Difficulties with exams I am a German undergrad Math student (3rd year) at the university of Munich and I would classify our courses as relatively hard compared to what I have heard from other (German, but also some other Country's) universities.

During the terms, I really dedicate almost all of my free time to studying and Math itself because I really enjoy it and love learning new stuff.
Yet, I really struggle at exams. I am always able to pass the exams by doing the standard exercises, but once it gets to tasks where you have to have the right ideas and think a little bit more I am unable to have a clear head and almost never get a REALLY good grade.
My grades are almost always around B+ to B- (if correctly translated), but never an A or even A+, since there's always some exercises that I can't solve. I start feeling like I am either studying the wrong way or I am simply too "stupid" to do some harder exercises.

Whenever I talk to graduate or PhD students or even professors, they always tell me that they have been straight A+ students and I've never met one who was just an average or maybe a little bit above average student.

So my question: Is the excuse "I am just bad exams" a legit one and if not, how can I work on it? I don't think that I don't study enough, it's actually not really possible to dedicate more time to be honest. I would really love to stay in the academic field but I am afraid I am not the right type of person to work on higher mathematics.

In my experience, if you're interested in joining a PhD program, as long as you're above the minimum required GPA they weigh your research experience, publications (if any) and recommendation letters much higher than your scores. If you want to find out whether you like academia and academia likes you back, find a professor willing to work with you on a research project or ask if one of their graduate students needs help with something. There are people who are great at both research and exams, but they are two very different skills IMO.

  Whenever I talk to graduate or PhD students or even professors, they
  always tell me that they have been straight A+ students.

Depending on the school, country and program, graduate courses are almost always straightforward to get very good grades in since they are largely literature and/or project based. Undergraduate programs tend to be harsher with grading and exams. I would wager that at least some of these academics you've spoken to don't remember their undergraduate scores exactly. :)


Benefits to supervisor presence at viva in the UK? I was wondering if anyone can help me decide if I should ask my supervisor to be present at my Viva.

I would suggest that you should only bring your supervisor if you have a specific, positive reason to do so. If you are in two minds about it, it sounds like the answer is "no". But as your supervisor says, it is entirely your decision.

Although it is permitted to bring your supervisor into the viva as an observer, most PhD candidates do not do this. The main exception is if it would be reassuring for you to have them there. There might also be an argument for having them as a kind of "quality control", but really this is the job of the internal examiner, so unless for some reason you don't trust your internal (perhaps if they were very inexperienced), that's not necessary.

For most people, having your supervisor there would be fairly harmless, but provide no real benefit. It could be a little distracting having them in the room (given they are not allowed to say anything!) and might just mean that you start second-guessing yourself, looking to your supervisor for reassurance instead of being self-reliant. Given that it's uncommon, it's possible that it could make you look less confident in the eyes of your examiners.


What's the expected level of paper for top conferences in Computer Science What's the expected level of paper to be submitted to top level conferences in theoretical computer science (FOCS/SODA/STOC)?

I think there should be four main concern:

Is it a novel results?
How hard is the paper?
Generality and extension of the results.
Is it an interesting topic?

But actually I cannot imagine how reviewers are going to measure above concerns, e.g, If in some paper there is 10 mediocre result means is good? ...., also I don't know is there any other important thing that we should be careful about it for top conferences.

Actually someone can try to send the paper to the FOCS/SODA/STOC and see if is rejected then send it to some other conferences, but IMHO this is not appreciated. It's good if referees to related conferences help to understand what did they expecting for top conferences?

P.S1: Actually one of an important things in all the conferences is writing style, but suppose all preliminary stuffs like writing are OK.

P.S2: I could talk about this with my adviser, but also it's very appreciated to see other top conferences reviewers/participants/... opinion about this.

P.S3: Also experience of reviewers in similar fields would be very appreciated.

What's the expected level of paper to be submitted to top level conferences in theoritical computer science (FOCS/SODA/STOC)?

Top.  The top level.

My experience on program committees for STOC, FOCS, ITCS, SODA, SOCG, etc., is that there are FAR more submissions of publishable quality than can be accepted into the conference.  By "publishable quality" I mean a well-written presentation of a novel, interesting, and non-trivial result within the scope of the conference.

For example, I was on the STOC 2013 program committee.  We accepted 99 out of 361 submissions.  Program committee members were specifically instructed to limit the top rating to only the top 20% of the papers we reviewed; at least for me, that meant some very hard choices.  Most of the discussion in the last week of the review cycle revolved around papers that were clearly very strong, but were not obviously "competitive" with other papers that were already accepted.

There are several questions that come up over and over in the FOCS/STOC review cycle:

How surprising / novel / elegant / interesting is the result?
How surprising / novel / elegant / interesting / general are the techniques?
How technically difficult is the result?  Ironically, FOCS and STOC committees have a reputation for ignoring the distinction between trivial (easy to derive from scratch) and nondeterministically trivial (easy to understand after the fact).
What is the expected impact of this result?  Is this paper going to change the way people do theoretical computer science over the next five years?
Is the result of general interest to the theoretical computer science community?  Or is it only of interest to a narrow subcommunity?  In particular, if the topic is outside the STOC/FOCS mainstream—say, for example, computational topology—does the paper do a good job of explaining and motivating the results to a typical STOC/FOCS audience?

As a general rule, for a paper to be accepted to STOC/FOCS, at least one person on the program committee must be willing to pound on the table and demand that the paper is accepted, with strong answers to all these questions.  Which means that as a minimum, the authors must have compelling answers to all these questions, even if professional modesty forbids writing those answers into the paper.

Specific criteria vary between different conferences, and not only because of the obvious differences in topical coverage.  A well-written paper that combines existing techniques is a surprising way to obtain an elegant proof of a novel and interesting result, but does not introduce new techniques or require much technical sophistication, is much more likely to be accepted at SODA than at STOC or FOCS.  (I've seen more than one paper rejected from STOC and accepted to SODA with precisely that review summary at both conferences.)  ITCS favors conceptual contributions — new approaches, new models, new problem areas — over technical difficulty.

But at its core, conference reviewing is a random process.  (As Baruch Awerbuch put it: "...whose expectation depends on the submissions, and whose variance depends on the program committee.")  Every submission is a gamble.  Your chances of winning the lottery may be small, but they're infinitely larger if you actually buy a ticket than if you don't.

Write the best papers you can.
Keep your target audience in mind when you write.
Especially if you're submitting to a conference for the first time, get feedback on your paper from a community expert well before you submit.
If you believe you have a reasonable chance of acceptance, submit it.  Be respectful but brutally honest with yourself.  Do not listen to the Impostor Syndrome.
Regardless of the outcome, take reviews and other feedback seriously.  Don't just revise your paper; also revise your writing habits and your mental model of the audience for future submissions.
Rejection is not the end of the world.  It's only one paper; you'll write dozens more.

  Actually someone can try to send the paper to the FOCS/SODA/STOC and see if is rejected then send it to some other conferences, but IMHO this is not appreciated.

It's a bit more subtle than that.  Submitting a paper that might get in is fine.  What PCs really don't like is being asked to review submissions that are clearly below threshold, especially papers that were previously submitted to comparable conferences but were not updated to respond to previous reviews.  (Even when a paper is submitted to several different conferences, it's not uncommon to have overlapping sets of reviewers.  I've been asked to review four different submissions of the same paper.)


What happened if the third author made extensive changes for galley proof without letting the editor, first and corresponding authors know? One of the papers (Letter to the Editor) I am first authors got accepted with no revision, and it is in under the proofing system now. The publisher gave us 48 hours to revise but somehow the third author just bounced up in the last hour to change and paraphrase almost every single sentence and add a reference without previously letting both the corresponding author and me know. When I found out, I was just OK with it, but I required her to contact the editor for approval before submitting the paper or made any change. Now the second author of the paper just rushed and submitted the revised version without anyone else's agreement although I had kept telling him not to do so.

I particularly concern that this is very unacceptable behaviour and moreover I have other two first-authored papers under the review in the same journal. Will this have any impact on my other papers? Did anyone experience the same thing before? Is making 30+ changes considered extensive changes?

I think you can relax - this isn't that big a deal.

You can contact the editor / publisher and say there has been a miscommunication between the authors, and you need some more time to sort it out and make sure that everyone approves the edits.  I imagine this sort of thing must happen all the time.  In the worst case, the paper might have to be postponed to a later issue, which is a little annoying but still better than having some authors be unhappy with the final version.

  I particularly concern that this is very unacceptable behaviour

I wouldn't say that - more of a minor error or misunderstanding.  Yes, the other authors should have been more careful about seeking everyone's approval, but under time pressure people sometimes make shortcuts or false assumptions.  Just sort it out and ask them nicely to pay more attention in the future - don't let something this minor ruin your working relationship with them.

  Will this have any impact on my other papers?

That seems extremely unlikely.

