What are the common criteria of evaluation for a Post-Doctoral or Tenure-Track faculty position? I am waiting for my PhD viva and I would like to start applying for Post-docs or faculty positions. We all know that a CV is never too good, so I would like to ask some things about the elements of evaluation for Post-Doctoral/tenure-track faculty positions. I know each university has its own rules, so I am looking for a general answer here. My PhD is in the field of Mechanical Engineering from an European University.

How important are:

TPC (Technical Program Committee) at conference?
Reviewer at journals and/or conferences?
Journal papers. What metrics are important? Impact factor, indexing (ISI, Scopus, Scimago quarter). Is quantity  more important or less important than quality?
Conference papers. Are they of significant importance compared to journal papers? What metrics are important here? Indexing? Proceedings resulting in publication are more valuable than those private (only on the proceedings book).
Previous research grants as R&D engineer with a MS. degree. They seem to be really important. How should it be stated? Reference of the grant, name of the project, and length?
Advanced studies diploma (1st year of some doctoral degrees). Is it very important?
Recommendation letters. How many are usually needed? Should all of them be of University lecturers, or engineers working at industry are also appreciated, if they previously worked with me?
Professional references. Are they needed if recommendation letters are sent out?
Does any other metric seem to be important, like teaching experience?

You seem to be most interested in a primarily research position so I'll say a few things about that and then give a broader answer.

Every candidate is different, with a different mix of positive and maybe negative factors. Every hiring committee is different with its own concerns. Every university is different, and usually they have a well-defined "mission."

But it is up to the candidate to make the case to the specific committee. Nothing positive that you do professionally is likely to hurt you unless your interests are wildly different from the "mission." So, for a research focused position at a university with a research focused mission all of the things you mention are good and any of them can be stressed in your application.

All universities love that sweet sweet grant money and some fundamentally depend on it, so be aware of that in seeking employment. It is hard to get tenure in some places without quite a lot of grant support. Other places it means little, but is still valued. Especially if the grant can support students.

However, you should try to match your own interests with the mission of the place. If you are very hot to do research you will be very frustrated at a place with little research synergy. Likewise there might be little future for a person interested primarily in teaching and advising at an R1 university.

Note that some small Liberal Arts colleges have a strong research reputation, others do not. In the US, some state universities stress a teaching mission over research. Others are just the opposite.

At one Ivy League college/university that I know of, faculty in Computer Science were (and maybe still are) given a choice of focus - teaching or research. They valued both and didn't require that every faculty be equally invested in both. But you had to excel in the one you focused on and be "acceptable" in the other. You couldn't ignore one aspect entirely. So, just as you need to make your own case for getting hired, you need to make your own case for tenure and the value of the various things isn't fixed in stone.

Note also that some R1 level universities in the US have a special category for teaching faculty. The criteria for hiring and retention are quite different from that of the research faculty. There can be a place for both.

If you want to do research today, but are at a small place that doesn't support it well, you will need to establish and maintain a wider group of contacts, possibly world-wide. This was impossible before the internet and relatively cheap travel, but is now a possibility. In my later years I collaborated with an international group, a few of whom I only met face to face a few times. But it takes extra effort if the coffee-room crowd can't help you explore your current interests.

Technical note. In some fields, such as CS, conference papers are extremely valuable. In other fields, not so much. Much of the intellectual life of the field can be carried on in good conferences.


Should I push for my paper to be published as an undergraduate? I've been doing a research attachment as an undergraduate in a malaria culture lab and my project involves the screening and hit prioritisation of anti-cancer drugs for repurposing use against malaria. Since the attachment is an official programme under my school, one of the deliverables is a paper at the end of the attachment and I was keen on writing a paper to be published in a journal(if it's accepted!)

I mentioned this to my mentor and he said it might not be worth publishing the paper or something of the sort but didn't elaborate on it much. Should I look into it and ask if it can be published in an undergraduate journal or should I let it go?

Perhaps your advisor is worried about the depth or novelty of your work, suggesting that it might not be worthy of publication. s/he might be correct or not. But there is no reason to restrict yourself to an undergraduate journal. If the work has the right quality it can be published anywhere that the referees and editor will accept it. The fact that you are an undergraduate has no bearing on the issue of quality.

You can submit a paper, certainly, though whether as a sole or joint-author depends a bit on your field and location. It might be worth it just for the experience.

But speak again with your advisor/mentor to find out why they were originally a bit dismissive. And look at what appears in any journal you might submit to in order to judge your paper against what they normally accept.


Is copy-editing/typesetting the only step in the publishing process where someone other than the author makes changes to the manuscript? I have not published a scientific paper before. I am trying to understand the publishing process.

As far as I understand, no changes are made to the manuscript by anyone other than the author(s) until the paper is accepted, and only after the paper is accepted, copy-editors do formatting/grammar-checks/typesetting. Is this correct?

In particular, if I am correct, it means that the editor does not actually make any changes to the manuscript, but only makes decisions about whether it is accepted or not, and the reviewers also make no changes, but only give feedback.

In general, you are correct: in general the editors and reviewers can only make suggestions for changes while only the author actually makes the changes.

In practice, however, good and thorough reviewers (and occasionally editors too) may often make highly specific suggestions for changes (e.g., "Delete this sentence", "Change phrase X into alternate phrase Y", "Cite papers A, B, and C"). Authors are strongly motivated to accept these changes in exactly or close to their stated form, for two reasons:

Doing so is likely to please the reviewer and increase chances of acceptance.
The reviewer often has a good suggestion and there's little reason to choose an alternate phrasing.

Finally, note that in some cases copy-editors do significantly more than just formatting/grammar-checks/type-setting.  In particular, for publications with very broad audiences, it is sometimes the case that the copyeditor will actually significantly modify the words and phases used by the authors in order to make the text more accessible and more in keeping with the publication's preferred "tone."  In this case, though, the authors always have a chance to review the suggested changes and make corrections in case they introduce errors, though objections to style may not be accepted by the journal.


What to include in the preliminary part of a Math Masters Thesis? I just want to ask 2 questions. First, what will be the possible content of a preliminary part of a Math masters thesis? Second, can I use any part of a book in a sense that copy it and then include it on the preliminary part with a proper citation or do I need to restate it on my own words? Thanks a lot in your help.

Your preliminary section should perhaps introduce the problem you tackled and the steps taken to attack it. It should serve as a sort of overview, moreso than an abstract.

I would not copy verbatim anything from a book in bulk unless you have the consent of the author or publisher to do so. At my university, students are required to have these "copyright statements" if they are reusing printed material that they have already published. I would check your university's guidelines on these.


Seeking out guidance from a Professor at another institute during PhD I'm interested in the research of a particular professor at University 1 (top 5 in my field), which recently rejected my PhD application. I do have an offer from another place, (University 2, top 20) which I now plan on attending.

Can I go to University 2, complete the requirements for a masters, and reapply to University 1?
Would it be possible for me to seek out guidance from (or maybe even collaborate with) the professor at University 1 during these two years who might then want me as a PhD student?

This is all in the US.

Of course you can, and this is probably your best chance to make it into U1 (without any guarantee, clearly), but this involves a risk of straining relationships to your supervisor at U2.
This is a question you should discuss with your supervisor at U2 (after all he/she should give you guidance as well and careful argumentation is needed to explain why extra guidance might be appropriate), but don't be surprised if the professor at U1 would not be seeing a collaboration with you as a priority -- he/she might be busy enough with all the commitments towards his own institution.

Doing what you suggest is all within your legal rights, but I personally think when you have entered an agreement at U2 (possibly involving funding) then you should focus on that and not give the impression that you want to run away at the earliest opportunity.


ASME “text-only” submission in LaTeX We are submitting a journal paper to ASME Journals of Mechanisms and Robotics for the first time. The manuscript is prepared in LaTeX. In the final submission, it is required that we submit "text-only" file along with the final PDF.

  II. TEXT-ONLY FILE(S)

  The text-only file, Word or LaTex, should include the following items in order:

  1.1. paper title

  1.2. author(s) info (affiliation, address, email)

  1.3. abstract

  1.4. text: single column and double spaced

  1.5. reference section (ASME requires a numerical format, e.g., [1], 2, etc.)

  1.6. table caption list

  1.7. figure caption list

  1.8. tables, each on separate page

  1.9. footers  containing page number

ASME guidelines

If someone who has submitted to ASME before can answer what exactly are they expecting from LaTeX users, it shall be of great help.

Are we just supposed to upload the LaTeX document as is and the requirement is more directed towards Word users?
Am I supposed to remove all the figures? That would mess up the references. In order to correct that I shall have to manually add the reference numbers to figure! I tried options such as How can I remove the figures from draft and gobbling the \includegraphics command, but in vain.
Do I have to manually type the figure caption list? As deleting the figures would remove all the references and \listoffigures wouldn't work.
What exactly does this requirement mean?

  1.9. footers containing page number

Regards.

I contacted the ASME staff and they said

  "You can submit the LaTeX files with the figures embedded and we will accommodate."

I guess that makes life easier and solves the problem.


