' Evaluations of Professors," IZA Discussion Paper No. 5620, April 2011 - link

Calkins and Micari, "Less-Than-Perfect Judges: Evaluating Student Evaluations," Thought & Action, fall 2010, p. 7 - link

Carrell and West, "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from
Random Assignment of Students to Professors," J Political Economy 118 (2010) 409 - link

Marsh and Roche, "Making Students' Evaluations of Teaching Effectiveness Effective: The Critical Issues of Validity, Bias, and Utility," American Psycologist, November 1997, p. 1187 - link

Stark and Freishtat, "An Evaluation of Course Evaluations," ScienceOpen https://www.scienceopen.com/document/vid/42e6aae5-‐246b-‐4900-‐8015-‐
dc99b467b6e4?0  - link


How far should you go in compromising your work to get it published? To get my first paper published I carefully followed all reviewers’ instructions as I was convinced that reviewers are experienced researchers and reviewers. After major revision my first paper was smoothly accepted.

However, as I progressed in research I also grew to dislike my first publication. Following the reviewers’ instructions made the paper unbalanced and disrupted the line of reasoning. That is because many reviewers request additional changes reflecting their area of expertise, but not necessarily contribute to the original objective and scope of the paper.

I also learnt that ‘the academic standard’ is a broad interpretation depending on the reviewers’ experiences and preferences. Also reviewers make mistakes in their judgement. As I was quickly asked to review myself, this blog greatly helped me in identifying my own mistakes: https://sites.umiacs.umd.edu/elm/2016/02/01/mistakes-reviewers-make/

In following publications, supported by my experienced supervisors, I learned to refute more. Even if I want to compromise, my supervisors will object because it is also a matter of our long-term reputation. The flip-side of the coin is that reviewers get pissed-off because no one likes a rebuttal, no matter how politely and respectfully it is written. It just provokes a response in reviewers to legitimize their views and invites additional scrutiny of my work.

I do however fully agree with my supervisors. It is a balance between short term targets and long term success. It is in essence a matter of personal integrity. But it is also personally stressful and it takes a lot of additional time and effort on the expense of research. I often think, just let us compromise and get the work published smoothly.

How should I deal with this dilemma? Have others had similar experiences?

When I started writing papers, my supervisors advised me that I should consider the reviewers' comments and suggestions but not be bound by them. When revising papers after reviewer feedback I would write a response letter addressing each point, whether I had incorporated the reviewer feedback or not, and importantly - why (or why not). In most cases I found that the editor considered a justification for not amending (a portion of) the paper to be acceptable.

In one case a reviewer wanted what amounted to a literature review of possible alternative solutions, which we considered to be far beyond the scope of what we were reporting in the paper and we ultimately withdrew the paper and submitted it to a different journal.


My main research advisor refuses to give me a letter (to help for apply US physics program). What should I do? By "main" research advisor I mean: with him, I got my most valuable research experience, greatest results and of course I invested most of my research time. Our field is Physics and I am making some achievements, but when I asked him for a recommendation letter for my PhD application, he refused and said I would not want his letter if he really writes one. I'll give his reason at the end, but I want to state my own question here first.
Will it be weird that I state my research experience with him very clearly (I think it will make a strong part) in my SoP but without his recommendation? Will the admission committee wonder where this advisor's recommendation is? If this is not a problem, does it even help that I merely mention this experience in SoP without the support of a letter? I have another piece of research experience from a very prestigious place and I have the LoR from my supervisor there, but that one doesn't have strong results as this main piece of experience and I am counting on this experience to make my application strong.
Here is his reason why he doesn't want to recommend me which might be trivial to my question but I guess you would want to know.
First, my undergrad major is an engineering field that has almost nothing to do with Physics. My advisor said if he is recruiting graduate students, he would only consider Physics Bachelors to be graduate students because it will be very hard and even impossible for students trained in other majors to shape their thinking to be suitable to do research in Physics. I am no exception, although I am doing part-time research with him and have taught myself most Physics core coursework (Damn, another equally prestigious Physics Professor in the neighbouring office just holds the opposite view). For me, his suggestion is that I should treat Physics as a hobby but forget about going to graduate school. (We encountered a nasty math problem which was important for logical completeness of our work some time ago, and he got around it with a trick which to me was "ridiculous" by then. I proposed my own alternative method, but in his view my method is rigid, and he then used my failure of understanding his trick to tell me that my thinking is already not suitable for Physics.)
Second, he is really really an "idealist" in doing research. Since I am applying for grad school, I want to speed up a little bit to revise our work to have a presentable draft (I had already derived the results by then, we were polishing the writing and dealing the above-mentioned math problem). He said I was appearing to be like a "pragmatist" because I was not acting or thinking slowly and calmly like an idealist. He even got a bit unhappy with me when I was arguing with him, wanting him to explain his trick (mentioned in the first reason) more clearly, when I was so desperate to understand it.
As a result, he said I would not want his letter since his opinion is just he won't recommend me to a graduate program although I did research with him.

Yes, it might look a bit weird, but you don't have control over that. And he is giving you good advice that he shouldn't write you a letter. Not every advisor is willing to be so honest.
But, I don't think it is an absolute block to your plans. Find others to write you strong letters and (US perspective) you should be ok.
What you need are letters from people who can confidently and honestly predict your future success based on their experiences with you. This advisor is not that person.
And FWIW, it is his problem, not a problem with your work mode. And no admissions committee should make any decisions based on guesses or suppositions. They should take your materials as they stand.


Does 'securing letters of recommendations' count as one of legitimate reasons of going abroad for one semester? I am going to apply for one semester of study abroad at a more prominent university than the one I am currently enrolled in. One of my true motivations to apply is to secure letters of recommendations in case I'll apply for a graduate school later on. Should I mention this motivation? My personal statement will be read by both sides involved. Will the mention make it sound that the letters from my university are worth less? Does the reason in itself count as one of legitimate motives to go?

No, you shouldn't mention securing letters of recommendation in your personal statement.  It sounds a little too mercenary, like you are more interested in bureaucratic outcomes like letters than you are in actually learning.  It may hurt the feelings of faculty from your home institution who read it, and it's not really what the other institution is looking for in a personal statement.

On the other hand, you're right that this experience could really help in securing compelling letters, and I think it's sensible for you to take this into account in your (private) decision making.  If you currently attend a strong research university, then getting letters from an even stronger research university probably won't help much.  However, there are many students at teaching-focused schools that don't send many students to graduate school in any given field, and very rarely to the top departments.  That makes it harder for faculty to write strong letters of recommendation, because the comparison group is not so good: even if somebody writes "this is the best student I've seen in 20 years", it's not clear that this is in itself a strong enough statement.  (It's still possible to write a compelling letter if the recommender can offer enough concrete, impressive details, but it makes writing the letter harder and requires the recommender to know the applicant really well.)  If a faculty member can easily compare you with lots of students attending a range of good to great graduate schools, that makes it easier for them to write a useful letter.

So if you're studying in a department that rarely or never sends students to the graduate programs you'd like to attend, then it's very much worth trying to get a letter from someone who has a broader perspective on the applicant pool.  Otherwise it's not so important.  But either way, you shouldn't mention it in your personal statement.


Contact a professor to agree a research proposal for a post doc position that he is advertising I am a PhD candidate in computer science and I am looking for postdocs.

Surfing the web, I have found a post-doc opening that I find extremely interesting, but I do not know personally the PI of the group, nor my advisor does.

The opening asks for submitting 3 items: a CV, a cover letter and a research proposal.

Before writing a research proposal I would like to get in contact with the PI and try to understand their challenges and write something that would be meaningful for them, instead of going directly with a proposal that maybe is not of interest for them.

Which is the best way to approach a PI in this setting? Should I send him a mail with a CV and referee contacts even if this is not exactly an application, but is an informal query? Or should I go directly with the formal application?