  Is making 30+ changes considered extensive changes?

The number of changes isn't really relevant - it's about quality, not quantity.  Do the changes significantly affect the content of the paper, such that a reviewer might need to reconsider whether the paper can still be published?  Changes such as paraphrases and added references shouldn't reach that level, even if there are a lot of them.


How to ask for another university prof for course materials? Just surfing the net to find useful resources, came across to the university course page, and course materials were well explained. However, when trying to download them, Unfortunately, there was a canvas page to do the university authorization.

Is it a mistake to ask the instructor for the course contents, despite not being a professor's student?
Well, if that is not a problem, Is there any suggestion or recommendation with how speaking and using words or expressions in email text might make it better?
Should there be an EDU email or other Email service providers are safe?
What if they did not answer? Is it right to keep doing it again?

Any help would be appreciated.

It is definitely not a mistake to ask the instructor for his course notes. From what I know it is common practice to do this and many professors and grad students do this on a regular basis even if you are not a student taking that course.
I would recommend you take a straightforward approach, there's no need to beat around the bush. Introduce yourself to the instructor being clear about your intentions with his course notes. If there are some certain parts of the course you are more interested in, remember to mention them as they might be more comfortable sharing some parts of the content rather than the whole thing.
An EDU email could be better but it depends on the circumstances. If you are a professor teaching  a similar course at some other university, the instructor might have his concerns regarding sharing content but if you work in industry and there's no chance of stealing their work they might be okay with sharing it.
If they don't answer you can drop another email after some time (I usually give people a week before sending a polite reminder email). However if you don't get a reply for your second email, I personally wouldn't keep sending them emails.

I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have any more questions.


What is Post Secondary Education? What is Post Secondary Education? Does it include only PhD (or) any degree lower than PhD?

In the US, primary education is the first seven or nine years (depending on location), and secondary education is usually considered high school. Primary and secondary education are compulsory and are provided free by the state (of course some go to private school).

"Post-secondary" education refers to anything you do after that, including bachelor's, master's, and doctorate-level degrees, but also things like associate's degrees and vocational training.

From Wikipedia:

  Higher education (also called post-secondary education, third-level or tertiary education) is an optional final stage of formal learning that occurs after completion of secondary education. Often delivered at universities, academies, colleges, seminaries, conservatories, and institutes of technology, higher education is also available through certain college-level institutions, including vocational schools, trade schools, and other career colleges that award academic degrees or professional certifications.

If you wanted to distinguish between college or university education and vocational training, you might call the former "tertiary" or "higher" and the latter "further" or "continuing," but it's not a well-defined distinction and not universal.

A master's or doctorate degree is "postgraduate" education.


Grad school and pregnancy I 'm planning to apply for Masters in Computer Science (Non-thesis). I 'm wondering if both, pregnancy and school, can be managed at the same time. Or is better to wait until I get my baby and then apply for the school. I 'm trying to learn from others experiences.

Since I'm not female, I can't give direct evidence. However, there are a couple of things you might think about.

The first is your general health. If it is good, then the stress of pregnancy will most likely be manageable. Then your studies will also be manageable. Note that the stress can be both physical and mental.

The second, is stress itself. Both a pregnancy and a graduate education can add to your stress. If you have other stresses in your life (financial, ...) it can get pretty high. That isn't a recommendation against it, however, but a recommendation that you will need ways to manage stress. If you do this well already, then there is likely no problem, otherwise, find active stress reducing activities.

In fact, having something to think about other than your studies can actually be a help because of the way the mind works. If you do nothing but try to force your mind to action it can stall.

Also, it is probably a mistake to delay your dreams unnecessarily, either for a child or an education.


Do some or most universities allow retiring faculty to retain their faculty email accounts? Upon retiring after decades with the same university and rank of full professor I did not realize that I would lose my faculty email account until it was too late to save years of correspondence including correspondence concerning a paper currently being refereed for publication. Are there any recommended policies on this issue for faculty retiring from colleges and universities?

In my experience, most institutions do allow retired faculty to keep their email accounts.

The American Association of University Professors has issued a Statement of Principles on Academic Retirement and Insurance Plans which includes:

  Each institution should help retired faculty members and administrators remain a part of the academic community, and facilitate timely retirement, by providing, where possible, such amenities as a mail address, library privileges, office space, faculty club membership, the institution’s publications, secretarial help, administration of grants, research facilities, faculty dining and parking privileges, and participation in convocations and academic processions.

Although "email account" isn't specifically mentioned on that list, it would seem to clearly be in the same spirit.

Of course, your institution has the power to make whatever policies they see fit.

As to your correspondence, I'd suggest asking whether it can be restored from a backup.  They might be able to give you the data even if they won't mantain the account.  Your department chair might be able to support you in this, particularly if your correspondence included other department business that may be relevant to current faculty.

Another request you could make is whether your institution could set up a forwarding address, so that when your correspondents send mail to jbales@yourschool.edu, it gets forwarded on to your own personal email account.  That saves the institution the trouble of having to maintain your account and store your mail, but you still get the benefit of being reachable through that address.


Why do junior faculty serve on PhD admissions committees at American universities? I only have knowledge of American universities:  I know of junior faculty that serve on graduate admissions committees in the STEM fields -- at top schools such as Harvard.  The things that I hear from them are quite interesting, for instance, how strong the recommendation letters are from the undergraduate applicants at top schools - that virtually all letters say that those students are the "best" that those professors have ever had.  But why do junior faculty such as "Assistant Professors" or "Titled Instructor" serve on graduate admissions committees? To me, the admissions process for graduate STEM programs are so important that I feel the committee should consist of senior faculty instead.

If junior faculty members aren't allowed to sit on an admissions committee, then  by the time they become senior faculty they won't have had any experience of sitting on admissions committees. The junior members need to learn how to become senior members and this is just one part of it!

I also don't think that graduate admissions decisions are quite so monumentally important (or tricky) as you imply; for top institutions such as Harvard you will already have a self-selected pool of very good appplicants to choose from, and I imagine it's difficult to make a bad pick.


What's the point of conferences on a CV? I've seen many academic CVs list the conferences the individual participated in, and I can't help but wonder how is this information useful? I can understand citing journal articles because this gives information as to the type of research the individual is doing, but I have no clue as to why listing conferences adds anything.

I typically have seen conferences appear in CVs in three ways:

Peer-reviewed conference publications, which in some fields (e.g., computer science) can be as important as journal articles
Talks given at conferences, whether based on peer reviewed papers, non-reviewed abstracts, or invitations, which give evidence that the person has experience with scientific speaking.
Service to the community, whether as an organizer, a reviewer, or a student volunteer.

Beyond that, just saying "I paid $600 to register for this conference and all I got was this lousy tote bag" seems rather pointless.


Co-authors either dismiss my ideas or don't understand them... and then dismiss them anyway I'm a PhD student in computer science. I'm currently working with 2 co-authors in revising a paper for resubmission (I'm not the main author). They act very respectful and open to criticism, but they seem to dismiss my concerns without realizing that they are doing it. I'm going to use a fictional example to illustrate the spirit of our conversations:

Me: "I don't think 2+2=5 as you said."

Them: "But we've addressed that concern before. Maybe you should explain yourself better so that we can understand."

Me: "I've already explained it 10 times in different emails and in person. There was even a claim that said 2=1 that I refuted."

Them: "We're not doubting your arguments but we need some time to figure out if that's true. Now let's consider 2+2=5... Oh, yeah, if 2=1 turns out to be true, then..."

At that point, it would make sense to me to ask about how I refuted 2=1. They want it to be true, I'm saying it's false, but they go on with their own trains of thought, assuming it's true. If someone in your team has a piece of information that can be decisive for something you are very interested in knowing, why would you ignore it? I've been told I have to learn how to explain why something is important in order to get my message across, but in this case it is important for everyone (and they know that) and yet they are not willing to make an effort to understand. They have even told me that they have answered my questions when in fact they haven't, and then I have to explain what it is that they don't understand and why, and it's getting frustrating.

1) Am I doing something wrong? How can I tell if it's a lack of skill on my part or laziness on theirs?

2) How can I refuse to collaborate on future works with the same team? I have a feeling that they will ask me to prove that it's not my fault and will keep arguing that this "happens all the time when doing research".

(1) This question could only be answered by reading your drafts and discussion carefully.
(2) If they invite you, politely decline.  (If there's more going on here, for example, a debt of gratitude, complex relationships with a third party, funding ramifications, etc., please explain.)
Now I'll pose and answer the question I thought you were leading up to.
Question:

How can I deal with their stubborn refusal to read my comments carefully and give them fair consideration?