Admission to Ph.D. program at U.S. university without guaranteed funding Recently I got admission from one U.S. university for my Ph.D. study, and they offered me a kind of scholarship that only covers my tuition fee. When I asked them about other funding possibilities such as RA or TA positions, they said that at this point they are not offering any RA or TA positions to any incoming students, only when you arrived at university, you can find one by yourself.

My question is whether this situation is common in U.S. universities. I have heard that some students can get an assistant-ship even before attending the Ph.D. program.  Although I have an admission letter in my hand, without enough funding for my future study I really do not what to do. Therefore I desperately need suggestions from people who have been through this and have experience.

The way you are asking the question, the answer is a clear no: this is not common at every university, certainly not in every department at every university.  In my department (mathematics, UGA) to the best of my knowledge we have not had -- say for the last decade -- any PhD students without funding (occasionally from an outside source) that is sufficient for them to live on (albeit less than lavishly).  This situation is quite common in mathematics departments in the United States, and I think it is similar in other STEM fields.  In the social sciences and humanities, funding is distinctly more scarce, but certainly many entering PhD students get funding in these areas.

You ask for advice.  To get good advice you should speak to someone who knows more about your situation.  This advice is centered on the situation in mathematics, but nevertheless I think it is worth hearing: I would think at least twice before entering a PhD program that was not committed to supporting me.  The academic job market is very tight right now, but unevenly so: it contracts severely at every career stage, so that the majority of people who had a lot of success getting placed at one stage find themselves having more difficulties with the next.  Not just anybody gets funding for a PhD program: the resources need to be there, and you need to be (in the judgment of the admissions committee) worthy of them.  However, it is not nearly as hard to get student funding as it is to land any kind of post-PhD academic position (tenure-track or otherwise: actually, in many cases it is harder to land a research postdoc than a tenure track teaching job).

If you have a very specific plan -- worked out with at least one faculty member in the program -- for your success in that graduate program, then maybe things can work out well for you even without advanced funding.  Short of that: depleting your own financial resources to fund your graduate career is certainly, on average, a poor investment.  Please think carefully before you do this.


What are the consequences to the researcher in cases of academic fraud? The purpose of this question is to attempt to generate a concise but comprehensive answer to the question, what happens to the researcher after fraud is discovered? I'm familiar with some consequences:

Listing on the NIH Office of Research Integrity website
Retraction of relevant publications
Prevention from publication in journals for X years

What other are some other typical (and atypical) outcomes?

As I posted in answer to another comment, more often than not, schools want to avoid the dramas associated with plagiarism scandals. That is why schools like Harvard will prompt researchers accused of fraudulent behavior, such as Marc Hauser, to resign, rather than go through tenure revocation procedures.

But losing one's job is fairly likely, and an unofficial blacklisting is almost certain to result.

One other consequence, though, is often forgotten: the peripheral damage of academic fraud cases. Sensationalized results, such as those in the Jan Hendrik Schön and Hwang Woo-Suk cases, led many graduate students to embark on projects in those disciplines trying to reproduce and expand upon the promises implied by those projects. When those projects collapsed, a lot of graduate students were left in the lurch.


Are relationships between faculty and graduate students at different universities acceptable? It is commonly understood that romantic relationships between faculty and students at the same university are frowned upon, or explicitly forbidden. However are romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students at geographically far away universities acceptable? Are they still acceptable if the faculty and graduate student are in the same field or neighboring field? Is a small age difference between faculty and graduate student ever relevant in such situations?

Short answer: generally yes.

Long answer:

It is commonly understood that consenting adults are in general free to enter voluntary romantic relationships with whomever they choose, except for people over whom they hold professional authority. Thus, a professor may not have a relationship with her or his own student. That’s a big no-no anywhere I’m familiar with.

As for graduate students in the same institution but in other departments, whether a professor is to be regarded as being in a position of authority over such a student is a matter of interpretation; opinions about this seem to vary considerably, and I think it would be a mistake to characterize any particular opinion as being “commonly understood”.

As for a professor having a relationship with someone who is a student in another university, there may be specific circumstances where that would be problematic, such as if the student is applying for a postdoc or other position in the professor’s department. Even this doesn’t make the relationship taboo, it only means appropriate measures must be taken to ensure the professor isn’t exercising any decision-making authority over their significant other’s application. But generally speaking, other than those specific exceptional circumstances, this doesn’t violate any rules, and isn’t frowned upon by reasonable people.


Will applying for multiple master programs in the same department improve or worsen my chances of getting admitted to my preferred program? I am finishing my computer science studies and I want to apply for a master degree. The CS department in my university opened 2 different master programs. One is more research oriented and the other is more professional oriented. The courses of each program are selected from the same table of courses, however there are some limitations in the professional program.
Probably, the same persons will evaluate both applications.
My question is: will applying for both programs affect my chances of entering the research oriented program which is my first choice, or will it maximize the chances of entering to at least one program?

Speaking as someone who did apply to his own undergraduate institution for a graduate program, and as someone whos institution has two programs within the same department (although I did not apply to both). I don't think it will have a big impact on your chances of getting accepted into a single program, here is why I say this.

At my institution they have different people reviewing the applications into each program, meaning it is likely at your institution the same person will not see nor know that you applied to another program as well.
I was actually advised to apply to both, though I did not apply to both.

As others have mentioned, you can ask around and get a final confirmation from someone at your institution on how they feel about you doing this.


Methodology and Literature review in Masters dissertation I am writing my masters dissertation and it is supposed to be 25000 to 30000 words long. I am struggling to decide how big the Methodology and Literature review should be? Do you think 5000 words for each should be sufficient or too much? The handbook I was given doesn't state how long they should be, only about the total word count.

Defining such a number implies that you adjust your scientific work so that it fits into a fixed document breakdown. There are many arguments against such an approach, but since you asked for the number, here are some ideas for how to get it:

Solution 1: Talk to your supervisor.

He or she is the one deciding about your grade, so it would be smart to follow their opinion about the structuring and divisioning of your thesis parts.

Solution 2: Find examples.

Most universities make masters theses public, either on the homepage or in their library. Go through some of them and figure out how other people structured their document. Use their work as guiding example.

Solution 3: Write a paper.

A masters thesis is something like your first scientific publication, so you can structure it as a conference paper:

Introduction + problem statement + methodology (15%)
Related work / literature study (25%)
Your approach and experiments (35%)
Your results and conclusion (25%)

The weighting will highly vary, depending on the problem class. Pure survey papers have no experiments, so you spend way more space for the literature study part. Engineering papers only have a short related work section, so that there is more space for the approach / architecture section.


How to apply for a faculty position elsewhere without revealing the conflict with current dept chair? I am a new faculty member. My chair is simply crazy in my perspective.

I am an assistant professor. However, my teaching assignment is "offering individual statistical consulting/workshops", not "teaching any classes". This was indicated in my job description when I applied for this job. However, several times, she says, "you are not teaching" - so she says that I need to do what she asks me to do because she pays my salary (I really do not know why she pays).

What she wants me to do is to write research/funding proposals and articles, then put her as the PI/the first author although they are my research ideas/works. She has taken three studies so far. More seriously, when she took the first one, I refused it. Then she sent out an official letter including some other faculty, saying that she took my research proposal because it was originally her idea and I stole it. Worse still, she then forced me to write the paper for her.

My Ph.D. is in statistics. She said that I couldn't get tenured unless I change my research field into an education field which she wanted to do. Her point was again "paycheck" - I should do something because I am not teaching.

Worst of all, she claims I am a bad person and faculty member because I refuse her unethical requests as a researcher. Furthermore, she talks about me to all the other faculty members, causing them to hesitate to be friends with me. Whatever I say goes to the chair.

Anyway, I am leaving - what should I do to be free from the chair in the application procedure. I really do not want anyone to contact the chair as my referee. By the way, I wouldn't mention my chair in anywhere on my application documents.

Good search committee members are aware that many applicants do not want their current department to know that they are applying for a job. Search committee members should only be contacting your listed references. That said there are plenty of bad search committee members and plenty of search committees that accidentally let information leak out.

It is perfectly reasonable to not list your current chair, or anyone from your current department, as a reference. You should, however, list your current position on your CV. Not listing your chair as a reference does not mean your chair will not get an informal phone call, but there is nothing you can do about that. You should also know that when a department chair gives a reference, they often highlight the good aspects, and ignore the bad aspects, of people they want to get rid of and focus on the bad aspects of people they want to keep.


Are there any undergraduate research programs available online? Is there something like an undergraduate research programme (given by a good institution) in mathematics/theoretical physics which provides a research opportunity in which I can collaborate online and leads to a publication?

I think you should check The Open University's site.

Under the Studying for a Research Degree section in the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology site I found this:

  Part-time research students pursue their projects at a distance, under individual guidance from expert supervisors.

So maybe it is a possibility if you actually would like to earn a degree from that university, but since this institute is famous for the excellent quality online and distance education I think you should write them a message and ask for information. I guess they would have good suggestions about your question.

