What should I start doing to improve my prospects since deciding on an academic career? So, I have had a year out to work and am now going to do my Master's degree in Computing. I have decided to fully embark on a career in academia.

What can I start doing NOW that will help improve my academic reputation, credentials, CV and career prospects? For example, should I do more writing, set up a technical blog, find research opportunities, what projects should I start, organisations to join etc.?

Try to find active researchers who are willing to let you do a research project with them (easier said than done, but if you're offering to work for free in your spare time without huge amounts of hand-holding then people will sometimes give you a chance), and then collaborate with them to write a paper. Papers, particularly high-quality papers in good venues, are the primary currency in academia. Writing a technical blog might be fun, but realistically won't affect your academic reputation one way or the other (it's unlikely that many academics will see or read it). Similarly, joining organisations isn't on its own going to have much impact on your academic reputation - people generally don't care if you're a member of e.g. IEEE, they just care if you've done any useful work lately. Helping organise seminars that are popular in the field (if you can find a way to get involved in that) might get you noticed to some extent, but only counts a bit (people hiring researchers don't want to know whether you can organise talks, they want to know if you can produce interesting research).

Basically, the main thing that matters is (good) papers - try to find ways to write them, preferably with other people, but on your own if necessary (the latter is hard and less effective, so try to avoid it if you can). Try not to waste too much time on things that consume your energy but for which you don't get any reward. Enjoying them can count as a reward, incidentally - by all means do fun things just because you like them, just don't expect them to have a huge impact on your reputation.

Source: It's Sunday, and I'm writing a paper, so at the very least I believe the advice I'm giving :)


The review of one of the reviewers is basically a copy and paste from my paper. Should I care? I just received the reviews of a paper I submitted. The paper was reviewed by three anonymous reviewers, two of the reviews provided valuable insight suggestions and comments. However, the third reviewer just copied text from the paper. Should I care about what the third reviewer did?

As you've described it, this sounds rather odd. Reviewers are under no obligation to accept a paper to review, so to accept one and then submit what sounds from your description like a complete cop-out is strange behaviour. It's also a bit odd for the editor to send you completely uninformative comments. It's possible that they genuinely did write a review, but that the text has been copied mistakenly, either by the reviewer or by the editor. It might therefore be worth sending a brief email to the editor to enquire about this review. Something along the lines of: "Thank you for consideration of our paper. In the copy that I received one of the reviews does not contain any comments, only text from our paper. I just wanted to double-check that the correct version has been sent through, in order to make sure that I can respond effectively to all of the reviewers." Be very polite, and make sure you phrase it as a request for clarification, rather than a complaint.

If it turns out it was their genuine review, you are of course allowed to care - it's a bit frustrating if one of the reviewers has not fulfilled their role properly. But it's not a big deal, and there's not much that you can or should do about it. Some journals only get comments from two reviewers anyway, so just think of it that way and ignore the third.


Taking break/vacation during graduate studies/PhD Do people take time out to go home, meet with family etc. during their PhD?

If yes then for how long and how frequently is it usually?
How does one deal with this with one's advisor?
What are the pros and cons?

Given that one basically has just about 2-3 years in practice to do all their PhD work, I don't understand how anything else fits in the schedule except work. The entire idea of a PhD looks quite scary to me that one is expected to produce cutting-edge stuff in that short a time starting from just standard graduate courses!

PS: the question is general, but if it is field-dependent, I am interested in particular in physics PhDs (theoretical high-energy physics specifically)

The answer is of course, yes. In fact, you need to take a break to recharge your batteries.

The answers to the other questions will depend on what the rules are regarding holidays (which is country dependent). I think that our guys get six weeks annually (where as other countries only offer one or two weeks). Our guys can take them in one chunk, but this is sometimes problematic if there are deadlines that need to be met, or tutorials, etc.

The way to deal with your advisor is simply to ask him with a concrete proposal. It is better that you have not bought the plane tickets before you ask, because that will be perceived as an attempt at manipulation by your advisor, which will damage the trust relationship.

When my guys ask for a vacation I simply ask whether it clashes with anything. If not, I grant it.

The pros of taking a couple of holidays is that you will have time to recharge your batteries. The cons of not taking a holiday is that you can burn out.


Waiting for an overdue review? I have submitted my paper on 12-Jan-2019. The journal uses ScholarOne Manuscripts for online submission. The status has been changed to Awaiting Reviewer Scores in the same week I created the submission.

I've recently contacted the editor about the status of the manuscript on 8-Apr-2019 and he replied that he is waiting for an overdue review, the the reviewer wa chased on 5-Apr-2019.

At this point, I know I should wait. But it's interesting to know if I can send another reminder and when should I do that. Especially when the editor actually reported what is going on and didn't simply mention that the paper is "Under Review" and I should leave it like that until a decision is made.

You can send another reminder, but I would wait a bit. It is an uncomfortable thing to do, and my own level of discomfort with sending such notes usually gets outweighed by my impatience at around the 2-month mark. So, if you don't hear anything back by early June, you might write again.

But different journals and different fields have different typical timelines, so you will need to come to your own decision about the timing.


Conflicted about whether to start preparing for grad school I'm new to this forum and am mainly asking for advice. -- From a conflicted rising junior in undergrad (at an Ivy).

I'm an engineer majoring in ECE with interests in CS (definitely planning on a minor, and if sanity is sacrificed a bit, a double). I've been doing research with a professor in my major and his lab since last summer, after freshman year. So far, I've coauthored one paper that has already been presented at a conference by the first author grad student but hasn't officially been published yet. I know a lot of the advice I've read is to experience industry at least once, which I'm planning on doing the summer before senior year.

However, I'm conflicted as to whether I'm actually fit for grad school. A lot of the questions I ask myself are, "Do I like research enough? Am I motivated enough?" I definitely enjoy doing research and the topics I can explore with it, as well as the flexibility of hours and such. Often during the semesters I find myself wanting to put more time into research and less on my equally important classes.

Part of me tells myself I should just find a job and settle, perhaps go for a masters. However, another ambitious part of me tells myself to go for a Ph.D. I'm quite conflicted about my path since my past semester was a wreck. My grades were unsatisfactory (1 C and 2 C+'s in major-related classes and a math class) due to my taking of 22 credits (includes 2 research credits -- an A) which tanked my GPA to a 3.1, which isn't horrible, but not ideal.

How do I decide whether I should start prepping for grad school? (Consider that there is an M.Eng program at my school that does not require a GRE, but does require a higher GPA ~3.5.)

A 3.1 undergraduate GPA is indeed low (even from a top school) among successful applicants to a PhD program.  But there are over 130 R1 universities in the US, so it seems likely someone will take you.

I can't advise whether you should get an MS and work for a while before thinking more seriously about a PhD.  What I can tell you is that very few people who start with that intention actually do it.  It's possible to get a master's part-time while you're working but realistically, a PhD requires a full-time commitment and therein lies the problem:  Once they begin working full-time, pulling in the typical $100K+ engineering salary, most people begin spending it.  Worse, they get committed to continuing to spend it.  They take on loans for cars and condos or houses and so on, and then they're handcuffed.  They can't easily leave.

In my own 40+ years in industry, I've known lots of engineers with PhDs.  But I can only recall one person who quit to go get one.  And he had only been working for a year and hadn't yet started spending.  Sure, there may have been others, but I can't remember any others.

So, if you are thinking about a PhD, the best time to do it is probably immediately after you finish your bachelor's.  When I advise engineering students here at Michigan, I point out that I wish I had done that.  I never got a PhD and I regret it.  (And at 68, I think that ship has sailed.)  YMMV.


What is my responsibility to my lab after I graduate? I just finished a research-based Masters program, where nearly my entire degree was funded through sponsored research from a particular lab. In the normal schedule of events I should have had time between my final thesis submission and the end of my final's month funding to clean up my files/database work on a shared server. But the week of my thesis being due the criteria for completion was suddenly moved, such that I was no longer able to graduate on time. I ended up having to work unpaid past my graduation in order to complete my thesis. Several months after successfully submitting my thesis I am being nagged to clean up my section on the shared server. I have no intention of attempting a PhD with the lab after. What should I do?

I should add that this has been a recurring problem in our lab, that Masters students are under a lot of pressure to do more in their thesis, but not given time to organize their work so that it can be useful to future students. Once they graduate they get jobs and don't clean up after themselves.

Here's a way of approaching the ethical aspect of this: how important would it be for you, if you were in the middle of your degree, that a recent grad's files were left in a big mess?  Would that affect the finances of the group, because of the files eating up a lot of storage space?  Would your work be more difficult or time consuming, with needed files being hard to find?  Would you have to take some time away from studies and research in order to try to put the recent grad's files in order, for the good of the group?  Would it be difficult for another member of the group to figure out what was what, in the recent grad's absence?

I wonder if you could ask for payment for at least part of the extra time you'd be putting in.