Answer:

When you are the low man on the totem pole, it is all too easy to fall into an unproductive communication game with such people.  The key is to use an authoritative but not disrespectful tone, write in a neutral tone with no emotions showing, repeat yourself as needed, and time your repetitions carefully.  Note about the timing:  don't reply right away.  You may draft an email response right away, but send it after an interval of time has gone by.
There are two ways to repeat yourself.  You can choose whichever one works better for you.
(a) The succinct approach: "I responded to these points in draft number.letter, submitted on date."  Or: "Please refer to comments submitted by email on date, time.  Notice "comments"(not "my comments"); "submitted" (not "which I submitted").  Depersonalizing the language you use with them helps your messages sound authoritative.)
(b) Copy and paste from the previous draft or email message.

There must be no hint of frustration or sarcasm in your messages.  You can be a broken record, as long as you don't show you're aware that you might sound like a broken record.  And you must not show you are annoyed, because with people like this, showing annoyance is paradoxically counter-productive.
It might be easier to adopt this tone if you pretend you are the right-hand man of an expert in the field, drafting a response for the Big Researcher.  (This is analogous to being a legal clerk to a big name judge.)  Write your comments and email messages as though they will be signed by that imaginary senior researcher (which might be you twenty years from now!).
These tips bring no guarantee of success.  But at least you'll have minimized the time and energy you've put in.


Applying to Ph.D, how to reach out to a professor with no exactly overlapping research topic with me? Before everyone's coming at me, let me explain.
I am a CS student and been working on a fundamental type of research project. In my project, I had to propose a new approach, find a new algorithm to tackle a specific topic issue. The ultimate goal was to find the algorithm itself, not directly to application/implementation. My algorithm is new and has never been used before as an approach to solve this problem. It is tested, has less drawbacks than existing algorithms, and has been published in a paper.

Meanwhile, this professor I'm trying to reach out, is from the same specific field of CS as me, and he's a "rockstar" in device implementation and optimization. I've come across his name from papers and books countless times during my years of research, since he's indeed an expert in my field. It's always been my goal to actually implement my algorithm in devices to begin with. But unfortunately due to time constraints during my master, I was only able to work on the algorithm development.

I believe with his implementation competence, expertise and guidance, not only this research can be improved, but also he could enrich my skills in algorithm development along with implementation as well. I've read his book and some papers, but because my project is addressing a real-life target issue that has never been addressed in his lab before, unfortunately there's no overlapping research topic between us, apart from a broad topic, and that he's been working on device optimization that could be extremely useful for my research.

How do I politely explain this situation to him, that I genuinely want to learn from him under his supervision about implementation and optimization area, without sounding like I'm a random student with a random research idea who would like to do Ph.D. in his lab ?

My advice on making contact with rockstars is to have an intermediary introduce you to them. They are, by definition, very busy. (Concert dates, groupies, wild parties,...). It is natural for them to think of you as "a random student with a random research idea" if you contact them directly. They probably get a lot of messages, all of which turn out to be of little value.

If you can, find a professor in your field, such as your advisor, perhaps, and have them write on your behalf with just an introduction and a short recommendation that your research on "topic" is interesting. It is harder for even a rockstar to ignore a colleague than a "a random student with a random research idea".

And having a paper published gives the recommender a hook into explaining why the introduction is being made.

It is even better if your local professor/recommender is known to the rockstar. It is still better to tag along at a conference and get introduced in person (after the current pandemic dies down, of course).

But once you are introduced you have a chance to deepen the conversation over time.

But, in particular, don't flood the person with too much information initially. That makes it even easier to ignore you since it takes time and effort to evaluate what you send even to determine if there is anything of value in it. Many will be too busy to want to bother.

Personal note: It isn't exactly the same situation, but I was once able to get a good student accepted into the doctoral program at Georgia Tech by making a personal appeal to the dean, who was a friend of mine. The student wasn't a very good standard-test taker, so is GRE was a bit mediocre, but I saw his potential and expressed it to the dean. I was later told that my not-at-all-inflated recommendation was important in getting him accepted and he went on to finish and to get hired at a similarly prestigious place.


What is the purpose of textbooks? I as a student have done various courses at my university and for each of these courses a textbook was prescribed. On the other hand, the instructor provided his notes as well. The textbook was huge (approximately 500 pages) whereas the lecture notes were only 100 pages and really short and clean. During my studies, I rarely used the textbook but relied on the notes and I think that I just did fine. I am not the only student who rarely uses prescribed textbook but other students also think the same in my classes. The students that I talked to prefer notes mainly because

textbooks are expensive so not everyone can afford buying 5 textbooks each academic session (5 subjects per session) which makes it 10 textbooks per year and the average price for each textbook is $150;
textbooks are huge (about 500 pages) so students prefer to use notes which is clean, short, and summarized;
It is true that during an academic session, a student studies for a particular subject, but he may forget some of the material so he needs to study it again few days before the exam. Studying a 500 pages textbook few days before the exams is practically impossible given the stress and pressure that students face when they get near the exam.

The only benefit of the textbooks that I can tell is that if you find a particular concept unclear, you can look at the textbook for clarification but most students really do not do this. If they struggle with a particular concept, they go to the office hours of the instructor and ask for clarification. The textbooks also have many exercises so if any student needs to do more exercises, they can uses the prescribed textbook but I have not seen any student who does this.

What is the purpose of a prescribed textbook in a course taught by instructor and why do instructors emphasize reading it?

The question is based on several false premises and this also leads to an answer:

  […] students prefer to use notes which is[sic!] clean, short, and summarized

That's not true for many students. In fact, there are students who dislike summarized text and like textbook style.

  It is true that during an academic session, a student studies for a particular subject, but he may forget some of the material so he needs to study it again few days before the exam. Studying a 500 pages textbook few days before the exams is practically impossible […]

Textbooks have a table of contents and often an index, so it is not at all impossible to brush up on a certain topic using a 500 pages textbook last minute (given that you know the context and some buzzwords).

  […] you can look at the textbook for clarification but most students really do not do this.

Many students do this, really.

  If they struggle with a particular concept, they go to the office hours of the instructor and ask for clarification.

Some come to office hours, some don't. For my courses, only very little students come to office hours and most study by other means - presumably some read a textbook.

  The textbooks also have many exercises so if any student needs to do more exercises, they can uses the prescribed textbook but I have not seen any student who does this.

Look harder. There are these students who do additional exercises.

Last point: Textbooks are used by professors to create their courses. There are great textbooks for introductory courses and professors do not want to reinvent the wheel (well, a worse wheel, actually). If they rely on textbooks for their preparation, why not tell the students which books they used?

I don't know if there are courses where you really have to purchase a textbook - you may just decide to not buy it and may be fine. I prefer to announce textbooks that are available online through subscriptions of my university and in the library as a paper copy (with at least one "permanent/reference copy" that can not be borrowed) so that the students can use the book for free.


What does "indicative" mean for the literature review One reviewer of my paper commented the following:

  The authors should clearly state that the literature they have
  included in the introduction is indicative (both in the case of
  experimental measurements and molecular simulation of ILs) and
  redirect to some recent review articles.

I don't know what does he mean. I don't know If he expected that I add some introductory sentences before reviewing literature like (bold part):

  Several experiments have recently been performed in order to understand the underlying dynamics of ILS, including XXX. ZZZ et al. [8] obtained the viscosities of the ILs XXX and YYY in a wide temperature range. Moreover, ZZZ and KKK [9] recently published atmospheric pressure self-diffusion coefficients of MMM tetrafluoroborates and NNN in the temperature range of 40-90 ℃.

However, in a previous paragraph I mentioned an introductory about ILs in General and not XXX in particular:

  In the literature, experimental and theoretical methods have been employed to obtain the properties of ILs. Experimental analyses such as IR, H and F NMR spectra, polarizing optical microscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, and UV-vis spectra have been used to determine the properties of ILs [5-7].

Your reviewer might be Italian! In Italian, you can say that something is just "indicative" (or indicativo) if it is only there to give you a rough idea.
You can probably just state that your literature review is not exhaustive.

Some examples of a titolo indicativo


Can I list the published papers that I did intern work for even if I'm not an author I am applying to grad school for a Masters in Environmental Science. (My BS is in Biology). I interned throughout high school and college for NIH. I did the basic lab tech type of work, but there were 2 papers that were published which I helped work on. Obviously, I am not an author on either of those papers, however I think they show the kind of work of which I have been a part. I can't find any format for listing this type of thing, so perhaps I should exclude the reference completely? However, I went to a CV writing workshop and was advised that any papers I contributed to in any way should be listed. I would appreciate any advice on this subject. Thank you.

However, I went to a CV writing workshop and was advised that any papers I contributed to in any way should be listed.

That's bad advice for an academic CV.  You only list papers on which you are an author.  I haven't ever seen exceptions to this rule - if you list them it will at best be confusing, and at worst seen as fraudulent.

You can certainly list your job as research experience, and in any graduate application, you can and should explain in more detail what you did and how it contributed to published research.  You should also ask your supervisor or PI to write a letter of recommendation which explains your contributions and their importance, and how it shows your preparation for graduate study.