Any experience to share?

A postdoc application process is not a competition to find which person can magically understand the PI's objectives, it is there to find the best fit for the job. On the other hand, a postdoc is the start of independent research. You should devise your own research agenda(s) and ask questions about the suitability of your ideas to get a better feel for the project.

In my direct experience and experience of people in a similar position, it is entirely normal to ask questions about the position beforehand. Have a look at the advertisement, it may even explicitly mention to email any questions. My recommendation is to email the PI with a very short description of yourself (research area, where you got your PhD from, etc.) and very short questions. If - this - job is not suitable, the PI may even have you in mind for something else.

In my case I emailed asking if there was scope to do X (there was) for a job in an entirely new field, it is the best position I've ever applied for and I wouldn't have if I had not known it was possible.


What should I do about a group project in which I did almost everything? I had a history project at school. There were two other partners besides me. So I did basically 98% of the work, another person did approximately 2% of the work, and the last person did 0%. :( Now we are (I am) almost done.  For the video we had to make on Japanese calligraphy, I draw a LOT of drawings, found music, did 2 voiceovers, made all of the slides, and put together the entire video. The second person helped a tiny bit on putting together the video and also did 2 voiceovers, but nothing else. Finally, the 3rd person did.. umm... I don’t know (nothing). In class, we evaluated our team members. I didn’t give them very high scores, but now I feel like their scores should have been even lower. We made a group chat, and I STILL don’t have the 2 voiceovers of the 3rd person. This is completely unfair. Should I tell the teacher or not?

Proceed with caution. It may be that it will be your behavior that is not acceptable. Group projects are supposed to be done collaboratively. A student who takes over and does everything might actually be graded downward, just for that.

You were focused a lot (too much?) on the product. Perhaps the entire point of the exercise was to focus on process, instead. Perhaps your "team mates" gave you low scores also for taking over too much and cutting them out of the project.

So, before you "rat out" anyone, make sure you understand the requirements and the consequences.

But, if the others just refused to help and/or didn't come to group meetings, etc., then you should make appropriate comments on the peer evaluation that you did.

There are, of course, professors who only care about the product. I don't know if that was the case here, but in my course it would not be. A group project is supposed to support everyone's learning and to give practice in collaboration.


College Staff Taking Classes and Doing Research I presently work in a facilities-type role at a small Liberal Arts college.

One of the benefits of working at the college is the ability to take two classes per academic-year (not including summer or winter terms).

I have a BS in Economics from a larger university as well as a pretty broad quantitative background and I'm interested in taking classes in mathematics, statistics, and computer science (they have an MSCS program here).

What I'm wondering is this:

How likely would it be for me to become involved in research projects?

Would it be odd for a staff member taking a few classes to ask about doing research with a faculty member?

I'm hoping to pad my resume a bit for acceptance into a PhD or MS in Applied Math program down the line; but, I'm wondering if it's worth getting my hopes up about doing research even though I'm just a staff member taking classes.

Well, your request would certainly be unusual for most faculty members, but that also doesn't mean it wouldn't be accepted!

The main challenge would be if you were looking to be paid for the work. Under such circumstances, it might be much more challenging to get involved with projects, because the funding mechanisms (such as NSF REU grants, which fund many undergraduate research projects) would not be available to fund you (since you're not an undergraduate student!).

However, if you're just looking to do it for the research experience, I think the biggest obstacle would be convincing a potential advisor that you're serious. I would recommend then that you make an in-person appointment, rather than trying to set something like this up via email.


Publishing data under Creative Commons license: CC0 or CC-BY? I am submitting a data article to an open access journal, with the data available in a repository (Open Science Framework). I need to add a license to the data repository. It seems from some internet research that the CC0 would be the correct option for a data set, but I have a hard time finding the difference between CC0 and CC-BY licenses.
So I have 2 questions: first, would CC0 be appropriate, and secondly, what is the actual difference?

CC-0 is considered the best choice for scientific progress because it lowers barriers to reuse.

Dryad has a nice and compelling explanation of why they require CC-0 in their FAQ https://datadryad.org/pages/faq#info-cc0

Here is one excerpt:

  CC0 does not exempt those who reuse the data from following community norms for scholarly communication, in particular from citation of the original data authors. On the contrary, by removing unenforceable legal barriers, CC0 facilitates the discovery, reuse, and citation of that data.


Am I too old for an Ed.D? I know that similar questions have been asked regarding PhD's, but I was hoping for specific guidance on my plans for an Ed.D.

I am 38 and I am a career changer; I went from being in the Army, to working for a distribution center. Now, I'm a third year elementary teacher overseas in Hanoi, Vietnam.

I love my new career and I just finished an MSED in Elementary Reading and Literacy. I've been accepted into the Liberty University Ed.S. program in Curriculum and Instruction. In the beginning, I planned on finishing my education there. But, I realized that going for an Ed.D. would require only an additional 30 credit hours. So, I have really been considering it.

I would love to continue teaching while I chip away at the Ed.D and I would continue to teach until I have 10 years experience (making me 45 years old).

My question is: would I be too old to get a job teaching at a university at this age? I would love to continue teaching overseas, but would return to the US for the right job. In addition to being a career changer, I'm new married with two young babies. So, I want to make sure that I set us up for a good future.

Thanks in advance for your help.

In education, the students tend to be slightly "older" because they are required to have practical teaching experience in the classroom. One school I worked at required master level education students to have at least one year in the classroom. Another school I worked at required 3 years of teaching experience before acceptance into the PhD program. This automatically pushes the youngest Ed phds into at best the early thirties.

Brilliance is not enough in education you also need the wisdom of experience in order to guide the next generation of teachers who will be of mixed-ability. Your background and wide experience would be attractive to liberal arts colleges. EdD is usually a practitioner degree involving, as you can guess, practical skills for K12 teaching and leadership. PhD is much more theoretical in nature and preparatory for conducting research.


Are software engineers with PhD in demand in Academia? I'm about to defend my PhD in Computer Science in a couple of months, and I'm struggling with deciding on a future career path. Over the course of the 8 years I spent in an academic environment, I familiarized myself with advances and challenges of formal software development. I also learned a lot about myself. It might sound a bit depressing but right now I don't think that it's my vocation to be a scientist. I feel that there are lots of talented people who will do the research with a lot more passion and way better than me and that a mediocre researcher is of no use for society.

However I think I would love to work with scientists as a software engineer. I came to this point because I like developing software, I have high respect for science and would happily support the research with tools, and implement the research results in software. Being in a research environment I might become more inspired with science someday and will switch to research.

This being said my question is: are software engineers with a research background & PhD in demand in the academic world? Do they allocate funding for such people in universities/research labs? What should I expect from a career of a research software engineer? Would it be considered strange if I applied to a PostDoc position saying that I want to concentrate primarily on software?

I would appreciate any comment or advice. Thank you.

tl;dr: Yes, some universities do value software engineers with a research background.
University College London (UCL), for example, has a Research Software Development Team (RSDT), which specialises in providing software engineering by programmers with a science-research background.
From the first of those links:

This is a team of professional software developers with particular expertise in designing, constructing and maintaining software for academic research.
Our goal is to enhance UCL’s capacity to produce high quality scientific software, from the simplest scripts to complex simulations running on state of the art high performance computers. We do this by collaborating with researchers who are creating their own software

How is it funded?
The work can be funded in one of several ways. It can be funded through university core funding. The work can be bid for as part of a research funding proposal or consultancy contract. It can be funded as part of a research grant for generic research software development.
What do they do?
The UCL RSDT team work alongside researchers on scientific projects. They co-author papers with them, transfer best practice & skills into the team, and hand over well-crafted, well-documented software (and its version-control history) for research.
The team do have research backgrounds themselves. They help select / develop the algorithms. When starting a new project, they read some of the background literature to the project - particularly that relating to the algorithms - to get enough grounding to enable them to ask meaningful questions of the researchers who they're working with.
And (touching on a comment by dgraziotin), the team host Software Carpentry Boot Camps for research staff and doctoral students. This gives the attendees an introduction to key concepts that they might otherwise not be exposed to, such as unit testing, version control, and working from the command-line.
Do many universities do this?
At the moment, this isn't an initiative at many universities that I'm aware of. However, given the success of UCL RSDT to date (the team is now expanding again), and the growing awareness of the concept of the Research Software Developer ("a new type of hero", as described by Neil P Chue Hong, Director of the Software Sustainability Institute), this is probably an idea whose time has come.
Disclosure
I am a little involved with the research software development effort linked to above.