What is expected when submitting to a conference I am planning to submit an abstract to a conference (pure mathematics). In the webpage they have the options of filling in the title, providing a pdf file of abstract and an option of providing a "full text/other file". I am not sure about the last option.

Do I provide one of my paper that I will talk about? That seems weird as I (most of the speakers I guess?) will be talking about a series of works. Or do I need to make a new pdf file, summarizing all the works covered? Or do I provide the beamer file? Or nothing at all?

Is it common that when submitting an abstract to a math conference, one has to also submit a file which describe their talk in some details?

It is typical to just provide a title and abstract.  In my experience, they are usually submitted in plain text or TeX format, not even in pdf.  You are never asked to provide a paper, though for some conferences you may be asked for notes later.  Based on your question, I guess the organizers want you to submit a file that they will just link to on the webpage for an abstract, which could be a pdf or plain text.  If you're still uncertain about what to do, just ask the organizers what they prefer.


Can I claim my assignment solutions as mini projects in my resume? I am currently doing Master of Technology (M.Tech) in CSE from IIT Kanpur, and here each and every assignment is like a mini project in itself. For example in my Advanced Computer Architecture course, in one of the assignments we have to build and simulate cache from the scratch and thereby analyze the entire experiment. It is more like a project than an assignment. So can I cite these works as my project in my resume?

Unless your resume format is prescribed by some external entity, then you can put pretty much anything you want on it. But, don't oversell these as they were all, I assume, a year or less in duration.
And again, unless you are required to use a specific format for some reason, there is no reason for a "Project" item.
Just be clear and honest in any CV.
But perhaps you mean that your institute requires you to produce such a thing for graduation and they set the format. In that case, seek guidance locally about what is accepted and what is not.


How to integrate a paper where I am third author, but did a lot of work, into my master's thesis? I am writing my thesis currently and I want to include papers that I am included on as an author.  I will have a couple papers where I am 1st author, but there is one where I am third but did a lot of the work.  How do I go about integrating it into my thesis?  Can I copy/paste most of the text still or do I need to rewrite it?  I don't want to plagiarize but don't want to rewrite it if I don't have to.

This situation does not sound problematic to me.  Many people write theses that incorporate papers written under these circumstances.

However, you need to get official permission, rather than relying on what random people on the internet say.  Specifically, you need to check three things:

What does your thesis advisor say?
What are your university's regulations regarding reusing text from published papers, particularly with coauthors where it is difficult to identify who contributed to a given passage?
Does the publication or copyright agreement with the journal permit reusing this text in your thesis?

If any one of these has a negative answer, then you cannot copy the text.  If they are all positive, then all you need to do is attribute the text properly.  For example, you could clearly state at the beginning of a chapter "This chapter is an edited version of the paper BLAH."  Your advisor, university, and publisher will have suggestions or requirements for how this attribution should be done.


what should i do if professors don't reply my mail for graduate admission? I want to apply to study computer science phd at us universities, and I am wondering if a professor that I have emailed for admission don't reply my mail. should i still apply for university?
Thanks

In the US, admissions are normally handled at the department level, so there's no reason you shouldn't apply, even if a potential advisor hasn't answered your email.

However, you may also want to consider the possibility that the advisor in question either didn't get it (it was sent to a spam folder, for instance), or overlooked it (it happens).


Remarks/Comments inside a translation I'm currently writing up my Masters Dissertation and in one of my sections I have translated an article that was written in German. To the best of my knowledge no current translation of this specific article exists.

My question is this; what is the best way to add commentary/remarks to what has been translated without disrupting the flow of the translation?

For example

foo bar foo bar foo bar and is given by
<insert equation here>
where ......

I'd like to add a comment along the lines of

foo bar foo bar foo bar and is given by
<insert equation here>
{comment on how he managed to derive said equation because it's not obvious}
where ......

Initially I thought that perhaps it's better to comment on them in the footnote as suggested here. However, it means some footnotes are going to be half a page and ruin the flow of the translation.

Any ideas or feedback is greatly appreciated

Regards

Kendall

Actually, inline comments will ruin the flow of the translation more than footnotes, I think. Especially if you have long comments that will run over page boundaries.

Footnoting will make it clearer what is the translation and what are the comments. It is also easier to ignore the comments if the reader chooses.

But if they are inline, perhaps using a distinctive font for the comments might help a bit.


Found an error in a paper I presented at a student engineering conference. Should/can I talk about it in my MS applications? Some background information: Found an error in a paper that I already presented at a student engineering conference; what should I do now?

I am inclined to talk about the paper because I was awarded the 2nd best paper. And although it isn't published (only printed in conference proceedings) and it was a student conference, I still made a big error.

Reading your background, it seems that everything about the work was correct except for a mistake in translating the algorithm from code to pseudocode.  Moreover, you've done your best at correcting the mistake.  Mistakes happen in science, and especially when it comes to the dread pseudocode (personally, that's why I always include actual executable code whenever I can).

From what you've presented, I think you have every reason to be proud of this work and none to be ashamed. Talk about the work in your applications.  Talk about the paper.  Talk about the experience in getting it corrected.  Anybody who you'd actually want to work for will see all of these as strengths and not weaknesses.


Refuting a hypothesis in a dissertation I am writing my dissertation, and things came out somewhat different to what I had thought three years ago. Back then, I had three hypotheses. Two turned out to be true. The third, last and flimsiest, looks false. The question is: how should I describe the third hypothesis in the short list of hypotheses?

I could phrase it the way I did three years ago. In the results and conclusions section, I could try refuting it.
I could phrase it the other way around, as if I always thought it was untrue. There a billion problems to that, the least being: how does one then describe the experimental plan? I can't really say I wanted the null hypothesis to come true? Surely different kinds of experiments would have been more useful.
I could leave that section out. That is madness, it's a lot of work down the drain.

It is hard to give good advice on this without knowing the concrete dissertation and the expectations of your community. Hence, this is one of those famous questions where the right answer really is ask your advisor.

However, in the dark I am not sure why you would not just use Option 1 from your list - you had a (hopefully reasonable) hypothesis, you set up experiments and tested it, and found no evidence to support your hypothesis. Assuming that the hypothesis wasn't bad to begin with and the experiments were sound, why can't you just write it down like this?


Should I remind my potential PhD advisor to know his feedback regarding my solutions to a problem set given by him? About a month ago, I emailed a potential PhD advisor in the field of theoretical physics expressing my interest in a PhD position he had advertised. He replied back by saying that he normally gives a problem set for PhD applicants to solve within 2 days. A week later, while sending me the questions, he added that he wanted to understand how reliable I am with calculations. The problem set included questions of increasing difficulty. I solved the problem set in the specified deadline and sent back the solutions but he hasn't replied since then.

Should I send him a reminder email to know the status of my application process?

Yes, absolutely. If it's been more than a week, it's definitely appropriate to send a polite reminder. He probably gets a lot of e-mails and may have just missed yours.

In general, I've found it's best to follow up after a week if there's any chance that the other person missed or forgot about the e-mail. If he's aware that he still needs to respond, no harm done. If he's not aware, then it's a good thing you're letting him know.


What are some useful tips that allows PhD students to produce many publications of good quality throughout the duration of the PhD? I am starting my PhD in Statistics soon and while I will try not to burn myself out, I still want to publish as much as possible while I am in my PhD program.

What are some useful tips that allows PhD students to produce many publications of good quality throughout the duration of the PhD? I have no previous experience writing papers, so I don't have any general idea as to how I will do this.

Thank you.

If you want to publish a lot of (scholarly) papers you need a lot of novel/new/interesting results. To get results you need (a) a lot of ideas and (b) a lot of hard work to develop those ideas.

If you are lucky then maybe a third of your initial ideas will end up in a result that is interesting enough to publish. Some of the ideas will be so easy to develop that they aren't worth publishing. Some of them will be so hard that you can make no progress in a reasonable amount of time.

To have a lot of ideas you need a firm foundation in your field, both what is known and what isn't yet known, but worth knowing if it could be arranged. Probably you won't be able to find those ideas yourself, or not very many of them, so you can work with other people who have ideas and with whom you can develop synergistic relationships to explore the unknown corners of your field.

To become a writer, you need to write a lot (as user henning suggests in a comment), but it takes more. You need to learn what is worth writing about first.

Since you are unlikely to know everything, or why some things are important or not, you need feedback on your work (and your writings). This is one of the reasons for having an advisor. He or she should be both a source of ideas and a sounding board for the ideas you have and how you develop them. So build a strong relationship with your advisor.

Another source of idea will be any state-of-the-art lectures that you can attend and any recent papers that explore ideas but leave some questions unanswered.

So, work with a lot of people. Listen to them and read what they write. Try a lot of things, expecting to leave much of it on the floor. Get a lot of feedback. Give out ideas as well as receive them. Make ideas your currency. Work hard. Take a lot of notes so that when something doesn't work out, but might later, you have a structured way to remember what you did earlier.

Always have something with you to read. Always have the means with you of writing down a quick note on an idea.