PS. I've taken an online course from this University on the FutureLearn site, and the material's quality was very good.


fix non-significant errors in a manuscript that is not accepted and currently under review after 1st round of revision? I'm in the field of Psychology. One of my manuscripts is now under review after the 1st round of revision. However, I found one of the variables was calculated in a wrong way, the results are better with the corrected variable because the significance levels were higher (i.e., p values were lower), but it didn't change the conclusions of my study, all the significant results still remain significant and non-significant results are still non-significant. I would like to know what would be the best option to deal with it.

option 1: ignore it.

option 2: correct it when I receive reviewers' feedbacks WITHOUT letting the reviewers and editor know.

option 3: correct it when I receive reviewers' feedbacks AND let the reviewers and editor know.

I'm worried that letting the editor and reviewers know would leave a bad impression on me and the quality of my work.

Thank you in advance!

I work in biomedical field so am not sure how vindictive psychology specialists are. The few I worked with are pretty nice, but n=3.

My opinion is definitely option 3. It's not just the p-value that matters, but also i) the statistics itself (e.g. the regression coefficient) could be different and ii) replicability could be threatened as well. If someone would like to follow your work they may be perplexed by your errors.

As for leaving a bad impression. I'd rather get rejected because I was being diligent than getting an acceptance with a flaw that I once convinced myself was trivial, but occasionally came up in the back of my mind. Just bad flavor.

I'd say no need to drum up what was corrected. Simply point out that in a final code review you spotted an error, and corrections to xxx variable was made. Overall associations/differences and conclusion remain unchanged. Give a short apology. And hope for the best.


Is it okay to copy paste some part of my Bachelor's thesis literature review for my own Master's thesis? So my bachelor's thesis and master's topics bear some similarity. Now I am doing literature review for my master's thesis under same supervisor. Can I copy some relevant parts (about 10 pages long) from my old bachelor's? It's just the literature review, not the findings.

Obviously you should check the regulations at the institution that you are attending to see exactly what they say about this matter.

With that said...

Submission of a thesis often includes signing a declaration that the material contained within the thesis has not previously been submitted for consideration for another degree (or words to that effect).

By doing what you suggest, copying and pasting a sizeable chunk of a previous thesis, you would be violating this declaration.


Molds of PhD thesis from more than one idea I'm considering doing a PhD in  Software Engineering and Information Technology.

Associated with a particular concept of interest (immersion), got many ideas running through my mind that having them explored would bring, at my sight, both business and educational value. So, the ideas:

Consolidation work.
Understand the current state of the art in immersive technologies.
Create taxonomies.
Design and implement immersive solutions.
Investigate the real-world value of immersion.
Etc.

Spoke with two PhDs. One told me a valid thesis can be a collection of articles that have to be published; in other words, what I have in mind is definitely good and possible as long as the articles are published. The other PhD told me  this would be something too general and I need to specify more to have a valid and good thesis; in other words, grab one idea and specify even further.

So, what I would like to understand is if I could create a thesis taking what I've got in mind with the 5+ ideas and have it be considered a valid and good thesis? If yes, under which molds / structure / methodology?

This varies a lot from field to field, so take this with a grain of salt. Before I started my PhD, I envisioned doing lots and lots of stuff. Unfortunately (or fortunately actually), that isn't how academia works. Developing a (good) project takes time. Also, more often than not, easy and good ideas have already been explored which means that, if you want to work on a particular topic, you have to build on top of what other people have already done. For instance, during my PhD, I developed 4 different projects over a period of 4 years. And that is considered above average in my field. Talk to your supervisor once you have one (or if you already have one). They are there to guide and will provide with the answers that you need.


Graduate in three years and then apply for Ph.D. programs? This is a question that I've been pondering for a long time and badly needs advice and different perspectives. Background: I'm an international student attending a modestly reputable college in the US. I'm a rising junior majoring in math and minoring in chemistry and psychology, with a GPA of 4.0/4.0 and pending publications in computational chemistry and psychology. I'm interested in Ph.D. programs in computational neuroscience (since this is a inter-disciplinary field, mostly I will apply to math or neuroscience programs).

So here is the problem: I really want to graduate early in three years, but should I? There are four reasons supporting this decision. First, due to some poor financial choices of my parents, it is risky if I stay in college for the total four years (getting a degree in three years is surely better than no degree at all!) Secondly, there is no professor here who works in the field of computational neuroscience, and the lack of relevant research opportunity is disappointing to say the least. Third, I find myself under-challenged by the curriculum. I'm taking the maximum course load with a lot of "hard" classes, but I find myself getting nothing out of the classes besides more facts and techniques. Finally, from the limited internship opportunities and readings I've done in computational neuroscience, I know that I will enjoy immersing myself in this field.

On the other hand, I can see how graduating in three years can put me in a huge disadvantage for Ph.D. application, and this is why I'm hesitant to make the final decision. One more year means more higher-level classes to take, more time to do better research, more time to prepare for GRE general and subject tests, and more time to grow as a person in general. I feel like even though I'm one of the best student in my college, but I'm certainly far from being one of the best in the country (which means diminished probability of being accepted by one of the better programs). I just want some more time to further challenge myself before I leave the college for good.

I would really appreciate some different opinion on this matter, and I thank you for reading through this long question.

If it really is a risk that you might not graduate at all if you stay on another year, then maybe you could consider graduating early and hedging your bets. There are other ways to catch up and make yourself both more prepared and more desirable to PhD programs of your choice. For example, you could try and apply for a research position if you see any openings in labs, and either take courses simultaneously or or as someone else suggested, apply to a non PhD program first.

Either way, if there is an academic you know you would want to work with, it doesn't hurt to write them an email and ask them if they would be willing to take someone with only three years of college and if not, what would kind of skills and strengths they might be looking for. I did this when I switched fields right after college, and I was told that though I did not have quite enough qualifications, if I managed to do x, y, z I would be considered. That's what I ended up doing while working part time and two years later I got into the program (of course if you need a visa to work that's a different story).

However, if you can manage it financially, I would probably advise staying in college the extra year, and prepping for the GRE, taking courses relevant to your field, and getting those very important recommendation letters by making an impression on your professors. Also, most colleges have the option of doing a senior thesis, and if you want to go into a research career, while not a deal breaker, writing one can be very beneficial, no matter what area you write it in. Showing that you have the ability to do independent work is always a good thing when applying for doctoral programs. And it gives you a chance to work one-on-one with your advisors and can be as challenging and fulfilling as you make it!

Everyone is different, so you will have to decide on your own, but I'm always in favor of a little bit more rather than less time between college and grad school to be both psychologically and academically prepared. But that's just me. Good luck to you!


What should a regretful student who is caught plagiarizing do to move forward? I'm a high school student also enrolled in a computer science class at a local college, and earlier this week I noticed that my grade for the class had dropped. I checked the online gradebook after noticing this, and there was a 0 for a programming assignment I had submitted. I sent my professor several emails (instead of asking him in person because the college is currently on break) asking why there was a 0, and he responded after a few days by telling me to wait for the disciplinary committee to contact me regarding the assignment.

And only after sending my email did I remember that I had taken bits of my program from an online one written for a problem very similar to mine--and it even used techniques we never learned in class. It was months ago, when I was really overloaded with work, and I thought I was safe because I paid to access the code online. And a lot of my friends who were full-time undergraduates seemed to be overtly cheating pretty often.

And only after he responded did the full gravity of the situation sink in on me: I had plagiarized, and there was no excuse. I had used someone else's work without much remorse while I was doing it, lacking moral responsibility just like a sociopath might. I did something might ruin my life.

At this point, I'm panicking and desperately need advice. I feel terrible, and I'm finding it hard to concentrate on my work for high school or even sleep. I had an amazing opportunity to pursue something I really loved at a higher level than most people my age, and I completely blew it. And what's more, I might not have the chance to do it again now.

I was recently admitted to my dream college Early Action, and it was the only college I applied to. But now I'm afraid that I'll get rescinded because I'll probably be dismissed from the college I'm currently enrolled in, and even if the disciplinary committee doesn't let my dream college know directly, it probably has a way to find out.

And even if I don't get rescinded, I'm worried that I'll need to send this information to all of the grad schools I apply to, or if not, they'll just have it anyway.

I know there's not much I can do until I hear back from the committee, but what should I do right now and after I hear back? If I'm brought before the committee for a hearing, what should I do? What are the chances I'll be rescinded? Will this prevent me from getting into a good grad school?

You sound quite naive about what constitutes plagiarism or academic wrongdoing at the university level (in particular the thought that paying for the code makes it okay or even less likely to be caught is pretty much exactly wrong).  But this naivete is quite well explained by the fact that you're a high school student.

It's great that you realize that you did something seriously wrong: I agree with you.  But you're not a sociopath: rather, you are a teenaged minor, and your behavior is well within the normal operating parameters of such entities.  Many (perhaps most) minors do at least one really stupid thing that if they were an adult would get them in real trouble.  But unless their actions cause irreparable harm to others, the adult world tends to be forgiving: there has to be a time in which you can make mistakes and learn from them.