Asking a professor to be on my committee (not advisor) before admission I am applying to a PhD program at my alma mater this fall, and I am trying to make my application as strong as possible. A friend who went through the program suggested that having people lined up to be on my dissertation committee before I applied would help my application.

I have a professor who has agreed to be my advisor if I am admitted, and another professor who has agreed to be on my committee if I am admitted.

I have a meeting with a third professor next week that I have never met before, but was introduced to by another professor. Aspects of his work are very similar to my interests, and I would love if he would be the third person on my committee, but I don't know how to go about asking if he would be willing when we meet.

  Do you have any advice on how to approach this meeting and this professor? How much will having all three professors necessary for my thesis committee on board when I apply help my application?

Lining up the committee this early has definite disadvantages. Your area of research may shift as you learn more about it. The top professor in your field may join the department next year - you would have loved to have her on your committee, it if were not already filled.


How to convert a grade in Italian scale to the UK grading scale? I got a grade as 99/110 during my Bachelor degree in Italy. What would be the conversion to the UK grading scale?

there are resources online that do some approximate conversion like Scholaro. You will have to use your exam grades (look on your diploma supplement) for your GPA, not the final grade. I'm Italian too and used similar services myself when I was looking for Master's programs in the US. To access the selected program you then typically need a certified translation if the official language of the school differs from your degree, i.e., Italian diploma English school. Depending on the school, they might also require you to show a fourth year of university education, e.g. Master di primo livello, as US and UK programs often follow the 4-year format. But this is not a general rule, but it happened to me.
As a side-note, if you graduated from Marconi University in Rome, you can ask for a US-diploma free of charge at graduation, or 200Eur (I think) after that. Marconi is a special case as it has an International branch in Washington which is approved by the US department of education.
Hope it helps :)


Who cites whom most often How can I find out which authors cite a certain author X most often?

This question is different from Influence of author on other authors because here I ask about the number of citations (a very specific metric), whereas the other question and answer are about other metrics.

(Regarding background research I tried as required by the quality standards of this site: I checked scholarly but a solution isn't obvious. Maybe following id_scholarcitedby there could work. Also, http://www.semanticscholar.org/ provides similar info (weighted influence as estimated by AI etc), but that does not perfectly correlate with the number of citations.)

John Ioannidis from Stanford has analysed citations pattern. In this 2016 paper he looks at citation patterns in multi-authorship. He commented on the impact of alphabetic authoring in the various disciplines as well.

In a recent August study in PLoS Biology, John further explores self-citations as well. In this paper he examines "extreme self-citations and citation farms" that can skew and game the citation system.

So yes, using his technique (he examines the Scopus and GoogleScholar database in these studies), you can probably find and examine citation patterns as well.


How to cite an old paper? My first article was accepted with minor revisions, one of them being the correction of a citation. This citation points to the first time the method I am improving was proposed, which was 1962.

Here is a link to the Paper : http://www-isl.stanford.edu/~widrow/papers/c1961generalizationand.pdf

It is on the Stanford online library. I found this paper cited multiple times in the following way:

  B. Widrow, ``Generalization and Information Storage in Networks of
  Adaline `Neurons','' in Self-Organizing Systems, symposium
  proceedings, M.C. Yovitz, G.T. Jacobi, and G. Goldstein, eds.,
  pp.435-461, Spartan Books, Washington, DC, 1962.

So I used it, but the reviewers are still asking me for a revision as they deem it to be incorrect. So my

Question:

How to cite this paper in a Periodica Polytechnica journal ?

EDIT 1 :

Thank you for your help, They didn't point to a particular correction, here is a print screen of their comment :

First of all, this doesn't look like a reviewer's comment, but rather like a copy-editor's comment. And if I interpret the comment correctly, they just want a note that indicates when the resource was last accessed for all online resources. So you only have to add "(Accessed 10 January 2020)" after the URL.
This is completely unrelated to the age of the paper.


Can a syllabus be adopted and modified? I have seen some few syllabuses online that look very similar. Is it fine to adopt any syllabus or instructors need to have their own syllabus? And do instructors need to get permission from the original syllabus writer or just link and acknowledgement?

In some cases, it could be that the instructors had a template provided by the school.  When I was an instructor at a college, I was required to update a few things on the syllabus, like my name, but I was required to NOT change ANYTHING else.  I had no flexibility (in that one specific way...  I did have a whole lot of flexibility with just about every other way that I ran my particular class, which I know is quite different than what some other instructors experience).  One thing I did have the flexibility to do was to create my own addition to the syllabus, but the college bureaucracy, which determined the official course objectives, also mandated a certain amount of information get presented unaltered.

In that case, I, as the instructor, never bothered to check the copyright of each and every syllabus, because obviously I had the organization's permission to do what the organization absolutely required of me.

This is just one example: The main point being, in some cases, instructors might not be creating their syllabus entirely from scratch.  Surely, the specific details vary from school to school.


How long typically are paper reviews? Is there such a thing as “too long”? When you review papers submitted for publication, is there an “optimal” length for reviews?
In my experience as an author and referee, I have seen a large range of review lengths (for reference, a paper in my field is typically between 3 and 8 printed pages):

Zero length: for some of the papers I have authored, the reviewer just clicked the “accept as is” or “reject” checkmark on the review sheet, without adding any comment (at least, not any comment visible to me). It's not so common, but it has happened.
Short length: a lot of time, I received reviews who consisted of a single paragraph.
Medium: one full page, maybe two pages.

Although I have never received any such long reviews, I have myself written on a few occasions reviews that exceed two pages, including once or twice a four or five-page review.  These were cases where the paper was good, but could be (in my view) much improved and some of the aspects/consequences had escaped the authors' consideration.

I am wondering how useful reviews of various length are to editors. I often consider that “unmotivated” reviews are useless, as they do not give any real insight about the paper to the editor. For example, if the editor gets two conflicting non motivated reviews, how is she to decide?

On the other hand, although I write some from time to time, I have never received long reviews, so… is this something frowned upon?

Speaking from the point of view of an editor: One of the best reviews I ever got was longer than the paper. The author, a young researcher, had proved three theorems, one of which I recognized as a known result. So I asked the original discoverer of that known result to referee the paper. In my cover letter, I mentioned that I recognized one of the theorems as his, and asked whether the other two theorems had enough novelty for a publication. It turned out that the other two theorems weren't new either. The referee could easily have just given citations for those two theorems and recommended rejection. Instead, he gave me (or, really, gave the author) a long, clear explanation of the state of the art in that subject, and he suggested some open problems that the author could try working on.


How can I find an old paper when the usual methods fail? I am trying to find the paper "The resistance of pure mercury at helium temperatures" by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. It was published in the Communications from the Laboratory of Physics at the University of Leiden in 1911.

This is the first publication of the discovery of superconductivity and it is cited in many texts dealing with the subject. However, I was unsuccessful in finding the actual content of the paper with the methods: My university's library catalogue, Google Scholar and Google. I even tried the catalogue of Leiden University, but no luck there either.

Due to the significance of the paper and the fact that Leiden University still exists, I am fairly certain that the paper is not lost completely and I am just unable to find it.