Papers, again, represent the successful exploration and development of ideas resulting in something known that was unknown before you started.


Pursuing the field of computational physics professionally with a physics PhD Please let me know if I should migrate this question elsewhere if it is inappropriate for this site.

This fall, I will begin my PhD program in physics at Johns Hopkins, and I would like to continue my education in theoretical condensed matter physics with a strong emphasis on computational methods.

As an undergraduate, I took Computational Physics I and II (grad level courses) and I absolutely loved them. In particular, I enjoyed the process of doing pen-and-paper theoretical calculations and turning those results into code from scratch. Note the latter part: many computational physics groups utilize packages like LAPACK in their work, but I'm not a fan of that; I'm a fan of writing my own code. I guess you could say I enjoy coding, just as much as I enjoy doing theoretical calculations. Additionally, I have been doing research in computational condensed matter physics for two years now. The conclusion has been a robust, multi-layered MD code for correlated systems that is super fast. The process of developing the code and seeing how physical calculations can turn into simulated observables was amazing.

Having enjoyed the field of computational physics, I'd like to pursue it professionally and end up with a career in industry regarding this field. As such, I would like to master it! My problem is that I don't know how. First, there aren't that many classes focusing on computational methods at my university. Second, there aren't many condensed matter physicists at my school who actively write their own code (if they are computational people, they use already-built packages for massive simulations). To me, it seems like becoming an expert in computational physics would be more of a self-taught situation. If so, how can I ensure I get a comprehensive overview of the subject and adequately educate myself?

In general, I'd like your expert recommendations as to what I can do to professionally develop myself in the field of computational physics.

So for starters, I want to comment on your interest in writing everything from scratch. I feel for you with that, I felt similarly when I was starting out. While writing codes for some things that exist in great software packages already can definitely make sense, I will specifically say that writing code to do numerical linear algebra work is a terrible use of time. These numerical linear algebra packages are optimized to the extreme both with respect to algorithm approaches and with their software implementations.

Now implementing some of these things yourself is a great learning experience but don’t expect your code will perform nearly as well as the popular and proven packages. Also note that when it comes to being a productive researcher, you will have to be smart about optimizing your use of time. Building up your own numerical linear algebra package is likely not going to be a very productive use of your time. Feel free to comment.

As for how to learn, you should see if you can find more specific courses in other departments in things like computational mechanics so you can develop some general computational science skills, if you cannot find computational courses with your desired niche. From there, you’ll want to find some good textbooks to supplement your learning, depending on what things you need to learn more deeply or that fit your domain of interest better. You’ll obviously want to also develop some of your own solvers after you’ve covered the theoretical side of things to validate your understanding.

Outside of the straight up computational physics learning, you should try learning about some topics that could be useful, such as High Performance Computing, numerical optimization, and perhaps some minimal computational geometry.


Literature review both by keywords in title and sorting by publishing date Is there any free online databases where I can do literature review by

(1)  giving keyword(s) that occur in title

(2) at the same time, sorting by publishing date from newest to oldest?

I found google scholar meets criteria (1) but it sorts by date only for one recent year. Pubmed meets criteria (2) but I am not finding option to search by (1) in pubmed.

Have you tried Scopus or Web of Science? Both feature extensive searching filter and sorting options for all fields of science.


Is it ok to call myself stupid in an email to a professor explaining why I have not completed my project yet? Thing is, dude was happy with my work in a research course with him over the summer. I had a small portion left to complete the project which I offered to volunteer to do. He immediately ordered the supplies I needed to conduct this last portion of research, and that was 2 months ago :(. I sort of never considered until now that I should have finished it in 1.5 months maximum regardless of the fact that I was volunteering on my own time. In my defence he's been on pat leave (although he attended informal weekly departmental meetings on campus).

How do I explain this to him in a way that shows I acknowledge my mistake and that I am still interested? Do I stand a chance of mending the relationship? I intend to finish the work over the next 2 weeks.

I would pose two questions:

Is the professor unhappy with you?
Did you really do anything wrong?

If the professor has not said they are unhappy with you, then I see no reason to give an explanation; keep it up-beat.

  Dear Professor, Just a status update on the X project. I've finished X, has taken a little longer than I anticipated, but I think I'll have it wrapped up in the next two weeks. Looking forward to it!

If the professor is unhappy, then the question becomes whether you did anything wrong. If there was no deadline and you're not getting paid, then it's a bit rich of the professor to be angry. You can push back as much as you're comfortable with; here's a reasonably polite version:

  Dear Professor, Sorry for the slow progress on the X project. Given that we had never discussed a deadline (and that I am not getting paid), I hadn't realize you had expected this to be finished by now. Still, I do want to finish the project, and will pick up the pace. I think I can be finished in two weeks; would that be OK? I'll keep you informed on the progress. Thanks,

If the professor is unhappy and you did do something wrong, then a quick apology is in order.

  Dear Professor, Please accept my apology about the slow progress on the X project. I am still interested and definitely want to finish it; I had just [stupidly] been doing the work pretty slowly and hadn't managed to keep the schedule we agreed upon. I think I can finish the project in the next two weeks; would that be OK? Happy to discuss in person if you like, just let me know.

As to whether to include the word "stupidly", I think it depends on your personality a bit -- as stated in the comments, you shouldn't seriously suggest that you are stupid, but I think it's fine as a way to be a bit self-effacing.

(Note, my answer is from a Western/US perspective)


Should the editor share the names / institution information of authors with the reviewers For most journals, the reviewer is aware of the names and the institution that the paper is coming from. IMO, if the paper is from a top institution, the reviewer might judge it differently than the same quality of paper coming from a low tier institute (not always the case, but there is a chance). Also, a reviewer might not be fully non biased if the paper is from one of the groups that he / she thinks is a competing group.

The simple way to get around this bias is to anonymize the source of the paper before its sent for peer review.

Why don't editors do that. Why isn't this model widely used?

This is called double-blind review. It is common in some fields, though I seem to see it more in conferences than journals.

There are a bunch of issues with double-blind review, next to the obvious overhead:

It prevents uploading preprints, since authors risk revealing their identity. This can be a problem in fields with long review times like maths since results would be kept silent longer.
If a paper is accompanied by software, how can it be licensed?
It doesn't always work, particularly when working in niches with few active researchers. Sometimes you can guess the author with reasonable accuracy based on the content and style of a paper. Some people even manage to guess the reviewer based on feedback.

Some take it even one step further to go for triple-blind review, in which:

The authors do not know the reviewers' identities.
The reviewers do not know the authors' identities.
The person that selects reviewers does not know the identities of the authors.

I would like to take this opportunity to suggest quadruple-blind review, which is triple-blind review in which the reviewers do not get to see the manuscript. To ensure anonymity, of course. You heard it here first!


Should I add past full time experience for internship I am an international student in Canada. Currently, I am pursuing Master's in Computer Science from a well reputed University and I am incline to apply for summer internships. Before coming to Canada, I have worked professionally four years in India as a software developer. My concern is, should I mention this in my resume for internship? Will it be overkill for internship? I will be applying to similar jobs as my professional experience?

Yes definitely. There is no doubt in mentioning the past experience. Even company s providing the internship also look for such candidates with some prior experience in their respective field. It will enables you to stand apart from the crowd and you could impress employer with such resumes. You dont need to describe the experience briefly as it is a resume.


Name of the explanatory chapter in a cumulative dissertation how do you usually call the chapter of a cumulative dissertation (PhD thesis) that describes the research? A cumulative dissertation basically has two part: One part includes (published) research papers and the other part is an explanatory chapter that motivates the research and summarizes the it.

So basically I thought of the following:
'Background chapter'
'Frame chapter' (that would be the direct translation of the German term

I'd apprciate every comment. Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the current answer. Are there any other suggestions. I'd be happy to hear any comment on that.

Some places, such as Heidelberg, simply call it a "Summary". Others indicate that the Summary must place the papers in their "Scientific Context". I would favor the latter. But a specific university might provide specific guidance on this, as might an advisor.


Usefulness of prior industry experience before entering grad school? I'm wondering what impact does prior industry experience (by which I mean 2+ years in a non-trivial functional role in any established organization) lend to the profile of someone who is entering grad school for a Ph.D. (in my case, its Computer Science, but I expect the question to be applicable to other areas as well) ?

Do admission committees look upon it as a bonus point, seeing that the applicant has managed real-world responsibilities successfully in the past, thereby improving the chances of acquiring funding (in terms of TA/RA) ?
More importantly, does it help the candidate during (and post Ph.D), when he is looking for research internships/post-docs ?

In both cases, assuming the position the applicant held is in a completely different area from his/her research, what other factors become important in the both the above cases? Is it the difficulty of projects the candidate undertook (which, frankly, very few people outside the organization are equipped to judge), or the level of success (promotions, accolades acquired during the stint in industry) that matter, or are there other parameters as well ?

Also, in case it is deemed that such a profile offer limited/no advantage to the grad student, it would be nice to know why that may be the case - after all, most (if not all!) organizations are run for profit, and they would tend to have very little use for someone who is not productive or capable of learning.