I think it is very unlikely that your actions would cause the university in which you've been early admitted to rescind its offer.  This is on the border of being so unlikely as not to really be worth worrying about...but someone in your situation is going to worry.  Here's how to allay your concerns:

You should go to your professor and explain very calmly and honestly everything that happened.  Your position should be that you are thoroughly repentant and will not contest whatever penalty to your course grade you have received.  You have just one concern: you don't want the academic dishonesty to appear on your transcript, because -- be honest -- you think that might jeopardize your collegiate career.  If it comes to it, you should make clear that you would rather get a failing grade or an unsatisfactory withdrawal from the course.  (This is a difference between your situation and that of most normally enrolled university students.)  If the professor is not willing to agree to that on the spot, then you should talk to others -- in particular, to your parents -- about how to proceed next.


I can request to have my PhD certificate name a more specific research area than "PhD in Computer Science". What should I have it say? I have already been enrolled in a PhD program and published a couple of papers. When I eventually get the certificate, it will state that I have a PhD in Computer Science. However, I can submit a request to change that to whatever I find more appropriate. I am asking here to be better informed before I raise the issue with my supervisor.

My research paves the way for machine-learning based solutions to be used for solving a particular software engineering problem.

I find (PhD in Computer Science) too broad of a description and (PhD in Software Engineering) too narrow. I also find (PhD in Artificial Intelligence OR Machine Learning) not to be an accurate description of what my thesis is actually about.

Should I, for example, use (PhD in Applied Artificial Intelligence) or (PhD in Applied Machine Learning)? Other suggestions will be appreciated.

Many employers and recruitment agencies use either automated searches or low skill human readers to select resumes that meet specific requirements. Only those resumes will be viewed by a human with knowledge of the job etc.

If you pick an unusual subject designation for your PhD you risk your resume not being selected for jobs that require a PhD in computer science. It may never be seen by anyone who understands that "Applied Machine Learning" is just as appropriate for that job as "Computer Science".

If your resume passes the filter it will be read by someone who can evaluate your specialization from the text and the publication list.


Re-initiating the discussion with a seemingly busy Professor A couple of weeks back, I reached out to a Professor stating my interest in a project he had put up on his website. The professor was impressed with my resume and gave a brief description of his project.

He had also asked me a few questions about my skills/familiarity with languages and platforms. He also remarked that he is preparing to give a short test to decide where I stand in the project.

Unfortunately, the Professor has not got back to my reply. I had informed him that I was quite familiar with tools/skills needed for the project. It has been two weeks since he has replied(although I hear it is the exam session which may be keeping him busy).

Should I consider that the offer is null and void as he has stopped replying to mails for the last fortnight?

If I am to mail him now, shall I explain the literature survey undertaken during this period and what skills have been learnt?

Please advise.

First of all, professors are busy. They need to do research and teach. They need to write and then publish papers and handle all matters related to teaching (prepare for course materials, exams, grading exams,... etc). So, two weeks not relying the e-mail sounds normal to me.

As in you case,

  He also remarked that he is preparing to give a short test to decide where I stand in the project.

and

  I had informed him that I was quite familiar with tools/skills needed for the project.

sound like you are ready for the test to convince him that you are qualified to join his project.

I would suggest you to send him an e-mail to tell him that you are ready for the test and asking what is the most convenient time for him to conduct it.

Surely, you can tell him the literature survey undertaken during this period. I am not sure about mentioning skills have been learnt during the two weeks period. To me, any skill that can be learnt in two weeks is not worth mentioning.

Good Luck !


Why do academics tend to be reluctant to ask for help from other academics? I've seen situations like the below happen quite a few times.

Alice writes a paper. It's well-received and receives a hundred citations. Bob also works in the area, and he engages a student Charlie to study the paper. Shortly after starting, Charlie tells Bob he couldn't get from equation 10 to equation 11, in fact he thinks the derivation is incorrect. Bob is incredulous (after all the paper is well-received and has a 100 citations) and tells Charlie to check it again. A few weeks later, Charlie tells Bob he still can't get equation 11, and in fact he's increasingly convinced the derivation is wrong because he's tried it in a few different ways and always gets the same result.
Bob starts looking at the paper himself and after another few weeks he also runs out of ideas. Finally they write to Alice asking for details. Alice responds quickly with, "you've made this mistake. After correcting it and making this transformation, equation 11 follows."

The specific details vary, but the core of what happens is the same: Bob and Charlie can't do what Alice has done, but instead of asking Alice for help, they insists on trying it themselves. After weeks of struggling and many tins of coffee, they finally give up and ask Alice, who proceeds to solve the problem very quickly.
The question: why would Bob and Charlie grind away for weeks when help is just an email away? If I managed a team of employees who refused to ask each other for help, especially when someone has already solved the problem, I'd be quite annoyed. After all, time is precious.
I find this especially surprising because virtually every professor I've seen teach encourages their students to ask questions. Instructors tell their students they're welcome to interrupt during class, to approach TAs, or to visit them during office hours. They discourage their students from working without progress for weeks before asking for help, and yet they're reluctant to ask for help themselves. Why?
The only reason I can think of is that Bob and Charlie want to be sure that the results are robust. If Alice made a mistake, then they would not be able to duplicate the results, but if they just ask Alice for help, then they're at risk of making the same mistake. But this doesn't seem like a strong reason: they can ask for help but then critically examine what Alice says.

I have never been fully immune from this kind of behavior, though I've suffered less from it than others, a fact that most likely helped me land two really nice jobs. Let me survey a few reasons why I think it happens.

Note: I'm talking of mathematics, where "robustness" is not a thing, and talking to someone does not "contaminate" your thinking (unless you are really careless).

Bob and Charlie are too proud. They don't want to be seen asking possibly stupid questions in writing.
Charlie feels that he doesn't know enough to even pose a good question, and Bob doesn't care enough. (Students generally tend to have trouble gauging their level, and I have occasionally blundered into conversations I wasn't prepared for by asking a too-advanced question.)
Bob and Charlie have seen their questions ignored too often. (My personal experience is that the usefulness of emailing an author about a paper they wrote declines sharply with the age of the paper. If the paper is 15+ years old, they most likely don't remember anything and have the same perspective as any other reader.)
Bob and Charlie don't want anyone to know they are reading the paper, as they are worried of creating expectations. (This sometimes does happen -- in that an author takes a question as a stronger sign of interest than it was intended. Though it does not appear to be a big deal, but more of an awkward moment.)
Bob and Charlie are worried Alice will view their question as a personal attack or at least as a threat. (In my career of reporting errors, this has happened 1-2 times out of somewhere near 50. But this sort of risk aversion isn't exactly out of character for much of academia...)


Is it unethical to not give feedback on final exams or assignments? In this question a person working as a TA was asking if and how he should try to persuade a lecturer to change her practice, in which she gave grades for final assignments but not detailed feedback. Many of the comments there expressed sentiments such as this being an "injustice", "reprehensible", "unethical behavior", "moral duty", "refusing to do her job", and "worth firing for".

Now, I must admit that I was somewhat surprised by these reactions. My experience throughout my academic career is that this is usually infeasible for a number of reasons, e.g.:

The institution may collect and impound all final exams after a day or two.
Final exams may be given on an institutional computerized platform, for which no per-item feedback is available to either students or instructors.
Students don't usually have time to come back to campus after finals are given.
I don't think I ever received final exams back throughout my undergraduate days.
I didn't get comprehensive exams back or feedback from the end of my Master's.

I think there's even an argument to be made vis-a-vis the formative vs. summative assessment distinction that final grades and feedback should not be overlapped, and that doing so is actually not helpful to students. (E.g.: "Summative assessments happen too far down the learning path to provide information at the classroom level and to make instructional adjustments and interventions during the learning process." Link.) In that sense, one could conceivably give copious feedback early in the semester with no grade, and then a course grade only from a final assignment at the end, after one is done with all feedback cycles.

Personally, I try to find ways to give final feedback to students if they are in critical need of it (usually by email), but I actually have to wrestle against my institution's procedures to make that happen. (I'm at a large urban community college in the U.S.) But my intuition was that it's at least a judgement call, and most common to not expect to see feedback from a final.

So: Is there consensus that not giving feedback on final exams/assignments is obviously unethical? (Side question: Are there any statistics on how common it is one way or the other?)

I think there's a distinction between automatically providing feed, and having access to feedback.

Like many people, I give little to no feedback on final exams for basically the reasons you describe: students don't have a chance to see it until the next semester, and very few of them bother to.

On the other hand, when a student does come see the exam, I'll spend a few minutes answering questions and explaining the grade. I think this is necessary, because students should have the option of asking for  mistakes or inconsistencies to be corrected, and they have no way of doing so unless they know why they were marked the way they were.

Many of the accusations of unethical behavior in the discussion on the question you linked to seem to be driven by concerns about the latter issue: the suspicion that students wouldn't have access to any feedback if they requested it, and that this was an intentional attempt to prevent students from appealing their grade.