Are there any other resources I can use to get ahold of this paper?

In the future, your university librarians are MADE for this!  Don't feel ashamed to ask -- there are librarians more into archiving and cataloging, and some more into education and service.

Give as much information as you currently have, and they'll find it for you AND/OR show you how to find it yourself in the future (if it's accessible via a resource like some of those mentioned above.)


Writing bachelor's thesis as a front-end developer(computer science) I am a front-end developer and I find it extremely difficult to find a bachelor's thesis topics since all the computer vision, machine learning, data mining stuff is done in languages other than JavaScript. I feel like the fact that I am a frontend developer limits me to topics like front-end JavaScript framework comparison, responsive web application design etc. But I just don't feel like these are good research topics.

Is there any advice/topic suggestions you can give me?

You could easily extend your possibilities by learning another programming language. Since you are already familiar with the underlying concepts, it should not take too much time to learn something like C, Java, or whatever is common in your field.

I would also do this apart from your thesis. This gives you a lot of new possibilities also after your thesis in your future career.

However, I recommend you to learn a new language before you start your thesis, otherwise you might run out of time or achieve only limited results. But that depends on your personal situation and how much time you have left.


How can I increase my productivity through my daily habits? I recently posted this similar question here but I guess even this site could help me with that it or could even be better.

I am student how can I increase my productivity for studies by adapting/incorporating some habits into my lifestyle that will help me in the long run.

It got me curious because my teacher's keep telling me but getting a goods score, it's not all about studies , but other practices /habit that help too. I think what he means is  more on the line of smart work v/s hard work. And the earlier you'll incorporate them in your life , the more/better results one can see.

So what I want to ask is that are there few practices taht I can incorporate in my life that will help me in my studies in the long run or can be beneficial for me, both physically and mentally.

Actually, my advice would be quite different from "work smart", though there are aspects of that also.

Get enough sleep. Every day. If you have exams, don't "cram" for them or stay up too late. Make sure you work steadily enough so that cramming isn't necessary and a brief review of essentials is all that is required. Just review your notes (and summaries).

Get enough exercise. Every day. Part of it is aerobic if possible, though just walking can also be a benefit. The time it takes for this isn't "wasted" as it lets your mind integrate the things you are learning.

Eat healthy and on a regular schedule. Avoid high caffeine and high sugar snacks. Or, limit them, at least. Avoid fad diets for balanced diets with fruit and veggies included.

Engage socially with people, face to face. At least a bit. Don't close yourself off.

Generally, watch your health and deal promptly with any issues. Don't neglect mental health.

As for the "work smart" part:

Take a lot of notes. Summarize those notes. Paper is known to be better than electronic (yes, there is research) as it engages your mind more completely.

Do a lot of reinforcement, such as by doing a lot exercises in your courses. Get a lot of feedback on what you do and what you write. Strongly prefer working on exercises over looking at solutions.

Ask for help when you need it, but try to answer your own questions first so you can respond intelligently to "What have you tried?".

Don't let social media dominate your life. Step away from the keyboard.

Have a schedule for work and play. It can be flexible, but stick to it unless there is a sufficient reason to deviate.


Restriction on working hours for full-time students I know that 20 hours/week when school is in session and 40 hours when school is out is the legal maximum working hour for international full-time students in United States. I was wondering whether this also holds for students other than international students. The website of U.S. Department of Labor mentions the same, but it is not clear whether it holds for all. Here is the extract from the website.

"Full-Time Student Program
This program is for full-time students employed in retail or service stores, agriculture, or colleges and universities. The employer that hires students can obtain a certificate from the Department of Labor which allows the student to be paid not less than 85% of the minimum wage. The certificate also limits the hours that the student may work to 8 hours in a day and no more than 20 hours a week when school is in session and 40 hours when school is out, and requires the employer to follow all child labor laws. Once students graduate or leave school for good, they must be paid at least the federal minimum wage.
There are some limitations on the use of the full-time student program..."

The extract you have linked is specifically for a program that exempts employers from paying the full minimum wage. There is, in principle, no law stating that students can only work 20 hours per week when school is in session. In fact, it's quite the opposite—students can work as many hours as they would like.

On the other hand, it is possible for universities to place conditions on financial aid recipients that they not work more than some number of hours per week, and in general it's not really that smart of an idea to be studying full-time and working full-time on top of that. And the university may also have limits on what students can do with on-campus student aide positions, whether or not they are on financial aid.

But as far as the US government is concerned? I don't think they really care.


Changing due date for a student suddenly Today I had two students never working on their assignment but looking at their phones the whole class. I did not warn them that I will collect their work but I told them to put their phones away. After that I told the students to turn their work in even though it wasn't the due date. I am planning to put their grade into the gradebook. Am I allowed to do this?

It's unlikely you can do this.

Unless you have a statement in your class syllabus that:

explicitly bans the use of cell phones in class and
specifies that you can make students turn work in early,

this is probably going too far beyond your actual authority and in principle could be overturned were the students to appeal.

If you're going to have students working on homework assignments in-class then it is probably best to institute a "participation" component to the grade, which you would then be certainly entitled to lower on account of their lack of participation during class. But unless that's already built in, there's not much you can really do here.


What is a legal and allowed method of getting a picture from Internet to be used in the cover of my thesis? I need a picture from the Internet of micro bacterium which I want to use on my Thesis cover. Now just coping the picture and using it will be like stealing someone else's property. Hence I want to know if there is any proper and legal method by which I can get the picture. This is the picture that I need, I wrote them a mail too but no reply yet.

You can ask the author of the image, or the owner of the exclusive licence if that is a different person, for permission to use the image. He may or may not grant it.

If he grants you permission for free then it is courtesy to write an acknowledgement to that effect somewhere in the thesis.

If the image is in the public domain then of course you are free to do with it as you will. (By "public domain", I mean, free of copyright restrictions by the explicit choice of the author or because the image is so old it can no longer be subject to copyright. I do not mean, simply the image was found in public.)

However many institutions have precise binding requirements for theses which would not allow you to place artwork on the cover (even if you already had licence to do so from the author). You should confirm with your institution whether this would be allowed.


Is there an honors system in graduate schools? Just like the Latin honors system in undergraduate programs, is there such a system for postgraduate degrees ?

At my university, you can graduate at the doctoral level "with distinction." This is the only honor we offer (aside from dissertation prizes) and it's entirely based on the dissertation, not on coursework.

We don't even calculate the GPA of our graduate students.


Should graduate students who are graders help undergraduate students with homework? In my department, we hire graduate TAs as both graders and teaching assistants. The teaching assistants are assigned to lead discussion sections that meet twice per week. The graders are assigned to grade all of the homework and exams.

The department requests that both TAs and graders spend three hours in the academic skills center. During these three hours, students can basically ask the grader/TA whatever they want.

My current assignment is an upper division undergraduate course. Many of the students aren't prepared for the course difficulty (ten hour homework assignments, projects, and exams). Inside the academic skills center, I am asked frequently about how to do homework problems when I am not a TA.

How should I handle this situation? Am I responsible for helping students do every single individual homework problem before the assignment is due? I thought that a grader would solely be responsible for grading homework. I spent a nontrivial amount of time helping students do their own homework.

Should graders have some sort of protection from these scenarios? I don't know why an undergraduate student would ask the grader grading their homework for help.

This is really a question for the professor(s) in charge of the course. You can and should get specific direction from them.

However, just for background and context. A lone professor in a smaller class will find him/herself in this situation frequently. It is unlikely that it is wise to not answer at all, but also unwise to give such specific hints that student learning ceases and the student just follows directions.

But it may take some experience to be able to balance the needs (and also to keep the prof happy). In general, you can think about the question you were asked, and before answering it, ask yourself whether the student has an unmet need that generates that question. Do they have a misconception? Have they missed an important reading? Something. I suspect that it is generally fair to address those needs rather than "helping" them with the specific assignment. Even giving them an easier task that might help them understand where they are and why they are having problems might be suitable.