How much would I have to publish to get an entry-level job? *Edit in response to comments: I'm not asking "What is the number of publications n of quality q1 such that anybody who has n many publications is guaranteed to get a job at a school like Y?" There is no such value of n. What I'm asking is, "Is there a number of publications n, of some quality q such that without n many publications of quality q, one will likely not get a job at a school like Y?" I realize the title is misleading.

This is in response to a conversation that developed in this thread.

I would like to hear from academia.SE members who have been search committee members on a junior search. How many publications, and of what quality would be required to get a job at different kinds of universities?

Let's say for the purpose of this exercise that we are in the U.S. and that there are five kind of universities.

2 year community colleges with incredibly heavy teaching expectations (4/4+)
4 year public or private colleges with heavy teaching expectations (3/4)
Elite small liberal arts colleges with moderate to light teaching expectations (2/2 - 3/3).
Non-elite state universities with graduate programs and light teaching loads (2/2).
Elite universities with little to no teaching (1/- or 1/1).

It would also be helpful if respondents would identify which discipline they are in.

I'm the faculty search chair for a top-5 American computer science department.

  How many publications, and of what quality would be required to get a job...?

This is simply the wrong question. To be considered for a position, you must have an independent research record among the very best in the world in your age cohort and subfield. The number of publications really doesn't matter, for the same reason grades don't matter for admission to a top PhD program; there are enough applicants with enough publications that we can afford to focus on more important features.

What matters more is the quality, visibility, impact, and reputation of your research.  You must have a coherent and compelling research vision and agenda. You must have letters from the very best people in your field—people that the search committee already know by reputation, preferably not at your home institution. Those letters must say things like "major impact on the field" and "strongest student on the market this year", with specific, technical, and credible details to back up their opinions.

Moreover, the search committee must agree with the assessment in the reference letters.  Without a champion on the search committee, you will not get an interview; there are simply too many strong applicants.  Yes, we do read your statements, your papers, and other papers that cite your papers ourselves. We also call up colleagues in your field who didn't write you letters and ask them who the best people are in your field; they'd better mention you.

That gets you to the short list of people we are willing to interview.  Unless it's a dry year, there are more people on this list than interview slots, so the recruiting committee has long discussions comparing the merits of various candidates and arguing about departmental needs/strategy. Sometimes enough clear winners emerge; more often, we just have to vote.

Once you are invited to an interview, your performance at the interview often becomes more important than your past record.  Your talk must be compelling and polished. You must impress the faculty and students you meet with your breadth of expertise, your research agenda/vision, your likely success as an advisor, as a collaborator, as an instructor, and as an intellectual leader.

In short, it must be clear that you will get tenure.

Inevitably, more people will "pass" the interview than we have positions to offer. So there is another long and wide-ranging discussion among the faculty, comparing the merits of the various top candidates and arguing about departmental needs. Sometimes clear winners emerge; other times the faculty deadlock and the department head has to make the call.

I have seen candidates with 2 or 3 groundbreaking papers get hired (and later get tenure). I have also seen fresh PhDs with 20+ papers in top venues that were not even considered for an interview, because their work was judged incremental or narrow. The number of papers is simply not the right metric to care about.


Are the peer-reviewers of papers submitted to a conference that took a place in location X from X too? Generally speaking, are the papers submitted to a conference (Scientific conference, say) that took place in region/country X reviewed by peer-reviewers in region/country X?

No, the reviewers could easily be from other countries and may, or even may not, be attending the conference.


Is it a bad idea to use other professors' Youtube videos as lectures? I am a graduate student at an American university, and I have been assigned to teach an online math class. I have noticed that there are many lecture videos available on Youtube made by actual professors, and since I am a first-time lecturer, their videos are superior to anything I could make.
I am wondering if it would be appropriate for me to assign Youtube videos as lectures? Or would this be considered unprofessional/frowned upon/likely not allowed?
Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of?

The answer depends on your goals.
If you have plans to work in academia, eventually you might find yourself on a track to becoming a professor yourself. In this role, you are expected to teach. Hence, you should be able to prepare teaching materials of high quality to support your teaching and benefit students' learning. The sooner you start working on your first video lecture, the sooner you prepare the one which you are actually not totally ashamed of. Your first lecture might be half-baked and otherwise of sub-par quality, but that's expected on your career stage, when people start learning the ropes. But if you listen to feedback from your students and your mentors, and reflect on it, then your second lecture will be better than your first one, and eventually you start producing good quality stuff. Most importantly, you will become a better educator yourself, equipped with a wide range of tools and techniques, and understanding which method works best in a particular situation. You will be able to adapt your teaching to the needs of a particular student cohort, and you won't depend on materials from the internet (which may or may not be available).
But maybe your goal is simply to survive this teaching assignment until you graduate? In this case there is probably no shame in using online materials to complement your teaching. Just don't forget, that you still need to support your students and help them contextualise and understand the content. You may achieve this by preparing some examples based on the materials in the lecture and working through them with your students. It may be appropriate to have a discussion regarding the material, or even to critically assess and compare the material presented by different lecturers.
Good luck.


Is it common to get a job (industry) after getting a PhD degree in Germany? (engineering field) I am an engineering PhD student in Germany. I am planning to get a job in industry after finishing my degree? Is this common in Germany?

Thank you guys in advance.

Yes, many engineers do this. In fact, industrial partnerships with academia for PhD students are much more frequent in Germany than in the US. Many of these lead to job placements following graduation. So it certainly is a possibility—most of my grad students there decided to go to industry.


Addressing the recepient on the cover letter for a PhD application I am applying for a PhD position, and I am required to attach a cover letter with the application.
In the advertisement for the position, the main contact person is the "Head of the PhD program", so it feels natural to address the letter to him.

My question: As this person is also an Associate Professor of Mathematics, which title should I use when stating his address information?

My first intuition was to write:

  Name Surname, Head of PhD program

  (other address information)

but this might be a bit unfortunate as he is also an associate professor, which could be considered to be a title of greater value.

Alternatively I could just write:

  Name Surname, Associate Professor of Mathematics

  (other address information)

but then it sort of misses the point of why I am addressing the letter to him (though this might be obvious to someone working at their department).

I could also add both:

  Name Surname

  Associate Professor of Mathematics and Head of PhD program

  (other address information)

Is there a standard way?

The university has their own online system for applying, so this might not be all too important. Nevertheless, I want to make sure everything is right.

In most places any of those would be fine. Some places are very formal about titles, though, such as Germany. But if his were the case here, I think you'd already know that. The important thing is that it get to the right person. It is relevant to the entire committee, of course, not just the "main contact".

But something simple is fine.


Changing from molecular neuroscience to ecology after PhD? Ecologist perspective needed! I am one year away from finishing a PhD in neuroscience and looking at PostDoc/future career options. Though I love neuroscience, I don't enjoy working in the field very much and I have had a life-long (though non-academic) passion for ecology/conservation biology. I have a very broad background in biology (zoology, plant physiology, marine biology, development..) and have done several ecology-related courses in my undergrad.

My questions goes mainly to ecologists out there, is it possible to learn the techniques needed for ecological surveys/conservation biology work (thinking mostly marine, climate change focused) "on the job"? I believe I have gained a lot of transferable skills during my PhD and I learn techniques quickly. However the fields are very different. I wish I could be more precise but right now I am just looking at a general idea based on the premise that during a PhD, one learns skills beyond one's subject and thus should be able to change, even though it's not easy.

Would it be necessary to maybe do a master's program to bridge the fields? My undergrad would allow me to do a master's in ecology, I already checked that. But at this point of my career I think it's more valuable to learn on the job than to go back to a taught course (also I'm quite old, >25).

I'm thankful for any input!

I am not an ecologist, but I work with several, and if you squint and don't look very hard I might pass as one.

It will very much depend on the type of ecology you're interested in doing, and what kind of skills you have now. "Ecology" is a very wide open field, which can involve anything from fairly advanced mathematics to lots of field work, and everything in between. It's certainly possible (a lab I know has taken several postdocs from fields further afield than your own), but it would help if you could find a way to either apply your current skill set to an ecological problem.

Failing that, while it's likely still possible, it may take more time and be something of a rougher path.

Short version: "It depends."


What questions could I ask students in an online questionnaire to improve my online teaching? Like many of us, I imagine, I have been giving online lectures, tutorials, Q&A sessions, exams, etc. for almost a year (and I just realized that it has, indeed, been almost a year...).
I have been frustrated by many aspects of online teaching, and I am not sure that I am meeting students' expectations. Now that this second online semester is coming to an end, I would like to send them a questionnaire to ask them what they thought of this whole ordeal, what they would like to see improved, what they enjoyed, etc. However, I want to make sure that my questions are not biased, and that they cover everything, I don't want to miss some aspects.
What are good questions that I could ask students? What are resources that I could read on such questionnaires?
Note: There isn't a culture of systematically asking for students' evaluations of courses in my country. Everything is organized by individual instructors. I teach math if it makes a difference. I have myself taken a class a fews years ago on collecting students' opinions, but it proved useless to me and completely out of touch with the reality of teaching that I was familiar with (the class instructors were coming from social sciences, where I believe the teaching is done in a different manner – I am not trying to disparage, just saying that teaching e.g. math and teaching e.g. sociology isn't done in the same way).