I sit on graduate admissions committees (in computer science, in the US), and I spent 4 years in industry before going to grad school.  I agree with others: Industry experience per se is not particularly attractive, unless it's directly related to your proposed area of study.  (Industry experience may be more attractive in more applied areas of CS; I'm a theoretician.)

But it depends on what you do while you're in industry.  Admissions committees are looking primarily for strong evidence of research potential — raw "wattage", intellectual maturity, independence, initiative, creativity, attention to detail, eagerness to fight with hard problems, and most importantly, real results.  Recommendation letters that specifically address those qualities, whether from academia or from industry, will increase your chances of admission.  If you just sit in your cubicle and competently produce the code that your manager asks for, not so much.

My industry experience was a point in my favor during my academic job hunt, but only a minor one.


Are university salaries public information in Sweden? I am currently in the process of negotiating position both on the academic side and industry. I was told certain numbers on the spread of salaries for a specific position at a specific place, however I cannot locate the source of this information.

So I am wondering whether or not salaries at a university are public information, specifically in Sweden. My understanding is that they are/should be, especially considering that even emails sent/received via university mail servers are covered as public information.

On the other hand, labor unions like (such Sveriges Ingenjörer) typically give salary statistics is one of the major reasons why you should be a paying member. Why would I want to pay for information that is publicly available?

Follow-up: If salary information is indeed publicly available, then where can I find it; do I contact the institute of interest directly or do I get in-touch with the national tax agency (i.e. Skatteverket)?

Yes, individual salary information at Swedish universities fall under "offentlighetsprincipen" (the principle of public access to official records), unless they are explicitly classified, which would be very rare. (See for example this document from Stockholm university describing how "offentlighetsprincipen" applies to university matters.)

The easiest way to obtain them is probably to contact the HR department (personalavdelning) at the university/faculty in question.


How often should I notify referees about my PhD application? I will be applying now for PhD programmes and I wonder if I should notify my referees about every single application, providing data, such as: title and brief description of the project so they can tailor their references? Or that would be too much for them to get every single time an email like that? I know that they are busy with academic or own research commitments so I don't want to pile them with emails if that's not necessary. They are aware that I'm applying now.

My suggestion would be to get in touch with your referees and tell them you that you will be applying for several PhDs, so they should expect to potentially get multiple requests for references.

You can then tell them that if they receive a request for a reference and would like more information about the PhD, so that their can tailor their references, then you'll be very happy to provide that for them as necessary. It may of course be the case that your referees will not be inclined to tailor references to individual projects.

This way they're only receiving information when they would like it.


student rate at conferences If the student status of a conference participant expires between the registration for the conference and the conference itself, is it typical that the person still pays the student fee (rather than a higher regular participation fee)?

EDIT: I reject "individual factors", "personal values" and "a certain person's preferences" as reasons why the question has been put on-hold: there is nothing preferential, nothing that would concern an individual here. The question couldn't care less about your personal values, my dear reader. The question is about how past conferences handled it typically, i.e., simple facts.

Yes.

The purpose of student discounts is to encourage people with a limited income and limited funding to participate.  Recent graduates are in that category.

Most students presenting at conferences are PhD students.  Usually, PhD students are not sure when they will finish their degree.  It's perfectly normal for a PhD student to register for a conference as a student, and there's no reason to change their registration if they happen to graduate before the conference occurs.

I've never seen a conference verify any information I have sent to them.

(Conferences are not publications in my field.)


Publication estimated time What is the difference between "Estimated publication date" and "publication due date"? For example:

Estimated publication date: 8 weeks
Due publication date: After positive completion of peer-review process

"Estimated publication date" - we have not set a fixed date for publishing this article, but this is a guess based on how long we think it's going to take.

"Due publication date" - we have set a fixed date for publishing this article.

In this case, I'd guess that they haven't yet reviewed the article (so can't be sure they're going to publish it) but know from experience that it usually takes about eight weeks to review + publish. When it's been reviewed, they'll be able to set a due date.


Legality of universities posting sections of books online Something I have noticed in my courses over the years is that in addition to all the online distributions of textbooks (which I understand to be mostly illegal), I can often times find universities posting sections of books online, particularly just the exercises. Doesn't this violate the same copyright law?

Here are some examples of what I am referring to from books I have studied from in the past.

Do Carmo, Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces

Here is a solution manual to about half of Brown and Churchill's book in complex analysis (sections of the book itself can be found as well, and it may be worth noting that this is not the university the authors were associated with, I don't know).

There are other examples from other pretty well known texts in mathematics.

How is this legal for universities to do? Do they need to consult the publisher or something first?

First of all, copyright infringement on this scale, which is not done for financial gain (in most common law countries) is not illegal but unlawful. The difference between these two things is that illegal behavior can lead to punishment, whereas unlawful behavior is simply not protected by law - if you are doing something lawful, you are protected from someone seeking redress. If someone seeks redress from you because you have distributed their copyright work, you cannot argue that your behavior was permitted by law.

With this in mind, it's not necessarily an important question whether or not your university is doing something which infringes copyright. In theory, everything is either lawful or unlawful, legal or illegal, with nothing in between. In practise, the only person who might reasonably be able to determine this is a judge (assisted by several lawyers). Partly because the time of judges and lawyers is costly, whole areas of human behavior exist in gray areas which are not in anyone's best interest to resolve one way or the other.

People break the law all the time. Some laws are never enforced, and some laws are unenforceable. Everyone is familiar with urban myths about various commonplace things such as Christmas pudding, or kissing on a Sunday being illegal in various jurisdictions, other practices such as outdoor nudity or urination being technically legal although they might be expected to lead to arrest, and yet further things such as weekly archery practice being required by law. Some of these stories are completely true, by the letter of the law. Large organizations such as Apple and Microsoft agree on wide-ranging 'patent swaps' rather than try to figure out who is infringing whom. Doubtless any organization as large as a university is constantly breaking some law or other, if you include building codes, employment regulations, health and environmental restrictions, tax codes, immigration requirements, etc. Probably lots of people are employed to do nothing except check that the university meets the regulations, but these people are constantly playing catch-up to new rules, as well as trying to make sure that the thousands of people working within the institution are obeying the internal policies which call for compliance to the law, rather than disregarding them (as they usually are).

Now, most academic publications are both written by academics and mainly bought by them, as well as by academic libraries. Academics are paid by universities to do research which includes the writing of books, and while lots of textbook publishers are corporations, some belong to universities, or work in joint ventures with universities. Thus publishers, authors, editors and readers of these books together with university organizations form a community. For publishers to spend their time trying to investigate instances of copyright infringement like the one you mentioned, would be the equivalent of you constantly remeasuring the borders of your backyard, trying to determine the exact boundary line ever more precisely, asking your neighbours to tear down fences and re-erect them a few inches over, and snipping the branches of plants which overlapped by a small amount. While your legal right, it would be very detrimental to the community, in this case the community of people who live in your neighbourhod, of which you are part. It would also be a huge waste of your time, for little or no benefit.

Far more important than legality is the question of ethical behavior. Unlike the law, one is not expected to attempt to conform as best one can, but to behave completely ethically, and make it clear that one is behaving ethically, at all times. The flip side of this is that you cannot behave unethically by accident, or without your own knowledge.

For a textbook publisher to reprint (say) a complete collection of one academic's papers which were published on her website, without notifying her or asking her approval, would be completely unethical, even if they were stated to be in the public domain. Similarly, it would be unethical for that academic to turn her university homepage into a site called 'FreeTextbookz' with a large collection of files and paid banner advertising. Many things which fall in between this are accepted by consensus of the community as being benign or trivial.


How to save my presentation if the audience does not reply? Some time ago, I gave a 60 minutes Zoom presentation in a department seminar.
I usually ask simple questions during my talks, in order to keep the audience awake.
This time, about 15 minutes into the talk, I asked some simple questions and no one replied (I waited for about 30 seconds). I guess they were just not listening; in Zoom it is hard to tell.
Is there anything I can do in this situation in order to "rescue" my presentation?
Or should I just keep talking to "no one" and learn the lesson for the next presentation?

In a live department seminar there are often people who are not paying strict attention. Sometimes that's because the talk is not well suited to the audience, but even good talks don't grab everyone.
The kinds of questions you know how to ask in the live presentations you're used to  may not work over zoom. In a roomful of people some may be embarrassed by total silence, and speak up. Then dozers may be jolted awake. In a virtual room audience members don't notice each other. It's easier for them to be distracted, and harder for you to monitor.
If you have one or two colleagues with whom you talk about your work you might practice your talk with them, or ask them to be sure to respond when they attend virtually.


Can international students study via distance without applying for a visa? If an international student wants to study in a US degree program (AA, BA, MA, PhD, etc.), but entirely on-line while living in their home country, and without ever entering the US, can they skip all of the visa-related paperwork?