What constitutes a unique research paper? I have been working on a particular algorithm. It has many applications and I have found one for which a dataset is available as well as other algorithms used to parse that dataset. But the algorithm I am studying hasn’t been applied to that dataset as far as I know. If I implement that algorithm on the dataset, I don’t think I will be making significant changes to it. Will it still be considered as enough of a result to publish a paper?

I am an undergrad; if that is relevant.

The following is general guidelines under the assumption that you're looking at this as a computer science project. If you specify the field, I can modify this advice accordingly. For advice about a particular project, you'll have to share the details of your project with someone with experience publishing in CS or whatever field you're working in.

The bar is, roughly, "is this something people would want to read." When you try to present new work to an audience, your job is pretty much to sell the arbiter (be it dissertation adviser, journal referee, or conference organizer) that the work that you did is something people would be interested in reading and using.

The most important question is: have other people used this algorithm, on any data set, before? If the answer is "no" than your work is almost certainly publishable, especially as it sounds like your algorithm preforms comparably well to other algorithms that preform the same or similar task. Your paper should explicitly analyze this and seek to give examples of data sets or contexts in which your algorithm out-preforms known algorithms.

If the answer is "yes," then your work may or may not be publishable. Applying a well-known algorithm like the Gale-Shipley Algorithm or Diijkstra's Algorithm to some random data set isn't generally going to be considered interesting because any researcher who is interested in this data set could do that, and the fact that no one has indicates that people don't currently care to. However, if you use a known algorithm to find an unexpected or surprising result then your project might still be publishable, and the more surprising or interesting the conclusions you can draw are, the more publishable the algorithm is. Here the strength of your paper is going to be determined by the data analysis you do, and how you show that your work is connected to work people are already interested in.

For example, I do a lot of research on social networks, and one hot topic in social network analysis is the detecting of communities inside of a broader social network. For the second approach, if you create a new algorithm for community detection, you can write a paper about your new algorithm comparing it to old algorithms and pointing out data sets where your algorithm is preferred. If you take a known community detection algorithm and use it to show that communities in certain types of graphs have an interesting property, that would be publishable. Additionally, you can somewhat blend these two cases if you were to take a known algorithm and show how it can be used for community detection, while everyone else is using it for some other purpose.


How to cite an interactive dataviz (Shiny app)? For my next paper I am going to provide a link to an interactive data visualization created using Rstudio's Shiny framework. How can I properly cite it?

You could cite it the way you would cite R packages, example: https://www.r-bloggers.com/how-to-cite-packages/

Or you can check out how it is cited following different citation benchmarks using Google scholar. See here on Yihui Xie's page

Or you can indeed cite it as a website, as @ff524 added.


PhD in Europe without scholarship from non-European homeland I earned my bachelors in Computer Engineering from my home country. I am now enrolled in a Physics masters program in the same university. Next year I plan to find a different university in Europe in which to enroll in a Computer Engineering PhD program.

However I doubt that I'll receive any scholarships from my homeland's government when studying abroad. Can I survive if I start to live out of my own my pocket? Is that enough to live in Europe just for a half year. Are there any available funds that can supplement my income such as a TA/RA's salary?

My main question is:

How to survive if I want to study PhD in Europe without any scholarship from my home country?
Which country might provide sufficient support for a foreigner to study at graduate level?

I am interested to Germany and Finland but any European country would be acceptable!

I only know the situation in Germany:

In order to get a visa, you are required to show that you can fund your PhD study. Either by scholarship, salary, or your personal means.

Usually, at least in CS, PhD students are employees of the university. You don't sign a contract that you are going to do a PhD, instead, you sign a contract that you will work for the university, "and you will be supported for doing a PhD". Your salary will be more than enough to support yourself (and thus for visa regulations).

However, it is also possible to do an external PhD. In this case you will not be an employee, rather a PhD student. What you need would be to find a professor who is willing to advise your work. In this case, you might get some scholarship from institutions like DAAD.


No reimbursement from grad school for canceled open house flight expense Expedia and the airline I booked a trans-Atlantic flight with, have told me I cannot get a reimbursement. Only a refund for airline credit for a future flight. I do not need this.

The grad school I was traveling to for the open house (which was canceled obviously) is not reimbursing me because I was given the option for a refund/flight credit.

I have extremely tight funds... this flight's price was highly non-trivial on my budget.

How can I handle this?

The starting point is probably to respond politely but firmly to the academic in charge of the admissions process, pointing out that you cannot eat a flight credit, and that the grad school's actions have led to a substantial and unexpected hole in your budget. Frame it as a 'moral' obligation rather than a 'legal' one. If you've had significant interactions with any of the professors as part of the applications process, you should cc them on the email.

If you do not get a satisfactory response, you might then escalate matters by emailing the Head of Department/Dean/University President's office. Again, being polite and non-antagonistic but persistent is probably your best option.

If none of this gets you anywhere, your options are probably to involve a lawyer and/or a journalist.


To whom the follow up email must be sent? I interviewed for a Math faculty position including with four persons. I want to know about follow up email. Should I send the follow up email for each an every body in the interview board?

I was in many hiring committees in math. If it was the last of several interviews for the position, the decision was likely made during the same day. If so there is no need in any follow up letter. If it was not the last interview, then it is too early for any follow up letter. In any case if the decision is positive you will hear from the hiring committee soon after it is made.


Citing a country's constitution in the OSCOLA style How do you cite a country's constitution in the OSCOLA style?

While the OSCOLA style guide does not give specific guidance for a constitution, the MLA guide suggests citing constitutions using the same form as laws.

As such, I would conclude that appropriate citation for a constitution would follow the OSCOLA style guide for legislation, e.g.,

  U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2


Can phd students submit their paper on their own? Can phd students submit their paper on their own? I have finished writing and polishing my manuscript (with my advisor listed as the corresponding author) and then sent it to my phd advisor almost a year ago but still has gotten no response from him. I am wondering if I can say sth like 'if I don't hear from you in 2 or 3 weeks, I am gonna assume that you have no problem and I am gonna submit it myself". Is this legit? Will I get expelled? I have hearded many different answers and need some HELP here! Thanks!

Absolutely no, not legit.
You need explicit consent from all the author listed to (attempt to) publish (=submitting for peer-review).
With no answer form your co-authors you may safely assume "you have not read the paper" and that's all you can assume from them.
But, you can submit on your own, as single author, no one is preventing doing that, you may be able "to bring people on board" during the review (there must be sound reasons to do that, but it is doable, if they are ok and they can strongly contribute plus you agree on having them on-board only for the second stage).
------- ADDITIONAL FROM COMMENTS -----------
Yes, I agree that removing an author means said author's contribution must be as well removed from the paper. That may lead to being unable to contribute the paper (how can you remove a co-author contribution if the co-author was the one showing and helping using an experimental machine?) or to big conflicts ("why did you not inculde me?"). If the paper still stands on its own, it is a big if.
Most likely, you can ask help to someone else in the faculty, or write the aggressive mail "if I don't hear from you in 2 or 3 weeks, I am gonna assume that you do not think your contribution is relevant and I am gonna submit it myself" and brace for the consequences (think and discuss an exit strategy, there is a world beyond and without your advisor).


Can you submit the same grant proposal to two different funding organizations? I have recently submitted an EU grant proposal, the chances are low as it is very competitive, and I have just come across another fellowship (UK based) which is actually more suited to my field but the deadline is in a few days. Can I apply with the same research project proposal?
Before, anyone suggests, I checked similar questions: this thread is not useful as the funding organization is the same for them (not for me): Can one submit overlapping grant proposals?

You can propose for the same topic/ideas. But the EU and UK application process (even applications within the same "country") are different and they look for different things for you to submit. So you can and should reuse old proposals (as no one has the time to make completely new proposals for every submission) as a "base" but they do need to be tailored for each submission. For instance the relative amount of space you have to write about method/novelty/timeliness/impact etc as well as practical things like page limits, page format, supporting documentation etc.
Given most proposals are also for different lengths of time/number of people proposals gain differences even if they cover the same area.
There can be limits about whether you can have multiple applications at the same time, but applications will be explicit about the limits in the supporting documentation. If your not sure ask your university research grants team as they know the details inside and out.


What are good principles for creating figures? This thought came into mind when I was reading Points of view: Elements of visual style.

While there are a lot of questions on software and strategies to make and edit figures, I am more curious about what are the things to consider (design rules) while laying out figures. Factors that come to mind include typography, color template, and proportion.

There are many books on this subject, as Peter Jansson points out, as it is something of an Art/Science in its own right.

However, if you don't feel like buying and reading one or more books on the subject, here are a few basic things that I consider both important, and easy to follow:

Consistency: While people can generally argue for hours over the merits of one colour scheme over the other, what is more important is that you use a consistent one for all your figures. Same goes for fonts and line styles. Also, if you're going to use blue squares to represent some thing in a figure, be sure to use blue squares for nothing else throughout your entire paper.
Conciseness: Try to reduce each figure to making a single point, i.e. try to think in terms of "what is this figure trying to say". It's tempting to pack more and more data into a single figure, but in the end this will usually dilute the message. One figure, one statement.
Clarity: Once you've decided what it is that your figure will say, remove anything from it that does not contribute to this single statement. E.g. do you really need every data point/curve you've drawn? If your statement refers to part of a flow chart or class diagram, do you really need all the other, less relevant boxes/labels/methods there too? Also, if the salient feature of your figure is not immediately clear, don't shy away from adding an arrow or something to highlight it.
Completeness: Holding the balance to clarity's minimalism, make sure there is also nothing missing from the figure which is needed for the statement you want to make. Figure axes labels are a favourite.