I'd go on about this in an informal manner. I'd probably ask general open questions like "What did you like about the course?", "What do you think could be improved about the course?", and then cover issues I am particularly interested in, like "What do you think of the way the exercise feedback was given?", "How do you think students could be stimulated better to participate actively in the online lessens?" or "how effective do you think was XXX that I tried to stimulate participation?" etc.
I do not think that questions need to be unbiased. In fact I'd like questions to encourage students to be positive and constructive (therefore I ask "what did you like" but not "what didn't you like"). Many feel more comfortable writing positive things and some will respond to "What do you think could be improved about the course?" rather than  "what didn't you like?" Also I think it will help me more and make myself more open to take criticism if it is presented in a constructive way, and I will more happily use ideas to improve if I get a generally positive message from the feedback. The students need to be encouraged to write things that can help you to improve, but I don't think it serves anybody to invite them to complain.
Obviously it is laudable that you'd also like to cover some aspects that are maybe not the first things you think of yourself. Some general aspects that can be covered are speed of delivery, quality of the provided material, do the students feel comfortable to ask questions and that your answers address them properly (the problem here is that students who for some reason don't feel comfortable to ask you questions may also not be comfortable to tell you this), what do the students think about the amount of work to be done, how this is organised, is the material challenging enough or even too challenging, do they think that you assessed their background knowledge well, i.e., neither spent too much time to explain things they already knew nor assumed material that they didn't know etc. Others will add more. You can of course also ask things like "Is there any comment you have that isn't covered by the questions up to now?" or "Do you believe that there is something about the situation of the students in these times that I should be aware of/take into account more?"
A word of caution though, somewhat in contrast to the number of suggestions before. Keep it short! Keep in mind filling in a questionnaire and then reading it takes time of your students and you. Time is precious. It is probably a bigger problem to cover all you can think of in a questionnaire that takes half an hour to fill in than to ask just five or seven questions and then realise that you forgot something you'd have liked to ask. With very open general questions, you give the students at least the chance to tell you whatever is not covered by other questions.


It seems every postdoc position needs representative papers. What should I do if I don't have any publications? I have spent 4.5 years on my PhD, writing my thesis, with just one average publication. I am 30yo with no work experience and don't want to go to industry. I have been looking at several postdoctoral positions and it seems every postdoc position needs representative papers showing proof for the work. Will I be able to get a postdoc and pursue academia?

Your question is very much field dependent. In some fields it is acceptable to go without a single publication for your PhD (I believe this is true for some subfields in economics, literature and math). However, you are expected to produce according to your community's standards: for example, in the economics/maths examples above you are expected to have at least one or two working papers/papers under submission containing solid results that were discussed in some workshops. In the literature domain, I understand that there's a lot of focus on teaching, written essays and book reviews etc. (I get this knowledge secondhand, I'm far from a humanities faculty). In my field (CS/AI/ML) you wouldn't be allowed to graduate with one average publication, and would most likely not have been allowed to go 4+ years into your thesis, unless there were very unusual circumstances (you mention industry, so I'm assuming you are at the very least in a STEM discipline).

So, the question you should be asking yourself is: am I comparable to my peers in terms of my PhD accomplishments?

If you have a lot of amazing work that just needs a bit more time, you can either

Ask your advisor to graduate in another year to let these results come to fruition under the umbrella of your thesis OR
Put them up on ArXiv (or the equivalent) and list them there. This is not ideal, but at least it shows that you weren't idle.

From the perspective of a postdoc host, I would most likely pass on an application that's clearly lacking in publications, even if it is backed up by glowing references. I would be more inclined to accept one that is backed up by preprints, if they contained amazing results that are vouched for by people whose opinion I respect. Postdocs should be people who are able to support their own research thread without very close supervision (they should be more independent than grad students at the very least), so you should prove to me that this is indeed the case; this is a tall order without proof that you can actually publish peer-reviewed work in good venues on your own.

I'm sorry to offer an answer you most likely don't want to hear, and I wish you all the best!


What is life like for Western-raised/trained academics who are faculty in countries with extremely tight governmental control? There are a growing number of prominent universities in the world which are based in countries where the government exerts substantial control over its citizens in ways that are not typical in "Western" countries (Europe, US, Canada, etc.). Two examples:

KAUST, in Saudi Arabia, where alcohol is illegal and there are extremely strict dress codes.
Tsinghua University, in China, where citizens are not typically allowed to protest or congregate, and in general citizens are not entitled to, for example, free speech.

For those who are/were faculty (or postdocs/researchers) at such institutions, and who were raised/trained in Western countries with less restrictive governments, what is life like at such a research institution? In particular:

Are you bound by the restrictive laws the govern most citizens (for example, dress codes or alcohol in Saudi Arabia, or speech in China)? (Of course it's assumed that you can't just do whatever you like - I'm mostly interested in the laws that have nothing comparable in Western countries)
Did you bring a family or significant other with you? What has their experience been like?
Do you expect to stay at this institution for your career, or will you eventually try to return to your home country/a Western country?

Importantly, I am NOT passing judgement/being critical of the government of these countries. I am really just interested in how the institutions/governments of these countries treat researchers who are not citizens (and who, from my experience, have often been recruited from another western institution).

Disclaimer:  What follows is a combination of openly-available facts and some personal opinions.  The opinion parts are my own and I don't claim to speak for anyone else.  I did not intend for this to be "the answer" to this question; it deals with only one country/university.

I was born and raised in the United States, and got all my degrees there.  I have now been a professor at KAUST for 5 years.  I certainly came here by choice; I had good competing offers at some top programs in my field in the US.

  Are you bound by the restrictive laws that govern most citizens?

To a significant degree, yes.  For instance, alcohol, pork, and a number of other substances are not permitted anywhere in Saudi Arabia.  On-campus housing for single students is in separate buildings for men and for women.

However, KAUST is exempt from a number of the social customs that are in effect throughout the rest of the country. For example:

KAUST is the only university in the country where males and females learn in the same classroom together.
Women can drive on the KAUST campus (with a license).
Women do not need to wear the abaya (burkha) at KAUST, or to cover their hair, etc.  They dress as they please, within professional standards of modesty.

KAUST is not completely unique in these respects; the Aramco "compound" (which is really a small city) in the Eastern Province has similar exceptions.  The KAUST campus and the Aramco compound are also the only two places in the country with a movie theater.

Of course, we frequently leave the campus to go to Jeddah.  My wife can't drive there and wears an abaya.  Also, the university culture at KAUST is more top-down than at most US universities, which I believe is a reflection of the local culture.  But our current president is changing that to some degree.

  Did you bring a family or significant other with you? What has their experience been like?

I brought a wife and two young children (my third was born here).  They are happy here -- if not, we wouldn't have stayed!  Frankly, KAUST is an ideal place to raise a family.  My children have friends from almost every imaginable culture, religion, and race.  They take lessons in things like piano, swimming, and ballet.  The schools are excellent and the community is extremely safe (I don't even lock my bike).  I'll often bike to my childrens' school and take them to the park for lunch; everything is within five minutes by bicycle here.  I live 1 block from the beach and my morning commute is a short bicycle ride through beautiful surroundings.

Life is pretty relaxed and hassle-free because the university essentially manages everything (and manages it well).  My wife doesn't work outside the home.  She participates in a number of community organizations and has time to devote to friendships, hobbies, and especially to our children.

I'll add (since most westerners find it surprising) that there are many single western women who work here very happily.

  Do you expect to stay at this institution for your career, or will you eventually try to return to your home country/a western country?

I came to KAUST because it was an adventure and chance to build something new and worthwhile.  My initial plan was to spend perhaps 3-4 years at KAUST and then go back to the US.  However, I have since realized that I have the ideal academic job (by my own criteria, at least):

Extremely generous funding with no need to write grant proposals (KAUST has one of the world's largest endowments and only about 120 faculty).
Light teaching load (1 MS level course and 1 PhD level course per year), which also has allowed me the time to be bit innovative and try things like inquiry-based learning.
A relatively light administrative load, compared to what I hear from colleagues in the US.  This is largely due to having excellent and plentiful support staff.
Long-term job security with the freedom to do research along any direction I wish (university positions generally include this, but other careers I considered do not).
Essentially unlimited access to a world-class supercomputer (200 Tflops, upgrading to 5 Pflops next spring).  This is relevant to my particular field; other researchers here get similar benefits from other exceptional facilities.