The base line is, don't get in the way of their learning just to help them complete a specific task.

But you might check even this advice with the prof. You might also cause more specific training to be provided to you are your fellow graders/TAs.


How do I look up grant information of PIs in Germany? I know NIH allows you to look up grant information of PIs in the United States. Is there a similar website in Germany (DFG?) that allows you to see grants information of PIs?

Also if someone knows of a similar website in Sweden?

Thank you!

You can find DFG-funded projects on their website via the DFG GEPRIS tool. This only shows the DFG funded projects, for other projects the PI might be involved in, you should check the websites of the respective funding agencies (e.g. CORDIS for those funded by the EU).


What is life as "Head of Department ____" like? In the past few years, I've become very interested in staying in academia for as long as possible. I really wanted to be a professor, and I still do. Using the internet and meeting with a few professors, I've researched various aspects of life as a professor, including daily schedules, salaries, etc. While trying to get an idea of what a typical professor's salary might look like, I always stumbled upon "Head of Department" salaries, which were considerably greater than other professor salaries. I liked the idea of being paid more, but I always dismissed the idea of becoming a "Head of Department" because I thought that their work was more related to administration than teaching or talking about the field of their department. (One of the main reasons I want to be a professor is the opportunity to be directly involved in the fields I'm passionate about every single day.) However, I recently traveled to a university in my state with the company I am interning at, and I met the head of the department of mechanical engineering. Though that is not my field of interest, I was very glad to have the chance to meet with her. I learned all about her day-to-day life as head of department: I learned that she is quite actively involved in many PhD students' projects, and oversees many research projects. There is also an administrative aspect in her job, but it isn't nearly as overwhelming or burdensome as I thought. Since the visit, I've become very interested in a job like hers.

Is my perception of "Head of Department" skewed? What can I do to be involved in my field like she is in hers?

I would love to learn about and teach my passions for a living.

Side question: How involved are deans of __ in their respective fields?

I had the great (mis)fortune of being a department chair for four years. This was at a small, not prestigious, liberal arts college. We use the "weak" chair model as mentioned by Bill Barth (which I think compromises such things as chair evaluations of faculty: pan someone, even fairly, and they will get the chance to return the favor). I was an associate professor when I took the position, it was my turn. I did get a course reduction, from four to three courses per semester, along with a minor stipend (I could have made more, with less time commitment, teaching five courses). There were the expected administrative duties: making schedules each semester, purchase orders, budget, etc. Since the position had no real power, I was a glorified secretary to the department. All but one of my facult were former chairs, but they all came to me with every little problem as if they had no idea of what to do. Finally, I reminded them they were former chairs and if they had some request that needed my approval. then they should get the necessary forms, fill them out, and bring them to me for signature. This solved that problem.

However, it always seemes there was something to take care of. As an example of how frustrating things can be, I arrived at my office one day at 8:00AM with three things I wanted to do. I left for home at 6:00PM having done none of them.

I was just beginning to solidify a research program when I took the job. When I was done, I seriously considered leaving academia. After a few years of decompression, I revived my enthusiasm for research and am getting back to speed, but those several years off, complicated by some family issues, really hurt me from a professional standpoint.

Now that I've related my horror story, I should point out that there are some people at my school who honestly enjoy being chair. Nonetheless, I would caution anyone to think long and hard before taking the plunge.


How to be effective at desk research I have just graduated from a masters degree in information systems, and I'm due to begin a role at a large IT consultancy firm in 6 months time.

For the interim I have arranged a period of desk research with one of my old professors. I cannot go into specifics but to give you a taster my research will be around small/medium IT firm strategies.

I will of course receive direction from my professor on the detail, but some general advice for someone wanting to shift into an appropriate mindset for being effective at desk research would be very helpful.

What strategies would you use to tackle a desk research role?

Set clear objectives and deadlines as early as possible to force yourself into a practical mindset. Don't do it for your supervisor, do it for yourself. Try to funnel your thoughts and ideas into a confined key focus point .

This prevents you from procrastinating (which I consider to be a big threat in desk research).


Was there ever a case where one has to prove access to materials cited? One can obtain reference materials from various sources. If not of open access, it could be either bought from a publisher or downloaded with an institutional license or even borrowed from a colleague.

Just out of curiosity, was there ever a situation where authors must prove their access to the articles cited in their paper to the editor/publisher/reviewer?

I agree that some of the references need not necessarily require licenced access for the sake of referencing such as pointing to datasets. However, my concern is about original research articles from which you cite a piece of information in your paper.

I could interpret your question two different ways: (a) proving that you have read the article (because otherwise your research is academically dubious), or (b) proving that you were legally entitled to read the article (because otherwise your research is legally dubious).

If the material is published, then you do not need a license to read it, you only need a license if you want to copy it. It is perfectly legal to read it by looking over someone's shoulder on the bus or in the library. Therefore, you do not need to prove that you were legally entitled to read it.

On the other hand, if you don't have access to a copy that you can go back to any time, you are going to have trouble responding to any queries from referees that suggest you didn't read it carefully enough...

As for unpublished material, such as private letters, I think it would be prudent to refrain from citing the material unless you have legitimate access to it.


What role do professors on a graduate student's PhD committee serve? Do they discuss the graduate student in meetings with each other? Or do they have any obligations to interact with the graduate student in other ways?

I think the variations here are national rather than by discipline.

In the U.S., the thesis committee's primary role is that of a review panel when all is going well, and as a neutral arbiter between student and advisor when it isn't. Again, there is no formal obligation on the part of the committee—except when convened by the student or advisor, but this typically occurs on a more frequent basis (every one to two years or so). As individuals, however, committee members may be consulted with on various topics (job placement and career strategies, suggestions for future research directions, and so on); however, this is voluntary and, again, not very frequent—probably one or two times per year.

In Germany, by comparison, the primary obligation occurs at the time of the thesis defense, when they serve as evaluators. Outside of this, you might never meet with the professors on your committee, other  than your primary advisor.


How should I address a possible mistake to co-authors in a submitted paper I am co-author of a submitted manuscript. I think I found a mistake in a methodological approach in our paper. But I am not sure if I am right. But if that mistake is really there, then some conclusions in this paper could be changed. It will not invalidate the whole paper, but some parts would have different meaning.

I already had some arguments on this paper, so I do not want to point some mistakes to my colleagues. I fear that if I will point to this possible mistake, my co-authors will get angry.

I don't even know when and how should I discuss this issue with co-authors? Some authors are reachable only by email and I don't know if I should ask about this mistake only the main author, or send the email to everybody. Or should I just briefly explain what I mean or send a proper document with explanation why I think I am right?

I am thinking of waiting until review; if reviewers do not point to that mistake I will raise it.

Edit: By mistake, I do not mean that we carried out our method of choice incorrectly; instead, I think we should have chosen a different (potentially more correct) method of analysis.

If you believe there is an issue with a paper you are a co-author of, then you absolutely should discuss it with your co-authors. In most (all?) fields, having read and approved the final manuscript is a necessary condition for authorship of a publication. I assume that you cannot really approve of a manuscript that you suspect has methodological flaws, so you should speak up now. Whether that is best done by emailing everyone or just contacting the lead author depends on a lot of external and contextual factors, so I cannot offer advice there.

Waiting for reviewers to spot the mistake seems like a very bad strategy. After all, what will happen if they don't spot the mistake? Either you bring up the issue after receiving the reviews (which is surely not better than bringing it up now) or you remain silent and become co-author to a paper that may have serious methodological problems.