Funny how they all start with "C". This is not intentional.


Should I adress myself as a doctor (Ph.D.) when I am only waiting for the diploma to be signed? I have publicly defended my doctoral thesis over a year ago now, and it is published online. I have also finished all the other doctoral studies that are required for a Ph.D. in my field (I have an official e-mail regarding this from the Head of study affairs of my faculty). All that remains for the final and official Ph.D. status are the official papers signed by my university. This is due to the fact that I have continued extracurricular studies (some minor subjects, methodological studies etc.) at my university under my postgraduate student status and thus have not requested the official papers yet since it would end my possibilities for further studies. I have also applied for postdoc grants, but for the time being without results.

Against this background, would any of you recommend addressing myself as a doctor (Ph.D.) until I receive the official certificate from my university? For example, I have been part of multiple academic peer-reviewing endeavors within the past year, and the journal editors always refer to me as a Dr. in their correspondences. So I have just followed their lead.

I've searched and read different forums around the topic i.e., "when it is proper to be called a doctor?" There seem to be somewhat ambiguity within the responses given.

As I understand it, you have met the requirements for graduation but you have not applied for graduation yet, so you have not graduated. The degree of Dr. has not been conferred to you by the university, so you should not use it.

The importance of this varies by country: in some countries such as Germany, this is explicitly stated in the university regulations. In the US, many universities have three official degree conferral dates every year (at the end of each term, see for example https://web.iit.edu/registrar/academic-calendar), and you are not expected to use the title before the degree has been conferred.

Others may address you as they wish, but trying to use the title yourself might be seen by some as dishonest.


When asking for an extension to submit revisions, should I mention that I am no longer in academia? I submitted a paper to a journal 6 months ago.
I finally heard back from them now,
and they would like revisions in 6 weeks;
for another round of review.

Since submitting that paper, I've submitted my phd thesis (which is now being examined) and am working full time in industry.

I plan to ask for an extension, for several reasons.
Including that it is the holiday season and my coauthors (supervisors) are all going on leave, as am I.

I am wondering if I should also mention that since I am in industry now, I have fairly limitted time in which I am able to work on revising my own papers.

On the one hand is is utterly true, on the other hand perhaps it is irelveant.

In general it seems like asking for an extention is probably not a big deal, since having been in review for 6 months, it doesn't seem like it would make much difference it it is finally published in 2 months vs 3 or 4 months.
Since plenty of people in academia also have limitted time to work on revising old papers (be it for teaching or for new projects).

Politely ask for an extension, keep it short, don't give reasons. Editors appreciate how hectic life can be and regularly grant extensions (without needing to know author-specific circumstances).


How to cite page from section-page number style document? I've come across a problem during my bachelor thesis.

I'd like to cite a single page in a document, but it uses the "section-page" style of numbering pages of the document. It appear like I'm referencing pages 7 to 23, even it is just a single page. (I am using ISO 690)

What's the proper way to cite such page? Thank you.

You can write "page 7-23", so that the singular word "page" gives the reader a clue.  A range of pages would be "pages 7–23".

Alternatively, I would have no objection to "Section 7, page 23", though apparently JeffE wouldn't approve of that.


How to write a survey paper? I want to write a survey on one emerging research topic in wireless communications (It can be applied to any field!). There are almost 500 papers on this topic as published or in early access. And the publishing rate in this topic is increasing day by day. So, I want to write a survey on this topic keeping in mind that it will get high citation and it will help new scholar who are in struggle with this topic. I found only one survey written by some reputed authors, however it lacks in many ways, like detailed information related to particular direction, it just assembles the papers in a good manner. I want to pick some directions and discuss  important approaches with good connection between them. However, I find it very difficult to proceed with large number of papers. Is there any good way to handle the survey process in a good efficient and quick way? PS. According to me, many people have already started to write this.

The point of a survey paper of the type you are discussion (as distinct from a systematic review), is to provide an organized view of the current state of the field.  As such, you should not be attempting to cite every paper, but only the ones that are significant (which will still be an awful lot).

Writing a good survey paper is hard, and there really aren't any good shortcuts: you do need to become familiar with the content of a very large number of papers, in order to make sure that the view you are presenting is sane.

My suggestion, based on my own experience in this area, is to use the following iterative process:

Begin by collecting a large pile of papers to survey.
Based on your experience and a few initial readings, hypothesize an organization schema for the field.
Start reading (mostly skimming) and organizing your collection of papers you read using this schema, including noting which ones are most important and which do not fit the schema well.
As you find significant numbers of papers that do not fit the schema well, adjust the schema to better fit what you are actually finding and shift the organization of your collection to match.
Add new papers to the "to be read" collection based on the adjusted schema, then return to reading and organizing.

When the process converges to a stable schema and an empty to-be-read pile, you will have a well-developed view of the current state of the field and be in a good position to write a survey.  Note, however, that this may take a number of months...


How to find people who do similar research? I am 28 years old and did my PhD last year at an applied math institute and left. However, I am still in good contact with my old working group  and my PhD adviser told me I should come back.

At the moment I am a self-employed programmer. Although I really like my current job, I sometimes wonder if I should give the academic career another try. The main reason why I left was that I did not feel integrated in research society.

To be more precise, most articles I read where between 1950-1960. Most of my focus area are was out of scope from my adviser (he is an expert in numerical optimization, I was doing measure theory and Markov operator theory combined with numerical optimization). I had a lot of fun to modernize old theorems and try to apply them to numeric problems. Although I enjoyed the freedom of doing research on my own, I often was wondering if the results that I found are already known. My advisor was often surprised about my fundamental results, but he could not tell me if they are actual new. In fact, after searching persistent for one of my main theorems, I found it in a booklet from 1960 written with a typewriter - with a much shorter and genial proof.  Although most of my other theorems have been peer-reviewed and published in B journals, I am still waiting for someone contacting me: "Hello, your result X in journal Y is known for a long time".

The author of this typewritten book is actually still alive (85 years old), on facebook and on top of that even accepted my friend-request. However, lives in New York and I live in Germany, so I can't easily visit for a short talk. I did send a text message, but  never received a reply, I am not sure if it was because they do not want to talk about math anymore or if they just did not receive it, because facebook sometimes hides messages.

I was searching the web for professors doing similar research to what I am interested (by entering some keywords together with university into google). However, when I scanned their recent publications, I had no idea what they are doing.

I think I might missed the opportunity to connect to other working groups. I love teaching and doing research, but I also hate doing isolated research and having no defined task.

Is there any specific way of finding people who do similar research that I am not aware of?

MathSciNet is a pretty powerful tool for finding things in math, and some parts of applied math (from the question, I think it cover your areas).  (There's also Zentralblatt--I'm less familiar with that, but I think MSN will have more relevant tools for you.)  See about getting access to that as a guest at a local university.

Then here are some things you can do:

Starting with papers you know that are close to your area, look them up in MathSciNet and look at the papers citing them or citing their reviews (of course you can do the first with Google scholar also, for papers that are available online).  Read the reviews to see if they are of interest.  For the ones that look interesting, repeat.  You can similarly look up all publications by a given author.
You can also search in MathSciNet by Math. Subject Classification codes to look for papers in certain subareas of applied math.
Without MathSciNet access, you can search for things on the arXiv or Google Scholar with keywords/authors/etc.  I guess this is what you have been doing.  Note, unlike Google Scholar, arXiv has subject classifications and anyone can read any paper listed there.
The subject has probably advanced a lot in 50-60 years, so it's may not be strange if most of the stuff going on now doesn't seem (at least on the surface) too close to the papers you were reading from the '50s and '60s.  So you might try looking for and reading some survey papers/lecture notes/textbooks to get a better sense of the area first.
If possible, try going to some conferences/local seminars and talking to people.


Roughly what date do NSF Postdoc Fellowship announcements occur? I can't find any information about when NSF announces the recipients of their postdoctoral fellowship awards. I'm specifically interested in the one for mathematics. I'd like to use this information to get a rough schedule for rolling applications.

In another answer, Zach H said that notifications for 2014 went out on January 14th.

In 2015, the date was January 26.

In general, the notifications are sent out a week or so before the coordinated postdoc deadline, the day before which most research universities agree not to require a decision on postdoc offers. http://www.ams.org/profession/employment-services/deadline-coordination/deadline-coordination  This deadline changes from year to year, but it is always toward the end of January/beginning of February.

The idea is that people should have an opportunity to find out whether they've received the NSF before making any other decisions on postdoc offers, and if they were not one of the lucky few getting the NSF, then they should have at least a week to mull over their decision.