Distance learning students who will not enter the United States are not required to get a U.S. visa. In fact, by federal law, online-only students are not eligible for a student visa.


My professor presented a problem that I solved. He says I can send it to a conference. What is the etiquette in cases like this? But I don't understand if it is ethical because he was the one who identified the problem. I wouldn't have thought of the answer if he hadn't asked the question. I am an undergraduate and this is my first time in research. I do not understand the process, I think. But is this how research works? What is the proper way to proceed now?

There is no ethical issue. You should be proud of your accomplishment and publish the paper. It may be, in fact, that the professor saw the problem but not the solution and needed it himself.

In fact, it is fairly common for a dissertation advisor for the doctorate to provide the problems to his/her students that result in their degrees. That isn't universal, but happens regularly in some fields.

On the other hand, in some fields (mathematics, say) the ability to ask the right questions is extremely important - more so than finding the eventual answers in many cases. But to be a complete researcher you need to be able to do both. However, it isn't expected that you get this ability naturally. So, in a way, the professor is "kick starting" you on your way to being a good researcher.

Of course, you can also say in the paper that the problem was proposed by Professor X of University Y. The professor can give you advice about the advisability of that, of course.

Moreover, the question posed by the professor got you thinking. You got to thinking about the solution. But I also guess that it got you thinking about the next question that needs to be asked. If so, you are on your way.

I should also note, for completeness, that there have been occasions in which someone has posted important unsolved problems as "exercises" in books and elsewhere. This has sometimes been done without comment. The idea is to get the problem out to a wide variety of people who know the topic and might, somehow, have the insight to solve it. Don Knuth, for example, has done this in Computer Science:The Art of Computer Programming.


ePrint Archive for PhD Dissertation in the Social Sciences I understand there are a number of specialised ePrint archives or repositories where scholarly works could be posted for wider dissemination (for example, arXiv).

I am wondering if there is a preferred one for PhD dissertations in the social sciences?

You can always put a copy of your dissertation on your professional web page.  Google will find it.


Hiding M1 grades or first year of master grades I had obtained my bachelor degree with first class of honor then I pursued my master studies in France. During the first year of my master (M1), I had pretty bad performance. I failed a course but I passed the semester since my average grade is higher than 10/20. Also, there was a project which I barely passed. I applied to another school for M2, I passed it with good grades (in french standards).

If I apply for a PhD, is deliberately hiding my M1 grades a violation? Given that M2 GPA is independent of M1, I could've been admitted directly into M2, and M2 courses are more geared towards research topics while M1 consists, mostly, of general courses.

Yes, 'hiding' any grades you are asked to supply to support an application is an ethical violation.

It seems like missing M1 grades are going to be a pretty obvious omission, and their dubious absence is likely to hurt you much more than their unappealing presence.

There are several existing answers here covering how to deal with and explain sub-par grades, or whether anything needs to be done at all.

How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?

How do I make a bad semester not look bad during my scholarship application?

How much will a poor first semester affect my grad school chances?

Should I explain a single bad grade in my personal statement?

Thoughts on Student with Bad Grades in Easy Courses and Better Grades in hard courses


Should I simplify my writing in a foreign country? As a native English speaker studying in the Netherlands, I often find myself writing (not published) English papers for a Dutch audience, and I worry I'm alienating my superiors with my writing.

I put a sample of text from a letter I wrote for an admissions committee through an array of readability tests, with Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, SMOG Index, Automated Readability Index, Gunning Fog, and Linsear Write all  assigning it "college graduate" level. For comparison, the King James Bible averages around a fifth grade reading level, and New York Times articles typically produce a reading level around the tenth grade on the same tests.

At first glance, this is exactly how it should be. A university student submitting university documents should be writing at a university level. And yet, despite the truly incredible level of skill widely demonstrated by the Dutch people in the English language, I can't help feeling that I'm disadvantaging myself through use of constructions and vocabulary that no reasonable non-native English speaker could ever be expected to know.

Is there some merit to this? Rather than optimizing my writing for descriptiveness and articulacy, should I instead aim to be more readable by a foreign audience, at the cost of expressiveness?

Thou shalt not dumb down thy writing, but don't make it a vain exercise of style

I'm a non-native English speaker, and let me put it straight: I may write in simple English, because limited are my English writing skills, but I don't want to read simple English because I want to enrich my vocabulary and grammatical constructions.

But whether you write for a native English speaker or not, write clearly, avoiding unnecessary verbosity just to show off your eloquence.

(And, honestly, stop wasting time using those readability tests)


Stuck completing master's thesis I started to my master thesis in a company in March, it's a new design project about the product they produce. First month was just spent on the getting all the information, technical drawings and they couldn't provide me laptop so I had to wait etc. In April I started to produce some ideas but my supervisor in company isn't helpful so much, doesn't give me input a lot, he was just saying yes or no to my ideas and after first 2 weeks of April, he started to complain and said that I can't find so many ideas and the ones that I found are not working. This made me more uncomfortable and stressed and now I am not sure that I can find that perfect idea and complete this thesis.
We had some problems because of the language of course; he speaks German with dialect and expects me to understand him 100%, but it's hard if you're a foreigner and German is your 3rd language and this problem also partly caused this lack of progress.
My professor is more understanding and trying to help, and offered to have a meeting with 3 of us, but today in the meeting my supervisor kind of blamed me and said normally it was working with German students and if you applied for this job you should be able to talk and understand fluently. I don't think that it is fair comment because in my CV, my German speaking level was not written as fluent and I thought they accepted me with knowing this. Also I didn't know about the dialect.
So until next week I need to find 5 new ideas to present but I am so stressed and feeling under pressure and can`t think about anything and generally because of that comments I am constantly feeling really bad and incapable. So I am considering dropping out of the thesis and finding a new topic. Would you recommend doing this?

If the company really needed so much working ideas on their product, they should hire a professional, not expecting them from a master student. Stick this thought in your brain, and then proceed. During thesis&internship you should demonstrate independt thinking, but you are still a student.
You can ask your professor a meeting asking bout the opportunity of continuing this (painful) experience with the advisor or to try a new start with a different company (would be an issue for you to graduate 6 months later? what is at stake that prevent you from restarting the thesis internship?).
You can put all the points you mentioned here in a neutral way (i.e. "he said that I can't find so many ideas and the ones that I found are not working" == "they expect to have new and working ideas from the university", or "my supervisor in company isn't helpful so much" == "we could not build an effective working relation").
Regarding the 5 ideas: you do not need to believe in them, and they cannot possibly be all productive ideas (if you had 5 bright, productive ideas, you would not be rotting working in such environment, you know this ... and even your supervisor would know that). So dig yourself in the library, look at the conference proceedings of biggest conferences related to the thesis subject, pick the ideas making claims you can barely understand, present them.


Can co-first authors’ positions be swapped in a CV? Some papers have co-first authors, which are supposed to have contributed equally. However, there is still an order issue.

Imagine a paper co-authored by A, B, and C. The paper goes like:

                                     A Very Long Paper Title
                                         A*, B*, and C
Our work is good.
-----
* A and B contributed equally to the work.

In this case, is it acceptable for B to cite this paper as follows in his/her CV?

  B*, A*, and C. A Very Long Paper Title. Journal of Stack Exchange.
  Jan. 2015. (* indicates the co-first authorship)

Note the position swap.

No.  The reference is the reference, changing it to move yourself higher could be misinterpreted as willful deceit.

Add a parenthetical statement at the end of the references saying "first n authors are co-first authors, listed in this order because..."

On my "internal" CV I have parentheticals after many papers, for example, listing contributions, nominations for best paper, etc.


Is it generally allowed to send a published paper to another conference but in a different format? My paper is accepted for poster presentation for a conference. Is it allowed sent it again to other conferences without withdrawing it from first conference? I am looking for oral presentation.

Most computer science conferences do not allow this, look for the conferences' dual submission policy.


Adding Authors After Manuscript Acceptance I was recently informed that a manuscript that I submitted to a journal a long time ago has been accepted.

I submitted it as the sole author, however, my advisor had some comments and suggestions that I applied to the manuscript.

As a courtesy I would now like to add him as an author.

My question: can a second author, i.e. my advisor, be added once I receive the galley proof, or whatever that is called, to the manuscript.

Any thoughts would be highly appreciated.

Possibly related to this question.

The difficulty here is that there's not a lot of ethical flexibility.  It's possible that this is a borderline case, where it's genuinely unclear whether your advisor should be an author and the two of you could reasonably change your minds.  However, most cases are not near the borderline.  As a general rule, either your advisor should have been an author all along (in which case submitting the paper without him was unethical), or he should not be an author now (in which case adding him would be unethical).  It's possible to change the author list after acceptance, but the editors will be suspicious and will ask for an explanation of why nothing unethical is going on.