In the end, if you bring up the issue now, there are three possible outcomes (presumably after some arguments and back-and-forth):

You convince your co-authors that there is an error. Since the paper is already submitted, all authors will have to discuss how they want to handle the issue in that case. This may range from updating the paper with the necessary corrections after receiving the reviews (regardless of whether or not the reviewers found the same issue) to retracting the paper.
Your co-authors convince you that the issue is in fact not important or not an issue at all, which may also help to improve the paper (clarify why x is not an issue in this particular context).
Neither you nor your co-authors are convinced by the others. In that case, you may have to withdraw as an author, painful as that may be.

I would argue that each of these results (even the last one) is preferable to just hoping for peer review to catch the issue you already know is there.

Edit: I missed that the manuscript was already submitted. However, I don't thnk this fundamentally changes things.


Back to academia for physics after M. Sc. In mathematics and 4 years working I need your advice. Have a Msc in Math from a decent uni, that I got around 4 years ago. I am working in London at the moment but I really can't stand it any longer. What I want is to go back to uni for a second master in physics and hopefully go on to get a phd. I can go anywhere in europe, but a place that would welcome me even without recommendation letters and being a bit older than the average student would be better. Any good uni to suggest? Alternatives?
Really hope to read some suggestions. You can be specific.

First of all, I would say that you need to be sure on which are your academia aims in the mid-long term. If you really want to aim for a PhD and you already have a Msc, it might not be very useful for you to aim for a second one (unless, of course you really, REALLY want to). Groups nowadays are pretty interdisciplinary and having multiple background in a lab is not only allowed, but welcomed.

That said, coming back to academia, even after a long period, should not be a problem. Nowadays most grants are milestone-base (that is, x years after finishing the degree, the PhD...) so even as an older PhD student you shouldn't have any problem. At the end, all that matters is that you can convince a PI that you can bring some expertise to the lab, and, if you are eligible for grants the better. The recommendation letter part... that might be complicated. Even if it is not directly from your last employer, you might need something... maybe from your advisor during the master thesis?

If you are looking specifically for suggestions, and you are OK with moving around Europe, at this point I would suggest to search for opportunities in Switzerland. For all intents and purposes it works as a European-associated country, it has pretty high scientific standards and also offers quite good conditions for PhD students. This last part, specially I can tell having done my PhD in Spain where investment in science is not a priority.

This, of course, depends on your fields and topics of interest, but I would give some thought to the EPFL and the ETH, the two federal universities in the country. They are very welcoming to foreign students and offer quite good opportunities. As it is out of my field, I don't know about good groups focusing on the field of physics, but I'm quite sure that with a bit of search you might find some interesting labs.

hope this helps!


Are universities always disorganized? I've been a faculty member at two universities.  Both have been very "disorganized," generally speaking. By "disorganized," I mean things like: Faculty are not formally hired until after the semester begins (due to administrative failure to sign contracts on time); courses are scheduled in rooms that are far too small for the number of students enrolled; facilities are poorly maintained (e.g., it's not uncommon for windows to break or heat to stop working in a room and not be fixed for months); HR departments don't answer email or even phone calls; pay checks are sometimes late or inaccurate, etc.

Is this a common experience at most universities, or just the ones where I've taught? Both of the places where I have been are well-known institutions -- not elite schools, but ones that are prestigious enough, and which you wouldn't expect to be poorly run.

For that matter, does this type of stuff happen in non-academic jobs, too? I have only ever worked in academia, so I don't have a lot of perspective on just how much disorganization is normal for a workplace bureaucracy. I kind of suspect academia might be a special case because it's run in large part by administrators (department heads, deans) who typically have no actual management training. But I suppose managers in the corporate world might have little idea what they are doing, too.

These are both private universities in the United States, by the way.

I worked at three different Universities in Germany and I can not confirm such a level of disorganization. Of course we are having problems because we are public entities, which means e.g. that we can not freely decide where to invest or to shift money from cost center A (e.g. personal) to cost center B (buildings), or hire as many people as we like, or pay the wages we thing are appropriate, but those problems are minor issues compared to the ones described.

It is correct that many management positions are held by amateurs (like me ;-) ), but this is manly the academic part (research, dean, ...), but our "true" administration is in the hands of professionals lead by the head of administration (in Germany "Kanzler") who usually has a management background and expertise.


Advisor unresponsive after agreeing to introduce me - What to do? I asked a question over here about the best way to go about meeting a prospective PhD advisor (Prof X). It was mostly agreed that I should ask my current advisor (who knows Prof X) to introduce me. I did ask him, and he responded by saying that he is happy to introduce me, so all well and good. However about eight days or so have passed since then and I haven't heard from him despite a couple of spaced out follow up emails. No answer to my calls either. What can or should I do at this point? Should I go back to my original plan of directly trying to contact Professor X? This is a bit frustrating, since in the meantime other grad schools are finalizing and mailing out their decisions and this school is my top choice. Thanks for any suggestions.

The situation doesn't sound promising, but don't lose hope just yet. As C is your advisor and you are nearing completion, you would hopefully have some kind of relationship with him, that if, for example, there were an informal discussion with X and he had changed his mind about offering support, then something might gently have been communicated to you from C to dissuade you from pursuing X.

As to how to proceed, also in reference to the discussion to your previous question, C is likely going to be your best way in. I'm not sure what "spaced out emails" entails, exactly, but if no joy is to be had from email or phone, try visiting. A person physically there is much harder to ignore than not picking up a phone or answering an email. You may get a sense of whether what's happened in paragraph 1 is the case.

In the unfortunate event that C no longer wishes to support, of course you can go with your original plan, but it would be best (as was also previously mentioned) to remove reference to C from any correspondence, as the mention of the name implies some kind of endorsement (or is just name-dropping, which may also be looked on unkindly), and try your luck. It may be a long shot, if X is that big, but if the in-person attempt to bring C on-board doesn't work, no one can be forced to do anything he doesn't want to do. Just suggestions, borrowing from some personal experience, hopefully helpful. Good luck.


Author bio section in journal I  am writing a  journal paper and I am the main and first author. The author bio section of that journal has only 100 words and we are 6 authors in total. The word limit is very short to describe the research area of each author. Will it be a good strategy to only include the first author description and research area in the author bio ( with the consent of other co-authors )?  Will it look good in general from the reader perspective?

I also looked into some papers from the journal. Some have only the main author description And some papers have the research group description. The authors in my paper are not from the same research group and hence we don't have the same research focus expect the research presented in this article. So not sure what is a good strategy to handle this

Short answer: there is probably no universal answer; in other words, you should check with the journal to see if there is prior precedent or guidelines in place. More specifically, you can check with: (1) the author instructions [it would be surprising if nothing is mentioned or this has not come up before], (2) the relevant section of a variety of recent, previous papers published by the same journal with a suitable number of authors, (3) an editor at the journal. From at least one of these options it should become clear what is expected of that journal for its author bios.

Aside from the specific journal, we could also more broadly consider the purpose of an author bio. It is important to preface such a discussion with the disclaimer that many journals don't even bother with such anymore in these days of Google, institutional webpages, and so forth. However, leaving that aside, we could consider that the author bio serves some of the following possible purposes:

Identify conflicts of interest: Were any of the authors employed (in some capacity) by a company whose profits could benefit from the results published? While such CoI's could sometimes be established from the institution, sometimes they could arise from secondary sources of income. Were, for example, some selection of authors paid for consultancy at a pharmaceutical company whose product could benefit from the new results? Did they serve on the board of a committee with a certain stance on a certain topic?
Establish seniority and background on the authors: Were the authors students at the time of publishing the paper? Or were they professors? Which authors held which positions? What is their main area of expertise or qualifications in said areas? Though such information should of course not affect the interpretation of the results of the paper, it may be useful to establish, perhaps, for awards purposes, or just to satiate the curiosity of the reader.
Contact information or disambiguation: If not already given elsewhere in the document, additional information may be necessary such that individual authors could be disambiguated and/or contacted by readers.

As mentioned at the start, admittedly the importance of author bios has declined in these days of the Web.