How do we explain a timing diagram in a technical talk? One of my slides of my presentation at a technical conference includes a timing diagram. I have to explain the functionality of the read/write operation with the help of this figure. I have maximized the diagram and am planning to explain each signal assertion.
This slide is one of the many slides and I am concerned about the time needed to be allotted for the timing diagram. I feel it is rather important as it explains the functionality of the proposed model.
Please suggest how I should go about formatting the diagram as well as explain the timing diagram.
Edit1 : A timing diagram is used to trace a set of signals to explain the behavior of a particular system. More details here

If your audience cannot be expected to be fully familiar with timing diagrams, begin by explaining what they are - a lot of software people are unfamiliar with them.

I suggest alternating between showing the complete diagram for context and showing an expanded view of a portion of it. The expanded portion will be easier to read, and will call attention to the points you are currently making. You can add annotations that would not fit on the full diagram. When you show the full diagram, put a box around the piece you are going to explain next, so that the audience can see how it fits in the full diagram.

In the expanded views, I would keep all the signals in their normal order, but possibly bold the ones that are relevant to the current discussion.


Is "backward learning" well-documented? I was initially in the field of pure math, but I successfully transitioned to being a researcher of machine learning with much less effort than I expected. My strategy was, instead of learning CS and ML from scratch, to read many interesting recent ML papers and, whenever I encounter with unfamiliar concepts or papers that are cited and seem to contain the information necessary for my understanding, I tried to find the relevant documents online to understand it.

While there is a vast amount of knowledge accumulated in ML, this unstructured way of pursuit strategy of knowledge turned out to be sufficient for me to cover the important information to contribute to the current state of research in a way I like, probably much more efficiently than by learning in a more structured way. I call this "backward learning strategy."

I think this may be similar to how researchers learn when they transition from an area to an area after PhD. Of course, feasibility of this learning must be dependent on the field. Even for pure mathematicians, one cannot understand an arithmetic geometry paper without at least having learned AG in textbook-level. However, it was not difficult for me to understand a paper on a certain kidney disease after reading some relevant papers, without much knowledge in medicine.

Unfortunately, I've not been able to find relevant information about this strategy online. I want some paper references for this learning.

Edit: Asking for anectodes may be not suitable for this site, so I changed it to paper references instead.

Documentation I don't have, but anecdotes, sure.

Actually, I'd be surprised if what you describe as "backward learning" isn't pretty ubiquitous in mathematics for new researchers, say doctoral students. Another name for it might be "just in time" learning, or "just enough".

Suppose a doctoral student is trying to get going on some problem suggested by an advisor. The advisor gives the students a paper or three that might be promising for extension. Those papers might have been authored by the advisor.

But the advisor had a certain history of learning and a certain base of understanding when the papers were written that the student is very unlikely to match. Even though they have taken advanced courses in the general area, this is different and very specific. So, to understand that paper(s), the student looks, also, at the papers referenced there, or even just their abstracts. If that is enough to provide a base, then fine, but one level is not always sufficient. I'd suggest several levels is usually required. My own doctoral research required me to work through a forty year development of the topic, just to be able to state a problem.

Forty years might not be much in a sub-field that isn't very active, of course. But the student needs enough of that backward look until most of the things stated in the papers are actually captured in the typical course. Or, if not captured, derivable from them in a straightforward manner.

However, once you become thoroughly familiar with some highly specialized topic, you have gained a lot of knowledge that isn't in text books and probably isn't worth putting in text books due to its specialized nature (and appeal). So, such a person can continue to move forward without so much backing up as was first required.

And math papers are written for other math experts, not for school kids. The jumps between steps can be quite large. So, a working mathematician will fairly often ask "where did that come from" while reading a paper. They may just assume the jump is valid, but if not, then it requires a deeper look and perhaps going backward to specialized sources (i.e. the referenced papers).

So, pretty common in math, I think. With no basis for saying so, I'd guess it is similar in other technical fields as well. The basics that you find in text books can be pretty far from the research frontier in math and maybe other fields as well.


How to show that the department fits my research goal? In the question about choosing research ideas to include in a statement of purpose, JeffE advised how to write the last paragraph of the SOP:

  How does my department fit your research goals? (If the rest of your statement is well-written, the reader already knows the answer to this question, but you also need convince the reader that you know.)

What should I really say here, without having repetition? This is the sum up part, which doesn't need to explain again, and should be short. I would add that this part also needs to raise the emotion of the readers. They have used their rationale enough in the main part. Whether I succeed in satisfying them or not, I have already tried my best, and there is no need to prove that I'm good anymore.

Or, as JeffE says, I need to convince the reader that I know I'm good*. My preference is to make the scarcity here, because the feeling of losing is one of the most strongest emotions. However, when I have the draft proofed, it is highly criticized that it is hubris, or at least unnecessary. I have given my rationale, but no one respond. Here is the draft:

  To sum up, I hope that If I get admitted, I will be a valuable asset to the lab, the department, and the university. I will be a new researcher with a compelling plan to maturing the theory; a new student who can enrich the diversity of the X department; and a future scientist working to accomplish the Y school’s vision: create a better world.

So:

How to write this part?
Should I use this part to raise their emotions?
Should I use scarcity to raise their emotion?

*Emboldening is only to emphasize the needed words, not to be hubris.

Your draft paragraph says nothing specific about the department or lab beyond the "create a better world" vision statement, and it says nothing specific about you beyond that you can enrich diversity.  (Every applicant hopes to be a valuable asset and feels they have a compelling plan.)  If your paragraph were swapped with another applicant's, in many cases nobody would notice the mismatch.

I'm not convinced that's a problem.  Your statement needs a conclusion, and this is a conclusion.  Writing a better concluding paragraph will make at most a small change in your chances of admission.  If the rest of your essay is compelling, then this conclusion won't ruin it.  If it's not compelling, then the last paragraph is too late to save it.  If you have the time and energy, it could be worth trying to write the perfect conclusion (one that is specific to both you and the department), but you should keep in mind that this is a minor form of fine-tuning.

  Should I use this part to raise their emotions?

I don't think this will be effective.  Reading statements of purpose just isn't a particularly emotional activity.  Usually, committee members are skimming through them looking for the important information and ignoring fluff, and anything that looks like an attempt to manipulate emotions will count as fluff.

  Should I use scarcity to raise their emotion?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by using scarcity.  Are you talking about raising fears that you are a scarce commodity and they might lose you to another department?  That doesn't need to be addressed, and it can look like hubris.  Most applicants just aren't that unique: there may be dozens or even hundreds of roughly similar applications.  (Of course everyone is unique and special as a human being, but this uniqueness isn't necessarily apparent in or even relevant to graduate admissions.)  The failure mode is usually not "oh no, this amazing candidate is lost to us forever" but rather "oh well, let's accept a similar student who was almost but not quite as promising".

To the extent your application is unique, that will be readily apparent and you don't need to emphasize it.  To the extent it is not unique, trying to raise emotions with impressions of scarcity will look arrogant or out of touch.


Can my master thesis be a part of doctoral dissertation of the Ph.D student I worked with? I had been working on a project for my masters thesis under a doctoral student, which is eligible for a paper publication. But after finishing more than half of the project, my supervisor suddenly ordered me to start over a new project and told me to stop working on the former work, stating that a masters thesis work cannot be used in a doctoral student's dissertation even if I am given authorship in that paper.

I would sincerely like to know if what my supervisor said is true or if I am being cheated out of my masters project and thus my masters degree. Either way, can the answer please be supported by proper evidence(s) to support it? It will help me talk to my supervisor, if necessary with solid proof and even escalate it up the hierarchy if required.

I come from a Central University in India.

For both a masters' thesis and a PhD dissertation, there needs to be a core piece of work that is primarily the student's work.  Collaboration can certainly be fine, but there needs to be a core idea that is "yours" in order to get a degree out of it.

It's at least conceivable that you and the PhD student were collaborating on something that had only one degree-worthy idea in it, and therefore a tough decision had to be made.

It's also possible that this is being used as an excuse for something unethical like cheating you out of your masters' project.

Whether this was legitimate, or not, we can't really tell from the information given.

It does sound that the situation was, at least, not handled very well.  The supervisor has oversight of both your projects and should have prevented your projects from overlapping too much, before you wasted lots of work on something. Also, if you contributed significantly to the eventual PhD project, at a minimum you should still get credit for this (e.g. with paper authorship).


Productive but not respected advisor - Should I continue with him? My situation is the following: I have a very productive but not respected advisor. By productive I mean that he has published a lot, and with not respected that his work is not cited by anyone except himself (his top paper has 20 citations, 15 from himself).

I will get my master's degree in 6 months, so I need to decide where to do my PhD. To be honest I don't know is my advisor doing real science. Am I judging his career too hard? At least I would not hope to be in the same situation as he is after the next ten years. Also, he demands me to do things exactly as he wants, so I have been thinking this issue a lot.

If you think I should not continue with him, can you tell me what kind of publication record I should demand from my advisor?