I assume you discussed authorship with your advisor when you submitted the paper, and both of you approved of the author list at the time of submission.  (If you didn't discuss it, then you need to do so immediately.)  In that case, what has changed?  It's usually best not to revisit the authorship once it has been agreed on, but if you feel strongly about it you could explain that you feel the current author list undervalues your advisor's contributions and that you think he should become an author.  (Note that as Nate Eldredge points out in the comments, this is only allowable if he made substantial intellectual contributions to the research, not just to thank him for his supervision.)


asking for CS coauthor as an undergraduate I've been working on a project with a graduate student in my lab for the past month and a half. I spend about 20 hours a week on the project.

I implemented a part of our algorithm, wrote part of the paper, revised the paper, tested/debugged the scripts we use for data collection, and produced some figures used in the paper.

Would it be appropriate for me to ask the graduate student for coauthorship? Do my contributions seem deserving of a coauthorship?

Yes. Implementing part of the algorithm, running it and producing the figures, and especially writing a significant portion of the text of the paper, are all contributions that should count for a listing in the authors.

We can't exactly know whether your contribution to each of these were "significant" without seeing the paper, but it is very likely. So, ask.


Potential advisor does not seem willing to accept me into group. How do I approach others in the same field? I have been trying to get into this professor's lab right from the time I joined my PhD program last Fall. We are in EE, and she does very theoretical work which is what I want to do.

She told me in our very first meeting that she wasn't sure of my mathematical abilities to cope with her research. I took all her recommended classes, and this quarter I took a project-based course with her. I chose a theory-heavy topic hoping to get good results in it and impress her with it.

However, I haven't got any results for the problem I chose. I have been working on the problem for a little more than a month, most of which time I took to just understand the existing literature.

The professor's senior students consoled me saying it's a hard problem, but regardless of that, it looks like the professor is not going to take me in her group (she hinted at this in a meeting last week).

So my question is: my university has lots of professors who work in this field, but only this one professor in my department who does this work. If I approach faculty in other departments, I am afraid that they'd just ask me to contact this particular professor, since she is known exactly for my area of interest, and is in my department. At that time, I'd feel very embarrassed to admit that I am going to them only because this professor rejected me.

What can I do about this? I am sure people get rejected getting into labs all the time. How do you approach alternate professors?

I also want to point out that though the professor doubted my abilities to do theory research, I do want to continue at least trying to work on my current project for a bit and do not wish to change my area of interest without even giving it a fair shot.

That is a tough situation. Any advice should depend on the specifics of your school. But I would advise to ask another professor to join their group, and when asked about going to the original professor simply say very briefly that she was not very interested in your idea (not in you personally, your idea) and so you wish to try with other professors. Don't give too much details.


Can I enroll in just the second year of a master's degree program in Germany? In the french academic system, master's programs last for 2 years and one can start from the second year (if he/she fulfills the academic requirements, such as having already studied the first year or has already another master's degree in the same specialization). From what I saw in some german universities websites, master's degrees in germany last 2 years, but they don't precise whether one has the possibility to apply for an entry from the second year (if for example one has already a master's degree in the same field). Is it possible to join from the second year?

The best way to answer your question is to explain that it's a two-step process:

First, you need to be admitted to the master's program. If you're coming in as an international student, this can be in and of itself very difficult, particularly if you are applying to what is known as a "consecutive" master's degree program, for which the usual prerequisite is a bachelor's degree in the same field from a German university. If you are coming from a different field, or from outside Germany, you need to have the university recognize and accept your credentials as substantially equivalent to the bachelor's degree in question.
After you have gained admission, you can then proceed to establish that courses you have taken are equivalent to the master's courses offered in the degree program of interest. Normally this has to be approved by the instructor of each course you're interested in getting "transfer credit" for.

Thus, you won't be admitted into the "second year" or "semester n" of a given master's program, but you can get the equivalent credit, which will thus shorten your overall time-to-degree accordingly.


Drop out of PhD to do MSc So, a bit of background: I went straight from my bachelor's to a PhD with the supervisor I had for my BSc. However, I have decided I'd like to instead do an MSc at a different university.

My question is: how do I put this in my CV. Can I put 'Research Assistant' under the Employment section? And how should I approach my supervisor in terms of asking her to be a referee?

People change programs, this happens, and your advisor may or may not be understanding and supportive depending on the circumstances of your case.

Don’t misrepresent yourself in your CV! If you were a graduate student, say that, and mention that you switched programs in your statement of purpose (saying you did so due to personal circumstances is fine). If you say you were a research assistant and mention nothing about the PhD it’ll look like you have something to hide.

Good luck!


Why should (or should not) a university have a policy of not hiring its own PhDs? My university (in France) is having a debate about the relevance of taking rules for preventing too many of its PhDs to be recruited here, or asking them to have some postdoc outside the region before. The same rules are also debated about the promotion to full professor (from what is called maître de conférence and is a tenured associate professorship).

Many people have strong opinion on these issues (me included), and I would like to gather a comprehensive list of arguments (in both directions) on this matter, if only to clear my ideas.

Some arguments may apply only under particular circumstances or in specific fields, please say so when it applies.

I have not come far in my career but I have a family of academics, this question certainly came up a number of times over the years.

I guess the main point of having a formal requirement of foreign exchange/post-doc period is two-folds:

to avoid the drawbacks of academic inbreeding. Academia is partially built on a strong tutor-pupil, or rather mentor-protégé, relationship. While this is a great way to pass on the experience and good skills, it can also be the cause of conservatism in the form of sticking to what you know only. Likewise it's truly important for young academics to experience different cultures, and I don't mean it like a charter trip to a warm place, only to hang out with friends/family. To learn, adapt and eventually appreciate a foreign culture is beneficial for any person, let alone for those who are supposed to keep an open mind to the unknown.
going to a new lab somewhere else is also a fantastic way to improve on your professional skills. It's another reason why young academics are often expected to go somewhere else, learn something new and overall improve intellectually. In the corporate world this is encouraged in terms of changing jobs, those prodigies who are groomed for high level executive positions usually end up switching jobs every 3-5 years, often taking on a new but not completely unfamiliar role.

I should also note that our department has a similar issue, in the form of internal recruiting. A significant portion of the PhDs are recruited from those who have taken the course our department gives for undergrads in a particular program. What that leads to then is that the department becomes more or less an alumni hangout. While it may be nice for those new recruits to feel more "at home", for anyone else who does not have the same background it creates a BIG barrier to overcome in order to get familiar with the people in the department.

That was my two cents, I hope it helps.


Is there a manual of how to write an Introduction? I was reading a Introduction in a Master's thesis, and this particular example appears to be overly lengthy.

Is there a consensus on how many points can be adequately addressed in an introduction? or a maximum number of pages? or is this question fully subjective?

The goal here is to learn more about best approaches to writing an introduction, regardless of content.

This example is from a Master's thesis, so the total number of pages is expected to be larger than, say, in a paper. Whether or not the length is appropriate depends on the quality of the text but, in general, I'd say it is fairly reasonable to have a 10-page-long thesis introduction (although each field has its own guidelines).


Tips for literature search So I'm doing my senior thesis (undergrad) on the politics of emerging technologies and how that applies to artificial intelligence policy. I've been trying to look at past examples of technologies as they were emerging and how research communities, industry, civil groups, and governments react. A good example being developments in recombinant DNA leading to the Asilomar Conference, or fetal tissue stem cell therapy leading to George Bush's executive order on federal funding on the subject. However, I'm running into a few problems:

1) Research is slow because the main search engines I'm using (G-Scholar, JSTOR) bring up a bunch of irrelevant papers. Even if I use quotes, something like (
 "emerging technology" politics ) will bring a lot of stuff I don't need. Is there something I can do to help narrow it down to papers that are more relevant for my topic, such as additional terms, or another search engine?

2) I feel like I don't know how to do this kind of research efficiently. I've never done something this complex, and I'm pressed on time, so I can't make any mistakes. At this point, I'm just putting in search terms and finding papers that seem to fit within the general area of my paper and taking notes on Evernote. But, I feel like this could be structured/targeted so much better. What's the best meta-research strategy?

Thanks for your time, and if you have any other relevant suggestions, I'd love to hear.

Regarding literature search I can give you the following suggestion: It sounds you already found some papers that are somehow related to your topic. Maybe your advisor already has some related work in this area? That would also work.

With this publication at hand there are two options to find new interesting work in this area: The reference section of this publication and the publication venue. Look up where the publication was published and read more papers from the same venue.

  At this point, I'm just putting in search terms and finding papers that seem to fit within the general area of my paper and taking notes on Evernote. But, I feel like this could be structured/targeted so much better.

However, for me it does not sound that literature search is your main problem. It is structuring your work. It sounds odd, but whenever I come to this point, I start to write the paper or thesis or whatever your goal is.

So just start writing up any thoughts you already have, include the notes you already have with the citations to the papers you already found. This does not have to be a coherent text, just a bunch of unfinished text segments. Eventually you come to the point where you have no notes and no own thoughts left. Then you will see what is already covered by related work and where you still have to find other publications. But now you know what to search for and you can use more precise search terms! Be prepared to rewrite every sentence several times afterwards, but you get the feeling that your work is proceeding and that is a huge motivation boost.