In summary, check with the journal guidelines, previous papers and/or editors to see what to do. My guess would be that you should include a brief bio of all authors with their institutions, roles and duration of employment at those institutions, and other paid or volunteer positions (past or present) that may affect (or be seen to affect) their impartiality in the context of the results of the paper (if applicable and not given in a dedicated CoI declaration). If there is space, you could include the principal areas of interest of the authors. I would imagine something along the lines of:

A and B are PhD students at the University of Z. C is a Professor at the University of Z, chair of the Institute of Y and part-time consultant for X. D is a Postdoc at the University of W. E and F are Masters students at the University of V. The principal areas of research in which the authors have worked are L (A, B, C), M (C, D, F) and N (E).


Is "working from home" a bad thing in academia? Is it a bad thing in academia if a student works from home? Missing department talks and seminars is obviously bad, but in case a student is pursuing a problem alone and he feels comfortable researching at home, is it viewed negatively? At times the time spent on travel and a crowded lab may disrupt one's flow of thoughts, so in those cases home provides an edge.

Is physical attendance deemed important by the department as long as they are kept in the loop regarding your progress?

The answer is it depends - both on the student and the culture of the department.

There are of course some situations where working from home is impossible - graduate programs that are heavily lab based come to mind. Below is a summarization of my thoughts from a more data analysis driven field, having done both.

Positives

Lots of departments these days don't have lots of graduate student space. While some labs might have dedicated bench space, and there may be an RA/TA office or two, there's not "a place" where students can work anyway, which makes "is it bad to work from home" something of a moot point.
Working from home benefits certain work styles. If you're the kind of person who prefers to work in a spread out, sprawling fashion, with multiple monitors, tons of stacks of paper, and a whiteboard or two, that's just not feasible in most grad student offices, even when they do exist. And when the only spaces that exist are transient ones, like shared desks or cubicles, library study areas etc. you also can't customize your work space at all - and expensive textbooks and laptops are theft bait.
It facilitates more flexible schedules. Universities tend to be closed at 3:00 AM. I tend to do my best work at around that time. This seems to be relatively common in academia, and as academia seems to promote an "always working" lifestyle, having a single centralized space you have access to 24 hours a day is nice.

Negatives

You do lose out on departmental interactions somewhat. The concern about missing seminars is I think a bit of a non-issue. Those are easy to miss when you're working on site, and can be attended with just a little bit of diligence on the part of someone working from home. What I've found missing more is the transient, passing in the hallways interactions. I realized, for example, one day that I had gone several weeks without talking to anyone about  my field. That's not good. It also does some harm to cross-polination and ideas from unexpected places.
It can get lonely. Seriously, this seems to be a major challenge. It's possible, and the workload sometimes promotes, just disappearing into a cave.
It's possible to get distracted, as it always is working from home. "Real life" has infinitely many things to take care of, and its much easier to defend "work time" if you're at an office. But then unless you have an office its easy to get distracted in a department where your friends and colleagues are around.

Overall, I wouldn't say its bad. I know successful academics who work almost entirely in their office, and who work almost entirely from home. I'd say the best way to promote on-site work, if a university is trying to accomplish that, is not to focus on the bad parts of working from home, but on addressing what makes it appealing. I finally moved entirely to a working from home setup because I got tired of "work" involving camping out in cramped spaces, without the materials I needed, fighting for power outlets.

As for whether or not your physical presence is important to the department - it depends on the department. I've known some who don't care as long as you show up to what you need to, and others that absolutely want you there, and subtly penalize those who aren't around.


Alternatives to paper handouts in conferences So, last month I travelled to one of the big conferences in my field. The copies of my own handout weighted about 5 pounds; on the way back, I took another 5 pounds worth of other people's handouts. This was the case for pretty much everybody else. This seems kind of wasteful for a couple of reasons.

When I got back home, I ran the handouts I had collected  through the scanner, backed up the files in Dropbox, and put the handouts in the recycling bin.
The conference organizers offered the possibility of making handout pdfs downloadable from the conference site prior to the start of the conference.

In fact, a couple of people (including one of the keynote speakers) told me over a coffee break that, if it was up to them, they would forgo paper handouts altogether and just provide a pdf that people can download and look at during talks. This is something I agree with, if only because it makes post-conference storage and retrieval way easier (also, pdf handouts are awesome when you are sitting in a talk by a 23-year-old grad student who is under the delusion that older people can read 10 pt text comfortably).

Question: is there any reason, other than force of habit, to keep on distributing paper handouts? Technology is not an obstacle, I think, given how these days everybody brings a laptop or a tablet to conferences.

There is almost no reason to give out paper handouts any more.

Almost none of the conferences that I attend hand out anything paper other than an updated program, if that.  Instead, everything is either in a USB stick or simply online at the conference web site.  Conferences with full papers tend to give out a USB stick; conferences with abstracts tend to place them online.

And here is where I see the only reason one might still want to bring a piece of paper: if the conference is handing out USBs stick or some other form of program that must be produced many weeks in advance, then if you want to give your audience some piece of information to look at that was not available then, you might bring paper.  To me, however, that sounds like a relatively rare case and not something that needs preserving as a typical custom.


Is publishing in your university journal considered a conflict of interest? Many journals are published by universities and research institutions. For example, Oxford University, Johns Hopkins University, Cambridge University, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory all have their own journals.

Since having reviewers from the same institution is often considered a conflict of interest (SE answer), is publishing in a journal that is published by your research institute also considered a conflict of interest, since the editor is often from the same institution? Is it considered any different from publishing elsewhere?

Additionally, are there any guidelines by universities or their respective publishing boards that touch on these issues?

In academics, conflicts of interest are generally thought of as conflicts that involve monetary issues. The fact that a publication may contribute to an author getting a promotion or tenure is not considered a conflict of interest. That said, if the university owns a stake in the idea being published, there could be monetary benefits to both the university and author. Authors, however, need to disclose their conflicts of interest, and it this case, they would be expected to mention that the parent company of the publisher also has a conflict of interest.

In these cases, as in all cases, it would be left to the reader to decide how to interpret the results and conclusions. It is worth noting that most editors (regardless of if they are at the same university as the university owned publisher) have a fair amount of autonomy from the publisher and if forced to publish something they disagree with, would likely leave in a vocal manner. Similarly, peer reviewers provide another independent form of input (although they can obviously be overruled).


How to cite a previous single-author paper by oneself? Suppose my name is John Smith, and I am writing a new (single-author) paper which wants to cite a previous (single-author) work by myself.

What is the best style for this?

(1) As we showed in [1], the following condition applies ....

(2) As I showed in [1], the following condition applies ....

(3) As Smith showed in [1], the following condition applies ....

(4) As [1] shows, the following condition applies ....

I would prefer to avoid (4) because it is easier for the reader to follow a discussion where names (rather than numbers) are associated with certain concepts. This leads me to prefer (3), because a specific name is attached.

The problem with (1) is that it can be difficult for the reader to distinguish two meanings of "we" in the context of a (math) paper: first, there is the impersonal use of we as in "we define a group as a set with an operation + etc.", and second there is the use of we as in the actual human writing the paper.

The problem with (2) is that it draws attention to myself as opposed to my ideas, which is the opposite of what I'd like in a scholarly paper

Does it matter if this is in the middle of a paragraph citing a wide variety of authors, only some of whom happen to be equal to myself? For example,
"As Jones showed in [2], ...., As Doe showed in [3], ...., As Smith (or we) or (I) showed in [1], .... "

In my field of psychology, it is normal to treat any previous citation as if it was another person. In a sense it is the article that presents the point. This convention is also related to the use of double blind review in many journals.

So you'd just write:

  Smith (2015) showed that ...

or

  Smith (2015) conducted a study and found that ...