There are reasons for setting aside the issue of your potential PhD supervisor's publication record for the purposes of deciding whether to carry on  working with him - these reasons are set out in other answers.

You also need to think about whether your - or any - potential PhD supervisor's working habits is a good fit with yours. When considering whether to continue with specifically this supervisor, you comment as follows:

  Also, he demands me to do things exactly as he wants, so I have been thinking this issue a lot.

So - is this a good thing for you, or a bad thing? Was that working relationship a positive or not? You mention that you've been thinking about this a lot, and I urge you to be clear about the answer in your own mind before you commit to a PhD program. Perhaps working like this was okay for a MSc project; I suspect that it could well be a problem during a PhD.

What were the experiences of other PhD students in this regard? Did they all have similar feelings regarding how he manages the research of his team?


I have been invited to peer review a manuscript for a reputable journal. This is my first so I have a few questions to the more experienced Are PhD students generally invited for such reviews? I was under the impression they would prefer someone with a Doctorate degree or more experience in the field.
What are the advantages/disadvantages of accepting to review?
The general discipline that the paper treats is related to my field of study but my active research is not necessarily related. Is it still OK to accept the invitation to review?

It is not unusual that PhD students get invited as reviewers, after all a PhD student will likely be a true expert in the field of the PhD. If you are a student during your first years of study, the request may be a little premature, generally speaking but if your are in your final year then it will be a good experience. What you need to consider is whether you can provide an insightful review of parts of or preferably the entire paper. You should have a sense of why you were invited, i.e. why your expertise may have been asked for.

Peer review is a vital part of the publishing process so getting experience of reviewing other's material is very worthwhile. If you continue in academia this will be expected of you so you will have to start sometime. You can definitely add reviewing for journals in your CV, not mentioning what you reviewed but certainly for what journal you have reviewed.

If yo have not done a review before you should probably ask someone (or preferable more than one) more experienced within your field for a brief outline of what should be included in the review and how to formulate the review.


Will taking a post-doc position harm my future chances in industry? I am 29 years old and am about to finish my PhD thesis in the field of remote sensing (i.e. somewhere between computer sciences and geosciences in a broad sense or applied signal and image processing in a more narrow sense) at a university in central Europe.

Due to the fact that there are only few tenure positions available in science and I would rather stay in my (economically strong) home region, I want to find a position in industry in the long term. However, I have received an interesting offer for a post-doc / scientist position in a new-to-be-founded research group with great funding and cutting edge research in the applied signal processing field.

My question now is: Will some additional years in academia harm my chances concerning a job in industry?

Some additional points to consider:

in the post-doc position, I would be the deputy of the group leader (who is soon to receive a full professor/tenure position)
I'd be responsible for staff management and some budget issues (about 20% of time)
I'd have the chance to travel to international conferences
the application the signal processing research is carried out for is not directly industry-relevant
I have received an invitation to an interview for an R&D job at an automotive company, but it is scheduled only in 3 weeks, while I have to decide for the post-doc offer sooner rather than later

I can not talk directly about remote sensing, but in computer science, a postdoc does not harm your chances to go into industry directly ...

... but unfortunately it will also likely not help you much when applying for an industry job. That is, I would expect that your CV for an industrial job is about as strong after the postdoc than before. Given that there are opportunity costs for working in a postdoc for (presumably) multiple years (lower salary, lost opportunity to build up experience that is more directly helpful in industry jobs, etc.), you will certainly pay for doing this postdoc if you look at the grander picture (lifetime earnings, etc.).

  I would be the deputy of the group leader (who is soon to receive a full professor / tenure position) - I'd be responsible for staff management and some budget issues (about 20% of time)

This sounds like you will have actual management experience after your postdoc. If you find the right company, these are certainly points that will help your case afterwards. However, some of my colleagues have made the experience that there are a surprisingly large number of companies in central europe that summarily dismiss everything you do at a university as "not really management" (mostly due to a lack of understanding that university labs also have to deal with budgets, hiring, people issues, etc.). Not sure how representative these word-of-mouth tales are, but it is something to keep in mind.


What to do for letters of reference if you want to apply to grad school but you've been self employed? Similar to this question How to secure recommendations and apply for PhD after having worked outside of academia for two years? but more specifically if you've been out of school and self-employed for a while, what options do you have for letters of reference? And AFAIK you need two letters, so if answers could provide multiple potential options that would be ideal :)

The source of the letters matters less than what they can convincingly say about your chances of success in the program you are applying to.
So choose referees who can write such letters. They might be clients, or managers, or former professors, or people you consulted professionally while self employed. People who know your work and your work ethic.


What should a student do if a professor agrees to write recommendation, then retracts offer upon realizing he confused the student with someone else? Prof. Z has taught thousands of students in my former school since 2010. In the Biology course that he taught, there were two students (A and B) with similar full names and nicknames, but their academic results were totally different.
Prof. Z liked student A but hated student B because student B used to be very naughty in Prof. Z's courses and got very bad grades.

On January 4th, Prof. Z received student B's email for a letter of recommendation. Prof. Z agreed to do so and arranged a time to meet student B. On the day when they met, Prof. Z knew he had made a big mistake, and he refused to do anything for student B.
Given that situation, what would you do if this happened to you (as student B)? This really happened recently in my former school, and student B was very angry and made a complaint to the head of Prof. Z's department.

The questions-not-asked include asking about the basis for student B's actions. As @BenBitdiddle comments after his answer, perhaps student B was "advised" to ask the most famous professor, etc.

My blanket reaction to this is that this advice should not have come from any professionally competent "advisor", but probably from peers, or peer-based information. Abstractly, there's certainly nothing wrong with getting the opinions of one's friends and peers. However, it is exactly in such situations that the critical weakness in asking people who don't know much about a given thing is instantiated. How to know that this would be a problem? Difficult, for many understandable reasons, but that does not resolve the issue!

That is, younger people would benefit from appreciating the palpable fact that important decisions affecting their lives are made by people (often older) who need not share their viewpoint, nor their same-age friends' viewpoint.

While it is true that some people who "have power" abuse it, this is not a universal, and it is not wise to postulate that all experienced/older people are oppressive or selfish. Genuine experience, as opposed to conjecture, is hard to replace. Thus, ideally, letter-of-recommendation writers are sufficiently experienced to have been through (and succeeded in) the endeavor for which they're writing a letter. Perhaps also experience (and successful in) appraising the likely future success of people in those endeavors. From this comes the value of letters of recommendation.

Yes, unfortunately, even a pretty-darn-good performance in a routine course doesn't give a letter writer much to work with. Many people hit that mark, etc.

What's a student to do who has trashed all those bridges, before they realized that it'd matter? Probably spend extra time proving exactly that they'd caught on, and have moved to a different plateau. But there'd need to be tangible evidence, not just a promise.

So, in effect, "tell your friends not to hope for letters from faculty in whose courses they'd done badly"... And, if people discover themselves in the position that there's no alternative, then they need to get as close to a "do-over" as they can, because otherwise they've sealed their own fate, in any conventional avenue.

Yes, it is indeed unfortunate that this "appraisal" period comes during a period of peoples' lives where many things are in turmoil...

So, again, people who become aware of this mechanism should "tell their friends" to work hard to avoid finding themselves in such a situation. If one does, then it is almost surely better to allocate considerable time to repair the damage, rather than somehow "fake it" and limp along with fatally bad letters of recommendation.

By the way, part of the "currency" that faculty have to spend (or not) is their word/reputation, so they are very, very hesitant to blow it on bogus not-so-bad recommendations. Faculty who'll give glowing recommendations to nearly anyone will have debased that currency to an extent that it is nearly worthless... so you'd not gain from a letter from them anyway.


Should I retake a course for an easy A or focus on research? I’m an incoming PhD student deciding on courses to take. A normal course load is 3. There aren’t many being offered this semester, the only third option is a course I took as a MS student last semester at another school (we have no transfer credit policy). I could take the course for a slightly easier A, since my program has high grade standards and my peers seem highly capable. My study adviser suggested this as it would free up time next year to prepare for the qualifying exam. However, I want to continue an old research project from my MS in addition to starting a new research project. During COVID times, I figure a light courseload is best, and any extra time translates to research progress. Next semester I can take 4 courses to make up for it.
After deciding on just 2 courses this semester, my friends and study adviser still suggested I retake the 3rd course. The lectures are just 2.5 hrs a week, but even if they are easy homework/projects might add up and research is my top priority. As for the course material, I loved the course last semester, but with less novel material it might be less interesting.
Should I follow my friends and adviser’s guidance, or should I focus on research now until I finish my old project and have a lighter first PhD/COVID semester?

PhD students are judged on their research publications, not their coursework.  It is good strategy to minimize the time you spend on courses.

we have no transfer credit policy

If there is no policy, ask for one.
I would recommend taking a low effort course over a high effort course; not to reduce effort expended, but to direct that effort to research.  If a course helps you with your research, then take it.
I would not recommend lowering your coursework efforts to the point that you fail; in that case you will need to repeat the effort, which is not efficient.