How to politely reject a request for a letter of recommendation for a professor I am a student.

I received a request for a letter of recommendation to a professor for some award. I know for a fact that my letter will be directly used in the application for the award. [I have since graduated from this institution.] I haven't interacted with this particular person in about 3-4 years, and feel that I couldn't write the strongest one, since my interactions with this person were not much outside of classwork (two classes).

It looks like someone else is requesting these letters; how do I politely reject the request? I am particularly not interested in burning any bridges, since I may consider getting a career in academia in the future, but I haven't asked this particular professor for any recommendations (nor do I plan to do so in the future).

Update: I have decided to write the letter. Appreciate all of the feedback here.

If you want to decline to write, then it would be reasonable to reply to the person who requested the letter, saying something like: "My interactions with Professor X were three to four years ago and involved very little interaction with him beyond attendance at two of his classes.  So I do not consider myself to be in a position to provide useful information for award Y."


What questions should I ask a PI in a PhD interview? I am going to attend my PhD interview online. The PI asked me to present my previous work and a research proposal in 10 min. I made a 8 slide presentation. Is it very big for 10 min?

And the other thing he told me is, at the end he is going to give me some time so that I can ask questions. What kind of question should I ask in this case? Related to subject? What other areas (other than subject) should I consider to ask questions?

Well, depending on the your topic but 1 min per slide seems the norm. However, for a presentation with a possible PhD, you might get a way with less number of slides for more details/discussion (maybe neglect literature review or discuss it while transitioning between slides) since he is familiar with the topic (I'm assuming so). Keep in mind that when I met my current advisor, I met him in a conference and we talked for few minutes (he asked me very detailed questions (2 questions)). so I'm building my answer based on my case.

Regarding your second question, maybe you can ask regarding what equipment do they have in the lab. How many students do s/he have? Do you get to work with the advisor directly? Or senior/post docs and rarely meet him/her? Will you be fully funded (if applicable)? Will be an RA or a TA or both?


How to effectively respond to harsh suggestions from the faculty of review committee? As generally expected the doctoral review committee has to evaluate the PhD student by asking questions, by debating etc.,

Faculty in doctoral review committee can give soft suggestions and are capable to provide grade for student for that particular semester and can even fail the student.

All the above are not insulting since all are dependent on performance of student.

But how to respond to the intimidating comments by faculty in the committee that are harsh and targeting personally, which are not deserved for a doctoral student?

  Example for harsh suggestions includes follows:

  1) Don't roam outside too much, sit and do work silently;

  2) Better to eat less and work more;

  3) It is not worth for you to do this degree;

  4) Can't you understand the content that bachelor degree students can
  understand?

  5) The work done by you in this semester can be done by masters
  student in a week.

  etc..,

I don't know what is the norm in your institution, but I would characterize comments 1-3 as highly inappropriate and unprofessional. The committee should not comment on a student's work and social habits, their eating habits (this would be considered taboo in many places), or offer dismal views on their prospects after a PhD. In my department, making comments like this towards a student will, at the very least, be cause for a very unpleasant talk with the department head, and will require a written apology to the student.

Criticism on your progress or your understanding is definitely acceptable, but can be conveyed in a more conducive manner (e.g. by not comparing your understanding to that of undergraduates - offensive to both you and to undergrads).

That said, if you receive these kinds of comments, you should speak with your advisor and see what you can do to make things work better. Comments 4-5 are simply a rude way of saying that you aren't making sufficient progress.

If you feel comfortable with your advisor, and assuming a culture of abuse is not prevalent in your department, you may raise this issue with them. I for one would be furious to hear this and would probably confront the offending committee member myself. If not - try to contact student affairs.

Abuse towards students should not be tolerated.


What incentive does a professor have to allow a student to enroll in a course that is already full? I'm hoping trying to register for a course I need that is currently full, and am told that I can try contacting the professor for permission to enroll. Under what circumstances are such requests typically granted? More students = more work for the professor, so I'm trying to figure out why a professor might agree to allow me in.

My best guess is that I should:

Convince them that since I'm a good student, I won't create very much extra work for them.
Convince them that since I'm a good student, allowing me into the course will raise the average grade for the term and make them look good.

What else can I say that they might find compelling?

I disagree with your proposed strategy.  The marginal added workload of one additional student is usually negligible, and the average grade for the term is not usually something that reflects well or poorly on a professor to a significant degree.  These aren't usually the main issues.

I would expect the professor to make the decision by trying to balance the benefits to you of taking the course, versus the negative effects on the other students from having the course be more crowded.  Your case will be more compelling if you can show that:

Not being able to take the course would represent a major hardship for you.  Something on the level of delaying your graduation.  If the only effect is that taking it later is somewhat less convenient, means a fuller schedule, means getting up at 8am, etc, that won't be compelling.
The fact that you couldn't register for the course normally is due to circumstances beyond your control, and not a result of inadequate planning on your part.
You are adequately prepared for the course, and are reasonably likely to pass it.  Being a "good student" overall means something here, but more to the point is showing that you have done reasonably well in all prerequisite courses.  If your preparation is marginal, the professor might think there's not much point in giving you permission to take a class you would be likely to fail.

There isn't much you can do about the negative effects from crowding; let the professor evaluate that.  Don't make suggestions like "I could skip all the lectures so that there will still be enough seats".  That tends to counteract #3 above.

Definitely do not attempt to bribe the professor with money, favors, etc, in exchange for being allowed to take the class.  (This should go without saying, but I have known it to happen.)


Are there any good statistics on students who are second generation in higher education? We do a lot of statistical analysis on students who are first-generation HE; the first generation in their family to attend University.

But are there any similar studies on students who are second-generation HE - ie, whose parents were first-generation?

What you need is studies that control for parental education. If none of them have a university education then they are the first generation, if one of them has a university generation then they are not the first generation. So the "effect" of that variable makes the comparison you are after. Parental education is a fairly standard variable in this literature, so you should be able to find such references quickly enough.


Why scientific articles do not include year/date? I noticed that (most?) articles do not include the date of publishing/writing.

For example see this paper (on researchgate.net).

If I click for a citation on that page, I see there the year listed as "2018". But in the article itself, there is no indication when it was written.

Why is that? Or did I miss something?

PS: To clarify, I am not asking about the duration of the work, but the information when the work was done (realizing that a single point in time can not be picked). For example if there is a paper about "Method for better battery capacity", then it is a substantial information whether it was written or published in 1899, 1989 or 2018.

For most purposes, the publication date is more important than the date the work was done. There are some exceptions, but they are few. The author doesn't know the publication date when the work is done.

The publication date is a kind of meta-data about the publication, not precisely relevant to the work itself (most cases). That meta-data is maintained by the publisher, of course.

Some work, of course, is time dependent and so the authors will, then, likely say  when data was gathered, and so on.


Should I separate research into professional and "citizen science" or amateur? This question was prompted by the sign-up of researchgate, which has three sections for new users; Academia, Corporate/Government/NGO, and Citizen Science.

If I am being paid to do research, regardless of my skill level, then I feel this makes me a "professional" in my field. After all, it's my primary source of income and my "profession". I would count myself as an "amateur mathematician", however the term "amateur" implies I'm not being paid for my work. This work is my livelihood, even my skills are far below that of a genuine mathematician.

However I am also investigating a wider range of topics than my training, and it involves fields where I am unable to make any contributions however I am studying those fields and even writing small literature reviews for in-house/corporate use.

While I feel it is fair to claim I am a "blockchain researcher", when I am investigating fields for my company which may have applications but I am currently unqualified in, should I count this investigation as a part of my profession or closer to recreational activity?

While I am being paid for this rather than it being purely recreational, it is still a field which I am not at the frontier of nor deeply knowledgeable of.

Your broader question seems to be whether you are "truly" a professional researcher given that you are paid to do research but consider your research skills to be far below some of your peers. I suspect this is entirely opinion-based: there is no hard-and-fast definition for the term "professional researcher."

The specific question seems to be whether you should identify yourself as academia, corporate/government/NGO, or citizen science. Given that you are requesting access to this website as part of your official corporate portfolio, I would say that corporate/government/NGO seems like the best choice.


Approaching Another Lab With A Project Proposal Based On My Thesis Chapter During my PhD I was stuck on a metabolic engineering problem which I figured out while writing up. I found plenty of evidence for the cause of the problem and devised a complementary system to allow for the desired pathway to function as intended.

I have had a turbulent but often functional working relationship with my primary supervisor, however, I am quite unpopular with the wider group. After my viva, I had a chat with my supervisor and he wanted to know exactly how the plan worked and how long would it take. Then he suggested I return in a month to explain the idea to a colleague of his who could assess its merit. Now he wont return my emails as I am trying to finalise the meeting.

Is there an ethics/legal problem with taking the idea to another professor to see if they are interested in having another student complete the work, or does the original university own the rights to the data that the idea was based on?