Should I include my research interests in my CV? How? I don't have any publications yet and I never coauthored a paper.  My question is, should I put in my CV the list of publications I have read (publications of other authors, I mean) and list them under "Read publications" or it is meaningless?

In my opinion this is a very bad idea. If I would get such a CV I would wonder why it's in there and thoughts are:

There are no real achievements so this was put in
The author thinks reading papers is an achievement or at least something special
The author read only a few papers (and if you are interested in a topic this list should have several pages)

All those points doesn't make you look very good. I wouldn't reply to that, and to be honest, think it's a bad joke.


How do I approach a postdoc interview when my background is not same as the professor's? My PhD research was applied mechanics. I used commercial finite element analysis software to simulate thermal spray process. My research did not involve developing any weak-form formulations or any new theoretical model. I just implemented existing models and the analysis was the novelty of my research. My publications are in applied journals like journal of thermal spray and technology.
Now the professor who's going to take my interview works in theoretical model and formulations development. His papers are in core mechanics journals. However, the advertised postdoc position description aligns with my research experience and I believe I can be successful there. But I cannot produce papers similar to the professor's profile.
How do I approach the interview in this case? Should I tell them that my research experience is applied and development of formulations is not my cup of tea?

My background is in computational mechanics, so I have some background to answer your question. It seems to me that you and the professor would make a good research team because your research interests and experience are complementary. Do not assume that the professor wants you to work on weak forms and model formulation. S/he might want to go in a more applied direction as @astronot said. Instead of assuming that the professor wants to produce more papers like s/he has done in the past, ask in the interview what you'd be expected to do.
Second, it might also be useful for you to learn weak forms, just like it might be useful for someone with a mathematical background to learn applied stuff using commercial packages.


What strategies are there for finding literature for a literature survey when the terminology used is diverse? I want to write a literature survey on a topic, let's say it's risk of crime due to a new technology, let's say due to the Gutenberg press. However, when I search for the overall theme (crime and "Gutenberg press"), it returns few results. Yet, I know of some papers that fit into the topic that are appropriate, it's just that they each use different terminology (e.g., mass-produced slander or text that undermines the Church's authority). These relevant papers don't link their results to the overall theme, namely crime.

The problem is that to perform an exhaustive and methodological survey is difficult, since it depends on me knowing links between papers I have read and the theme I want to investigate. I was wondering what methodologies I can use to address this problem?

For example, in comparison often a literature survey's methodology section will have something like "we are interested in everything to do with X within topic Y" and base search terms on those two aspects and summarise the results from each database. Then, following sections cover the area based on those results. I would like to achieve something similar, but the ability to search the literature in my case is limited.

I find searches based on keywords to be quite limited. You can play around with various keywords and see how far you get, but this only helps to get a first cut.

To deepen your search, use a snowball and reverse snowball procedure. This should get you around the problem that authors use different terminology. Be aware, however, that this may introduce some selection bias that you need to hedge against.

One way to reduce the bias and to broaden (rather than deepen) the search in addition to starting with diverse keywords is to ask around. You can just asks your colleagues but you can also get as formal as you want and conduct expert interviews or even surveys.


Should a review paper contain any original (previously unpublished) research? I am writing a review paper together with two colleagues of mine, to be submitted to a prestigious journal in our field (we already got editorial approval of our proposal). We have contributed significantly to the field, and so the review will discuss some of our published papers together with other materials from the literature, authored by other people.

I have some unpublished results that are basically higher quality data compared with some of what is available from the literature. This means that I have deeper insight into some more or less specific aspects within the general subject of the review than what one could get from reading what has been published.

These results are kind of scattered and I don't think I can put together a  coherent story by stitching together these new bits here and there. But a review paper sounds like a good place to bring them up, complementing everything that's already out there.

My idea of a review paper is that of a critical analysis and compilation of the body of research on a specific topic which has already been published. However, it would feel silly to me (and dishonest to some degree) to write in the review that "x = 10.5" when I know from my unpublished data that actually "x = 10.8" (just an example). Hence my question: is it fine to include unpublished results in a review paper provided that they are just a small fraction of what is being discussed?

I believe that such an approach is indeed fine. I have seen some examples of review papers in my field (example this one : http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0009250904009492 ) which are by construction review papers, but which add some news results or complementary results at the end.
Furthermore, I have seen review papers where new results were produced in order to establish, say, a comparison between various modeling approaches or etc.

Consequently, yes. I believe it should not be the core of your paper nor its most important aspect, but I do find it highly pertinent to briefly add new results or non-published results in a review paper. The key word here is to introduce them briefly.


Using home address when submitting an article with no affiliation? If you're submitting information for an article, and you have no institution affiliation, what should you use? I was asked for an address and all I have is an home address. That seems a bit weird to use, however.

I did a quick search to see what other independent researchers do for Nature journals, which include an author address.Specifically, I searched Google for

  site:nature.com "author details" "independent researcher"

I found that authors who are independent researchers sometimes list just their city for their address, or

  Independent researcher, City, Country

See for example here and here. Some do appear to give their home address, e.g. here and here.


How should I cite an archived webpage? While researching for an article, I came across an interesting post forum post which I wanted to use as a reference.

Before I could finish my article, the forum site I wanted to reference was officially shut down, making the aforementioned forum post inaccessible.

Thankfully I was able to find an archived version of the post on The Wayback Machine, but I'm not exactly sure how to reference it.

How should I cite an archived version of a webpage if the original webpage is no longer available? Should I add a "Date Accessed" note to my original citation, or should I cite the archived version instead?

I would consider doing both - the original (usually with a date accessed anyway these days - although I don't do much website citing), and a note that it is still available (as of your article) on the Wayback machine at the given address.

Now, it is always (sadly) possible that Steam would consider requesting the Wayback folks to delete their listing in the future, but it provides a hint.
Further, I'm surprised that Steam did not migrate the old site over to their new site, but that might have been a lot of work.


Will publishing a first author paper in ICECE2020 conference help me when applying for a PhD admission in the USA? I am in undergraduate. I wish to apply for scholarship to do PHD in the USA. Will publishing a paper in this conference (http://icece.buet.ac.bd/2020/) help me get funding?
It does not seem like a very reputable conference. However, I am not sure if my paper will be accepted in top tier conferences. So, is this conference 'better than nothing'? How much can a paper here help me?
thank you.

I suggest that you take every opportunity open to you to do research and publish it. It will never hurt unless you publish in predatory venues.
The university sponsoring this conference is reputable (and has a long history). The conference is in their main line of interest. I don't think you should have any qualms about submitting to such a conference.
While it might be a bit "better" to publish via a conference in EU, say, or US, it is probably financially impossible. Take advantage of all opportunities as you start on what you hope is a long career. Small first steps can be positive steps.
People elsewhere will understand these things in evaluating your work.


Huge gap in the deadlines for graduate programs in US and Germany. How to commit to one? I am finishing up my Bachelors in Physics from a US university and have applied to graduate programs in both USA and Germany (PhD programs in USA and Masters in Germany, because German uni's require a Masters to apply to their PhD programs). For German universities, I will be able to apply only to their winter semester that starts in October, because the summer semester starts in April, and I am still in school during this time. I was accepted to couple PhD programs in the US, but I have to accept the offer by mid-April. However, the deadlines for the winter semester of German uni's isn't until July. I was wondering if German universities get this question every year, and if there is any way to know the decisions from Germany before I have to accept the offers from US.

Most universities in Germany are aware of this problem but there is no common system so the only way to find out if you can get an early decision is to ask the university you applied at directly. If your program is "zulassungsbeschränkt" it means they only accept the best X applicants so it is not possible to be accepted before the deadline but there are many programs which accept all students meeting certain requirements.

Be aware that having (even a good) Masters degree is no guarantee to get a PhD position in Germany. Only a small fraction of Master students continue to do a PhD and, if you do not have scholarship, you need to find a professor who is willing to supervise you and has funding available.