Now I suppose the last bit of this post sounds like an advertisement, and I can't really help that.  In light of all this, I don't plan to leave any time soon.

I've been planning a series of retrospective posts on this topic for my blog.  I will link to that here if I get around to writing it.

Some updates in response to comments:

KAUST is committed to avoiding gender (and other types of) discrimination.  There are very many women (married and single) who work at KAUST.  There are many families in which both spouses work.  I can add that the opportunities for women to work in Saudi Arabia (outside of KAUST) have increased dramatically in the last couple of years.  As of 2016, KAUST's student body is 40% female and about 40% Saudi, so I'd guess around 16% are Saudi women.  Hundreds of Saudi women work at KAUST.  They are treated no differently from foreign (or male) students/employees.
Because most of us have close ties to groups in the US and Europe, KAUST researchers travel a lot.  We also have a large, steady stream of international visitors.  For instance, the last three presidents of my professional society have each given a seminar at KAUST.


If you make changes to paper after initial conference submission, should you present updated version at conference? I am a PhD student in computer science and have submitted a paper to a conference which details my proposed architecture. However in the month or so since this paper has been submitted my architecture has undergone changes (relatively major), how is this normally dealt with?

If the paper is accepted do I present the work as it was at the time of submission or do I openly state that changes have been made and present the updated version of the architecture?

I believe you should do what is better to the audience.

In some disciplines/communities it is strongly assumed that conference participants read the abstracts/papers before the presentation, and expect the discussion to follow precisely the material that is published. In this case, of course, you could only comment briefly on the recent changes you've made.

In other fields (such as mine), the abstracts are used only as a means to (roughly) describe the topic of the presentation. It is quite normal to extend the actual talk beyond the scope of the abstract, or reduce the role of some pieces of research advertised in the abstract. In this case, I'd advise you to make a talk that is simply interesting for you and the audience. It can probably include both the original design and your contribution to its recent development. Make sure people in the room understand why  the changes were needed, how you have worked them out, and what is the benefits of your new architecture.


What should a progress report contain? What are the key components of a progress report? There are no official guidelines from the funding agency; all I have is a set of project objectives listed in the original proposal and a target length: three pages.

I am at the stage of putting together a draft for the PI, and I would like to due my due-diligence (get some basic guidelines here) before asking the PI for further input.

Here are some of my questions:

What sections should it include?
Are there any essential "key concepts" to include?
Is it acceptable to cut and paste from the proposal?
Should I include figures and graphs from unpublished findings?
How would the writing style compare / contrast to a proposal? To a research paper?

Finally, is there a good resource that provides a comprehensive (if brief) overview of writing progress reports? I have a few books on scientific writing, but none specifically adress progress reports.

Good engineering practice suggests:

An executive overview: a couple of sentences (3 lines) which states either "The objectives for the period have been reached." or "The objectives have not been reached, because ..."; then "No obstacle in the way to the next objectives." Or "Possible obstacle are ....; contingency plan is ....".
A summary: what were the objectives for the period; then for each objective what has been done towards that objective. A little reuse of figures/graphs here is acceptable.
a main results section, as space allows: here you select one or two "main achievements" from the previous reporting period, and you give more details about that, with possibly references to external reports / draft papers / additional materials that the report reviewer can go analyse if they are interested.
an optional  obstacles & contingency section: if the executive summary lists problems, here you details what these problems are (either the obstacles in the previous period, or the foreseen obstacles in the next period, or both). Also detail your planned contingency actions.
a report of effort spent: here you detail where your budget (and man-hours of work) was allocated to each objective/task.

Also, don't make it too long. It's extremely important that the reviewers of your project can get an overall impression of the progress in a very short time. (they will typically have many projects to evaluate in a short time)


Is it possible to download nature as a magazine? As i just want to skim over the latest articles in nature photonics, I was wondering if there is anyway to download all of the current issue as a single file (just as when one downloads Scientific American, even though these are very different publications). Still, there should be a way to download all of the current issue at once. Does anyone know if it's possible; if so, how?

Scientific American is a very different type of journal, in fact it more a "magazine" than a peer-reviewed academic journal like Nature.

Nature (and almost all other paid-subscription academic journals) does not want people downloading large numbers of articles at a time, even if they are doing it legally (with a paid subscription, such as yourself). This is because people who download so many articles at a time, are usually trying to do it for some reason that goes against the goals of the company printing the journal (in this case Nature Publishing Group). For example, people who download 100s of academic journal articles in one day, might be trying to create a repository of articles online for free access somewhere else on the internet or on PirateBay, or to sell the articles for $3 each instead of the $30 that nature usually charges.

On this question you have put a bounty containing the message:

  I really need to find a way to download it

Which begs the question: Why is it that you need to download an entire issue of a journal all at once? I do not know anyone that has such a wide breadth of scientific knowledge, that they can understand every article in one issue of Nature. I think the reason why 8 months have passed without any answer to this question, is that Nature also does not see any good reason why someone would want to do this, that would not go against the goals of the company, which are to make a profit.

If you are not planning to do anything illegal, the best solution for you is probably to use an automation software such as AutoIT (if using Windows), or to use command-line tools like curl or wget (if using Linux), and then combine the PDFs by dragging and dropping them into a PDF merging software like the one offered with Small PDF.


Is it ever appropriate to ask a professor to be a business advisor? Myself and a few business partners of mine are working to develop a software product, in which I am responsible for building and all other technical aspects. At the same time, I'm currently pursuing a secondary degree in Computer Science at a local university. As my responsibilities within our business include securing a competent technical advisor, a suggestion was raised by my colleagues to inquire with my professors as to if they'd be willing to take on a limited advisory role in exchange for some amount of company ownership.

Is this at all common in the academic world? There are past professors in which I've excelled in their classes, had positive relationships and would consider their knowledge in such a role incredibly valuable. Additionally, I also know a few of them are not full-time with the university, but serve as guest lectures with ongoing careers in the software field.

I've been told this isn't an entirely uncommon practice, but I can also foresee a number of ethical issues and conflict of interest surrounding this idea, given that I'm a student within the program.

Due to the mentioned ethical aspects you should avoid any financial relationship with professors of which you are still taking courses.

On the other hand, it is happening quite often that a professor is supporting a start up and compensation can be either money, company ownership, or sometimes just personal satisfaction.


Is it research to just combine other people’s work? I am currently a second-year undergraduate double-majoring in math and computer science. I am currently doing a joint research paper with one of the faculty in my university.

My advisor gave me research problem A. I thought about the problem for one week and managed to break problem A to sub-problems A₁, A₂, ..., An. Next, I started researching on A₁. After reading several papers, I found that an author had already solved problem A₁. I repeated this for A₂, ..., An and they have all been solved previously. Now I take the solutions for all of them, with proper citations of course, and piece them into a solution to my original problem. I write a paper and get it published.

Now here is my problem: I feel like a fraud. I have not personally solved any of the Ai. Heck, the only work I’ve done is to break down the problem, searched for solutions to the subproblems, and to combine other people’s solutions. Is this really what research is about? I really feel disheartened and want to know other people’s opinions. I feel like anybody can really do what I did.

Research is not just about inventing things. Finding out the best options to solve the sub-problems is also part of research and is also a major part of why people publish — to have their work used for a purpose.

Research can simply be anything that makes a contribution to science/knowledge/understanding (see here) which can be any of the following.

Finding novel approaches to existing problems
Formulating new problems and solutions to them
Doing an in-depth study on an established field
Making meaningful connections between the unrelated
Extending on top of existing developments
Combining the best practices to solve subproblems of a bigger problem
...

The list can go on. The main point here is as long as you have cited the existing solutions A₁, A₂, ..., An and that such a combination has not been published before, then you have no need to feel guilty of the work you did. You have done real work to search for the best solutions to each subproblem and went through the trouble of combing them to get a meaningful result — you have achieved an advancement in research.

Summarizing the comments:

A subproblem Ai may as well be ensembles/extensions of previous work.
If no-one else has published the work before, then it is not as trivial as you think it is.
The imposter syndrome; it is common for many in their research career. Overcome it.
You shed light on how problem A can be solved which might be overlooked before.


What funding to include in an old paper? I am currently close to publishing a paper that I first sent for review 5 years ago. The reasons why the review process was so long are not entirely clear to me, and are beside the point. During that time, I have not done any significant work on the paper, except for editing it for clarity—the vast majority of the time, the paper was with the journal.
I'm unsure what funding information I should put on the paper in this case. I wrote it, and it appeared on arXiv, during my PhD. In the meantime, I had a post-doc, and now I have just started a new post-doc. Should I mention all these sources of funding, or only the ones from during the PhD? A similar question applies to affiliations.
My field is mathematics.