I suspect some foul play on the part of my advisor, who may want to complete the project without me as an expression of resentment stemming from previous fall outs. I feel like he is trying to plagiarise my work, either that or deliberately trying to prevent it from getting finished out of spite after teasing me with the possibility. Is what I am trying to do plagiarism of his work? Some of the project is based on my second supervisors idea but he got this idea from a paper and just transferred it into another platform. My second supervisor wont accept that my fix is viable, I did first suggest it in my 2nd year of research, but I lacked the evidence. Now I have plenty of evidence to support my idea, it seems watertight and I want to finish it.

Is there an ethics/legal problem with taking the idea to another professor to see if they are interested in having another student complete the work...?

Your current collaborator/PhD supervisor is not returning your emails. This is a signal that work will not proceed. For confirmation, you can outright ask them whether they want to proceed, and inform them that you'll proceed alone if you do not receive a response within a certain window, e.g., two weeks. Assuming you still don't receive a response, you can work with who you want to complete the work. (I'm unsure why another student is being sought. You'll surely need to contribute for any collaboration to be viable.)

  ...or does the original university own the rights to the data that the idea was based on?

With regards rights, you haven't given enough information to answer. If the prior work appears in your thesis, then anyone can continue the work. If the prior work is whatever you conceived whilst employed by the university, then rights will be defined in your contract. If the prior work includes a dataset owned by the university, then permission to use that dataset will be required.


Advisor interferes too much with my research I have an advisor who interferes too much with my research. When I am in the lab he always comes and sits near me telling me exactly what to do even the tiniest details, and most of the time he is just doing the design himself (Actually holding the mouse and doing the design) and I am just sitting and looking at him. The only tasks I am asked to do on my own are the simplest tasks that require no brain abilities at all.

Once, he got angry because I was trying some design I found in a book and he got angry and told that I am wasting time and I should do only what he tells me to do. I come to work at weekends only to find him waiting for me, and doing the same all over again. He calls me at weekends and during work days when I am not in the lab to come and work just to give himself an excuse in front of other professors to sit on my station and design.

I have to submit my thesis very soon, and when he sees me writing it he tells me that I am wasting time and I should do the stuff he asked me to do. I told him the I have an external examiner which have to see a draft very soon when I defend my thesis, and he said "Yes and I am in your committee and you have to make me happy".

Seriously, I just want him to back off! I feel very offended by this treatment and that I am just a "trained monkey" who does only what he asked to do.

What words can I use to tell him that he should give me my space and that I want to do my research on my own ??

The basic issue is that your advisor is a micromanager, and if you have to submit the thesis shortly, it's unlikely you're going to get him to change his behavior in time to affect your thesis positively.

Therefore, I think your best course of action depends on the relative "cost" of switching projects. If you are somewhere What you should do depends on the rules in place at your institution. If you are able to easily switch projects and restart your thesis in a new group under a different advisor, that may be the best possible outcome you can achieve.

However, if you're at an institution like mine, where the topic, advisor, and timeline of the thesis have to be approved in advance, starting over may carry serious consequences. Rather than run the risk of not being able to complete your degree, I would recommend that you consider just "toughing it out" and putting up with your advisor for whatever time you have left.

If you are determined to raise the issue, though, the best thing might be to indicate politely that you believe his supervision is making both of your jobs more complicated: you're not learning as much as you could if you were working independently, and he's not as productive as he could be if he weren't spending all of his time watching you work.


What is the difference between a school and a department? Some universities have a School of Something and some a Department of Something. Are they identical and just two common terms for the same thing, or they are different in the university structure?

My impression is that a School is generally larger than a Department. Probably, school is an academic unit between department and faculty. Maybe, a faculty has a few schools, and each school hosts some departments.

The term school and department are going to mean different things at different institutions. Generally speaking, the term school refers to a larger unit within a university than department and many schools will contain multiple departments. For example, Harvard University contains a School of Public Health (and other schools) which contains a Department of Epidemiology (and other departments).

That said, names are often not even used uniformly or consistently within universities. For example, at the same organizational level as the School of Public Health at Harvard is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences which runs both Harvard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. My current university uses the concept of an academic "unit". Many units are "schools" (e.g., the School of Public Health or the Information School) but others are not (e.g., the College of Arts of Sciences). There is also an organization within the university called the Graduate School which cuts across and oversees  work in different units and schools.

Sometimes, smaller "schools" will not contain separate departments. Sometimes, a large department in a large school might be larger than entire schools elsewhere in the university! Sometimes, the terms might be used interchangeably. In many other cases, they won't. In some cases, one or both terms might not even be used at all!


What to say to a student who has failed? A student has failed a course I just taught. Grades were announced yesterday. This student sent me a very long heartbreaking email about how this means she will be kicked out of her program, how she tried very hard, and how she wants me to reconsider her final grade.

I'm relatively new at being a university instructor; this isn't the first course I've taught at a university, nor is it the first time I've had a student fail a course. But this is the first time I've had a student beg and plead with me, and I'm not sure how to respond.

I genuinely feel bad for her, as she tried hard and came frequently to my office hours, but I ultimately believe that she did not demonstrate on the final exam that she had a good enough handle on the course material to pass.

What should I say to politely tell her that she will still fail, without sounding insensitive?

Edit: Some more relevant information, since some have asked. The course in question is a calculus course for an Engineering program. The student has previously failed and retaken courses, but she is not permitted to have any more failing grades if she wants to remain in the Engineering program. Failing this course is essentially her last `strike'. She will still be allowed to study at the university, but in a different program.

Edit 2: Thanks for all the responses. I wasn't looking for moral justification for failing her or looking for alternative solutions to the situation. I was simply looking for advice on how to respond in a professional manner. And I certainly got that advice from some of the responses.

In the end, I essentially responded with a concise email stating essentially that, while I sympathize with her situation, there was nothing I could do in good conscience to modify her grade at this time, and that I did not believe she demonstrated sufficient mastery of the material to warrant a grade of 50% on the exam. Then I closed with "I wish you the best of luck in your future studies. Sincerely, [me]"

It still doesn't make me feel any better about failing her. :(

(I also will add that this my first time teaching this particular course, and I have certainly learned my own lessons for next time. In particular regarding common misconceptions in the material and what to focus on in the lectures. This will hopefully mitigate the chance of a future student failing in a similar way.)

Edit 3: A few comments have suggested that I might reconsider the student's exam grade. To be clear, this student had about a 50% average in the course going into the final and would have therefore needed at least a 50% on the final exam to pass the course. However, the student only received about 35% on the final (while the average for the class on the final was 73%). I could not, in good conscience, bump the score so significantly to warrant giving out a passing grade in this case.

It was clear to me that the student had failed. I was only asking for advice on how to respond to her request that I pass her!

I think that you explained the situation very clearly and sensitively in your third paragraph, and that you should send a message to the student along the same lines. All you'd really have to say is that while you of course sympathize with the student, her performance on the final exam makes clear that she did not gain sufficient mastery of the course material to pass the class.

I'll add that I think your message to the student should be clear and concise. The longer your response to the student the more likely it is that you'll wind up in a long, drawn out exchange that stresses both of you out while benefiting no one.


How to enter graduate school in a social science discipline from a computer science background? I am a senior computer science major at a state school in the US. I have done internships at "Big 4" companies in my field as well as CS research with NSF grants.

I am interested in getting a Master's degree in a social science (history, English, or something related) but am not sure how I could get a school to look at my application. They are looking for students who have extensive experience and internships in related fields, which I don't have.

For what it's worth, I write very well and read copiously in my free time. My standardized test scores bear this out; when I took the SAT in high school, I got perfect scores on the reading and writing sections. Professors have also been very impressed with my analyses in humanities classes, though I haven't taken very many of them.

I understand that it probably wouldn't be so hard to get into a state school, but it would be nice to be accepted to a top 10 or so university. Is there a good way to get these schools to consider my application?

I am not totally familiar with how social science graduate programs work. But, in general, in order to have success with grad school applications after your undergraduate: (1) you should show you have the theoretical knowledge needed to succeed in your research and graduate studies (2) AND you should show some hands-on experience, at least tangentially, related to the area of research and study you want to pursue.
If you want to get into some interdisciplinary areas like computational social science, e.g. social network data analysis, your computer science background is a definite asset that definitely helps you both get into the program and get ahead in your studies. If a program of choice is interdisciplinary enough, they may not care about your lack of coursework in humanity or suggest you take prerequisites as part of their program.
However, if you don't want to "beat around the bush", so to speak, and get into more theoretical and pure social science fields, I think you need to take the essential coursework similar to what students with those majors take. Having research in social science beforehand also would work if you can allocate some time for that. It may require you to take an extra year to take all the extra credits but I argue that it also benefits you and increases your success in grad school, even considering the fact that you are a self-studied and well-versed person in social science. Grad school is not often a good place to catch up with fundamentals. I think it is important to take your time and build the foundations before starting your grad school studies.