As I often try to remember, a stable baseline for such things is honesty. So, perhaps something like "the main part of this work was partially funded by X. Revisions were partially funded by Y and Z".
(I'm assuming that "partially" is the correct thing in your situation...)
In the U.S., in math, the funding agencies not only "require" such acknowledgements, but do want to be able to "point to" them to make an impact on higher-ups, including the U.S. Congress. I somehow doubt that Congressional staffers are fact-checking the NSF's claims... but, still. :)
Similarly regarding affiliations, I think, though in that regard the more functionally relevant item is probably "current contact information". At the same time, you could also credit former employers/institutions with "partially funding" the research. Although I don't see this in any U.S. math rule-book, it would certainly be honest and fair.
(Years ago, a senior colleague of mine here in Minnesota, Steven Gaal, in the intro to his very nice monograph on linear analysis, explicitly thanked "the farmers and workers of Minnesota" for supporting him while he did that work.)


Is it ethical to answer questions about homework for colleagues taking courses I've already completed? I receive many questions from colleagues about homework in a certain course which I took a while back. I try to answer them and help them solve homework which are very similar to the ones I did when I was taking the course. There is no TA for that course, so they come to me with their questions.

I am not sure if what I am doing is ethical. The professor doesn't know that I am doing this. Should I stop and tell him about this and see what he says?

To "answer their questions" may mean different things, and some of them are OK, while others are not. E.g. answering questions like "What does this mean?" by explaining the thing in your own words is of course OK. However, solving their homework problems for them is not.

I guess, one can draw a line here: If you are helping them to learn the topic then it is OK. If you only try to help them to pass the course without caring about their progress in the topic, it is not OK.

So my advice would be: Focus on the topic itself when answering questions. Try to find out or guess what the instructor of the course wants the students to learn and help them to accomplish that.

Oh, and of course, asking the instructor is also OK.


What to remember when supervising female PhD students? I have been supervising a female PhD student for a couple of months. She is the first female PhD student I am supervising and got the position on merit.

My view is that her gender does not/should not change anything in how I supervise her or what I expect from her, the rationale being that doing so might ultimately hurt her in her post-PhD career. For this reason, I have not brought up her gender in any of our discussions. I briefly contemplated telling her that I will treat her the same way as her male peers, but did not do so because it seemed wrong (as in "of course, why is he telling me this?").

Lately I have been wondering, however, whether there are things I should do that I might not even be thinking of. Perhaps my own experience and the male-dominated environment blind me so that I do not perceive my own sexist/reverse-sexist attitudes and ultimately do not do things that I should be doing (and vice versa)? So I am interested in reading advice/views on supervising female PhD students (in male-dominated academic environments).

A few notes to address anticipated follow-up questions: Yes, I am male. I did not specify where my institution is located because I am interested in a range of opinions/comments. The agency that finances her project offers a special stipend to attend workshops/meetings for female students; I have encouraged her to attend.

My view is that her gender does not/should not change anything in how I supervise her or what I expect from her, the rationale being that doing so might ultimately hurt her in her post-PhD career. For this reason, I have not brought up her gender in any of our discussions. I briefly contemplated telling her that I will treat her the same way as her male peers, but did not do so because it seemed wrong (as in "of course, why is he telling me this?").

That is exactly the advice I would give in this situation, so congrats, you've already figured it out.

  The agency that finances her project offers a special stipend to attend workshops/meetings for female students; I have encouraged her to attend.

Try not to overdo the encouragement. I get so much spam inviting me to assorted "women in engineering" events.

On a related note, you might want to watch out for the possibility that you (or your department) might have a tendency to overuse the students who are "visible" minorities (race, gender) in publicity materials and outreach events.  Some people don't mind (some even appreciate this), but some dislike being used as "poster children" to show how diverse the department is. (There's a joke in this TV episode, where the African-American doctor calls out his college for overusing him in their brochure by photoshopping him into the same picture twice.)

I'm sure people must have published studies about how female PhD students are statistically more likely to have families and be concerned about work-life balance issues, and how you have to be more supportive, etc.  But all that really just comes down to being communicative and supportive of your students, whatever their individual needs might be. For large numbers I'm sure there's a gender dimension there, but at the individual level it's just about being a good supervisor to an individual student.


Turning down a postdoc offer from a committee member. Can that create problem in the future? Recently I responded to a postdoc 'advertisement' posted by one of my PhD defense committee members. I still have 2 months to go for my PhD defense. However, I got an offer for a position from the said committee member.

Now, I am in a fix about what would happen if I reject the offer? I am hoping to get a better position in a different university and group soon and I don't want to create any issues with my thesis evaluation due to the rejected offer.

Is it going to create an issue in the future? Can it influence my thesis evaluation?

A polite rejection to this post doc offer should neither hurt your thesis evaluation nor cause damage to your relationship with your committee member. The rejection email need not (and should not) be long or detailed, but as long as you make clear that you are honoured by the offer, that you have considered it carefully and seriously, but that you feel it is not quite the right path for you at this juncture, they will understand. I would suggest ending with a line saying that you look forward to finding ways to collaborate in the future.

All told, I think this is a positive sign for how this person will evaluate your thesis. They clearly think you are a worthy researcher or else they would not wish to hire you.


A Student turned in an essay answer to a question I haven't asked yet. What to do? A student turned in a bunch of homework assignments, poorly organized and many not labeled.  One of them was on a topic for several weeks from now.  The student turned in a short essay for the assignment, which I have not given.

Notes:
Most of the course material was prepared by someone else and is normally used by several of us adjuncts.
I've taught this course prior.

English is not the student's primary language (interesting since the essays turned in are in very good English...).

Since I haven't given the assignment, is it plagiarism?  (What was turned in is straight up a copy of an internet source.)

Do I report them to the Chair/Dean for plagiarism?

This is clear cut plagiarism. And not only is it plagiarism, it is also very poorly conducted plagiarism, which is a bit worse in my book, since it indicates that the student does not even takes studying seriously enough to read through the assignments and understand what he/she is plagiarizing.

Your university surely has guidelines. If you don't know the guidelines, you can ask the person responsible for undergraduate education at your institution, which will probably also be the person you should report to.

And let me just add one final thing: You don't do the student any favors by not reporting. Plagiarism exploits the mutual trust there always needs to be when teaching, and this is harmful for university education as such. Plagiarism and cheating should therefore always have consequences.


Reneging a postdoctoral offer from Canada due to Canadian work permit delays I was recently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the United States. My supervisor was in close collaboration with another professor in Canada and therefore I expressed interest in joining the team in Canada with which both professors responded positively.

I should mention here that I am a foreigner to both countries. Therefore, I had to apply for a work permit to move to Canada from the US. In addition, I require a full-job to remain in valid status in the US.

I applied for a Canadian work permit based on the job offer as early as I could---which was only three weeks before the tentative start date on the official letter. The processing times estimate on the Canadian website for such a process were two weeks at the time. Happily, I resigned from my US job to finalize my move and get ready for the visa.

Unfortunately, the visa has not yet arrived for another 4 weeks and my US status will expire soon unless I'm hired immediately. Therefore, I applied for a local postdoc position and received another offer. My previous supervisor in the US would not be able to re-hire me immediately and the current offer is the best option so far.

My question is as follows: I understand the resigning was a mistake in the first place. However, Is it justifiable, professionally and ethically, to accept another position in the US?  The position in Canada is ideal to me, but unfortunately, I have to commit to the US position for about a year if I sign.

Whether this specific Canadian professor would understand we, of course, cannot tell. Yet people tend to be understanding of delays due to bureaucratic visa issues, or things just not working out - especially if you communicate this clearly. I would suggest reaching out to that professor, laying out the situation and seeing if anything can be done. Perhaps they're willing to delay your start by a year, perhaps not. What you don't want to happen is the professor reaching out to you a month from now, asking when you're planning to show up, and you having to respond that actually you started a completely different position.

A sidenote is that you'd probably not be legally bound to a one-year commitment in the US, but I think you're right in not wanting to burn those bridges before they're even built.


I sent an angry e-mail to my interviewers about a conflict at my home institution. Could this affect my application? I applied to a foreign university. I was interviewed and now I am waiting for the result.

I had also applied to another research opportunity abroad, which is organized by my current department head. I was very hopeful that I would be selected for this opportunity because I am the first-ranking student and my English is very good. I spoke respectfully with the head professor about it on several occasions, but it seemed like he was making excuses and was not fairly considering me.

I recently found out that my classmate was selected for the opportunity abroad. He had performed much worse than me on classes we had taken together, and his English is very weak. I lost control and told the head of the department where there is a research opportunity that I would report this obvious injustice to the leading mathematicians at the university that had interviewed me recently. I did indeed e-mail my interviewers.

Now that I have calmed down, I realize that I should not have emailed my interviewers in this manner. Could it affect the outcome of my application?

Appendix: Thank you for your suggestions and advice. In fact, I have realized that I should always remain academically professional. I also sent a follow-up email to my interviewer and expressed my regret at my previous email.

Appendix 2: Now that I am more calm, I realize that my act was childish. I was not the employer to decide whom to hire. I emailed the head professor and and the one at the institution where there is a research opportunity expressing my regret. But now I feel like I need to try even much more than before to become successful. Good luck specially to me

I had some troubles following your question, but if I understood correctly then I would assume that:

The professor interviewing you is highly confused right now. They seem to have literally nothing to do with your university, the program, you (other than having interviewed you recently), and the person that you accused of being unjust - and yet they are drawn into a conflict that they have no stakes in nor responsibility for.
You may indeed have lowered your chances of getting accepted considerably. In the best case your email would be seen as odd. In the worst case it would be seen as grossly unprofessional, painting you as a trouble maker who will randomly lash out whenever something happens that you consider unjust. I have seen students like that, and I know of no professor / admission committee that wants to bother with this kind of drama.

  However, now that I have calmed down I have realized that I should not have let even injustices affect me and it was unnecessary to email my interviewer.

I think your reflection should go deeper than that. It is true that part of being a professional is also being able to absorb smaller perceived unjustices like that (empathy and an ability to accept that grades aren't everything helps here), but I also can't help but wonder what you were trying to achieve with this email in the first place. To me (and note that I am only going by your short recap) this sounds rather vindictive, serving no other purpose than to get back at the person not recommending you. If that is indeed the case, you should take a good hard look at your actions in this case and learn from that for the future.


Do I need to cite the source every time I paraphrase in this particular project paper? This is my first question in this forum and although I have gained a lot of information about proper citation from the web, I am still confused in this case. We are assigned a task by college to make a study from resources available online on a particular topic and prepare a project.
Now, I know the fact that I need to cite everytime I use someone else's idea. But this project work has to be prepared in this order: Title, Abstract,
Keywords, Introduction, Review of Literature, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusion,
Acknowledgement, References. This basically means that none of the work is our own and we need to study e-resources available and complete the task at hand.
What I am confused about is the particular heading called Review of Literature. I think that what we are going to write is entirely some sort of review of literature of others work since we've done nothing on our own. So, after making a thorough study of the papers available online, I paraphrased and put proper intext citations as well. Basically, methodology and results are also paraphrased from others work and as such I have put in-text citations not only in case of Review of Literature but also also in Results and Methodology.
So, I want to know whether I am doing it in the proper way or not?
This means, do I really need to provide in-text citations in this particular case in every part of the document if it is someone else's idea?
Sample:

REVIEW OF LITERATURE:
The study made by Gautret et al. (2020)  notes that hydroxychloroquine (an analogue of chloroquine) has been already demonstrated to have an anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity in vitro. Moreover, hydroxychloroquine’s clinical safety profile is better than chloroquine during long term use and also allows higher daily doses and interaction with other drugs is less as well (Gautret et al., 2020).

I have written the Results like this, but I think I've put too much in-text citation here:

Results: Patients treated with hydroxychloroquine (6 out of which received supervised doses of azithromychin as well for initial five days) were aged an average of 51.7 years (~14 years older than mean age of control patients) but not much difference was seen between two groups regarding “gender, clinical status and duration of symptoms” (Gautret et al., 2020).
As time passed, the study showed notable results and the percentage of patients showing negative PCR test of their swab samples at “days 3-4-5 and 6” during study period showed remarkable differences compared to “controls” when 70% of hydroxychloroquine treated patients were “virologically cured” but only a meager 12.5% of the other group achieved this feat (Gautret et al., 2020).

So, this brings me back all way round to the same question: Do I need to cite each and everything which is not my own idea? And is the approach that I am taking correct?
Edit:
This is what we are asked to do:

The Guidelines:

I can see the use of many references for the review of literature which is to be expected as that is establishing the state of play at the moment.

In the methodology section you describe how your experiment will be carried out, possibly referring to another’s paper or experiment as a “support” or justification. But it is a description of your method, not someone else’s method so it is unlikely to need referencing.

Then, the results should be those from your work, and only your work as any references to the results of others will be in the discussion.

Then in the discussion you would compare your results with subsequent analysis with the results from others so references will be needed.

From what you show and what I understand is that you are referencing all the material for every section from others - where are your results, analysis and conclusions?


Is there a way to follow particular authors on arxiv? I have googled and it is possible to create rss feeds for categories; nothing about rss feeds for authors.

Is there a way to automatically follow a large number of authors on arxiv?

Yes. Go to https://arxiv.org/search/ and search the author name (choose author name from the pull down menu on the right).

Original deprecated method:

Yes. It seems to be a link of the following form:

http://arxiv.org:443/find/math/1/au:+***AuthorIDHere***/0/1/0/all/0/1


Describing Middle School in european grant application I completed my PhD in the US, and I am currently writing a grant application for a EU grant.  While I was a graduate student, I worked on a grant that had me in a middle school classroom (8th grade, so 12-13 year old students).

What is the best, short way to describe this in my grant proposal? I don't want to waste a lot of space describing the specific age range of the students, if it can be avoided.  At the same time, I don't know if it will be clear what I mean if I write "8th grade classroom" or "middle school classroom".  Any ideas?

Describe it like you did here: 8th grade, and then in parenthesis put (ages 12-13) to remove any ambiguity. That will only cost you a couple of words, and no one can misunderstand.

To expand on @ORMapper commented, in Sweden middle school would be "mellanstadiet" which is grades 3-5, and the students are aged 9-11. So specify both what the gade was "called" and the age, and avoid descritors like "middle school"that can vary a lot by country.


Should my references be famous if I want to get into top schools for PhD? So I've been researching my field of interest and I'm increasingly getting drawn to apply to a few "top" departments (in pure math) -- it seems like such a strong fit at the moment given that I've done relatively serious undergraduate research, though it was more of a "directed" study kind of thing, and my approaches to some of the problems have been fruitless, but have gotten me exposed to so much mathematics that got me excited to learn and think more about the topics I was looking at initially. I have the grades and the GRE scores (past the 80th percentile on the subject test in math, which seems like the unadvertised minimum). However, my reference letter writers don't appear to have any connections to some of these top places. From some research online, it appears that admission committees want to hear from known mathematicians -- but what if my reference letter writers aren't known in said department? Is such an application doomed from the
start?

For people who have served on admission committees, what is your take on this and how would you advise an applicant like me? Unfortunately there's no time to rectify this by going to an REU or the like.

It's not necessary for your recommenders to be famous.  It certainly helps a little, since it's only natural for the admissions committee to be influenced by fame, but it's not really relevant to the quality of the recommendation so most people try not to be too influenced by it.  Instead, these criteria are more important:

Do your recommenders know you?  I.e., can they make detailed, substantive comments, beyond just listing grades?
Do they know what's required for success at the schools you are applying to, and what the competition is like?  Do they have a good basis for comparison in your case?  The best case scenario is if their students regularly apply and are at least sometimes accepted; then a comparison with past students is very informative.
Does the committee understand their personalities and writing styles?  Some recommenders are very optimistic and say everyone's great, while others lean towards understatement.  If members of the committee have read previous letters by your recommenders, or know them personally, then it's much easier to make a reliable judgment.  Otherwise, everyone will be at least a little more skeptical of the letters.

There are plenty of people who satisfy these criteria but wouldn't register as "famous" in the community at large.  On the other hand, if your recommenders don't satisfy them, then it will be harder to be admitted to a top department.  I wouldn't go so far as to say it's impossible, but this is worth keeping in mind when selecting letter writers.


Are the conferences organized by WASET legit or some type of scam? Searching through websites dedicated to collect upcoming scientific conferences, I have stumbled upon a lot of similar-sounding conferences around the world (e.g., see here), all organized through the "World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology", WASET. There is plenty of information about them on their respective websites, as the organizing committee, speakers already confirmed, etc.
This high quantity of similarly-titled conferences smells fishy. Is this some sort of scam, be it hard (they steal your money) or soft (lectures are actually given, without any real effort to look for relevant speakers, do peer-review, etc.)? Can anyone shed some light on this? Has someone here actually participated in, or even organized one of those?

There are many, many different red or orange flags that you can use as signal to identify whether a specific conference may be spam, but the simplest algorithm is as follows:
Have you previously read high-quality, relevant papers from this venue? If no, is there some other specific reason for you to believe that this venue is reputable (e.g., trusted colleagues believe in the conference, or you are aware that this is a new conference bootstrapped by trust members of the community)? If the answer to both of these questions is "no", it's likely spam and not worth further investigation.
In the specific case of WASET, I would be surprised if this is anything else than a scam. They seem to be doing the same "conference" many times a month in many different "places" (although all virtual at the moment, apparently), and even though they seem to have a bunch of software engineering related conferences I can't for the life of me recall ever reading, or even seeing, a paper published there. Clear pass.