Advisor walked in while I was complaining about her; How can I minimize the damage to our relationship? I work in a lab. This evening, thinking that my advisor had already left for the day, I started telling my peers in the lab that she has a bad attitude about a few things, and she was showing off a lot about her work last summer. Out of nowhere, she walked into the lab and was visibly upset, and I feared that she had heard what I said.

I just finished my masters and had asked my advisor about pursuing a Ph.D. She kind of gave an OK and I am supposed to meet with her tomorrow morning to discuss about it.  Although our relationship has been on and off at times, I feel bad because she helped me a lot in past and now she will feel I am an ungrateful jerk.

What will be the best way to approach this issue so that I can minimize the damage to our relationship?

From what you have said, I am not sure even if she heard you. All you need to do for now is to STOP this attitude. You will never find a perfect supervisor... Yes, you can talk with a friend about how difficult your life is with this supervisor. But this should be out of the lab and avoid -- as much as you can -- other students with the same supervisor.

Show her that you value her research and expertise (in case you don't value her research, then find another supervisor).
Do not talk about anything happened unless she started the talk.

I completely disagree with @Penguin_Knight on the gift thing. Being so nice in a typical meeting indicates something weird is happening. Do not do it. (I believe this is a cultural thing some people may see it really good others will think about it in a very bad context.)


When should you require to be addressed by your title? I have been asked to sign a lengthly and detailed contract in order to teach a course as an adjunct at a local community college. The administrator requesting this information signed it with her title and her degree. The document was addressed to me as "Mr." ... I have both a Ph.D. and a thirty plus year career at a major university where I retired as a named research professor (facts clearly indicated on the vita in the administrator's possession!). Am I wrong to expect to be addressed as Dr. in such documents?

A lot of admin documents are produced by machine these days, the ones that aren't are usually done by clueless people who aren't paid an awful lot. It would be ideal that they addressed you as 'Dr.', but unless they deal with a lot of doctors they probably just shoved your name into the standard mail merge template.

If you'd rather be addressed as 'Dr.' then raising the issue with them wouldn't be stepping out of line, after all you are the one providing them with a service.


Is it unethical to interview at a more prestigious program while currently enrolled in a PhD somewhere else? I applied at two different PhD positions at universities X & Y a while back (both in EU, I prefer not to disclose identity for specific reasons, sorry).

I got into X and have been here for about 2 months, and I heard from Y a few days ago inviting me to interview with them. Y is more prestigious, and also many of my friends are there. (Note: Both positions had different starting dates, X was more of a start-earliest program, Y is for 2015 admits)

Considering I am more interested in studying at University of Y, would it be unethical for me to take up the interview with Y, after I am here for 2 months?
(I am at X as a RA presently)

No, there are no ethical issues. There is nothing unethical neither in keeping it confidential until you are officially admitted at University Y (and I think it's advisable).

The only not-so-good thing could be that if you built a relationship of trust with your current supervisor (but I suspect you haven't since it hasn't been long), this person might get disappointed to hear you leave. But generally, people understand the argument of higher reputation of the program.

Consider however, that University X might not reimburse the tuition you already paid and that you might encounter other administrative inconveniences.


Does providing textbook solutions benefit the student? Often textbooks don't have solutions to problems and if they do they are often password protected for instructor use only.

Has any research been done (in peer reviewed journals) that looks at whether providing solutions to students actually benefits the student in their actual understanding of the subject?

Why do you need "research in peer reviewed journals" for something you can easily figure out experimentally yourself in a couple of semesters using exactly the setup you are interested in? The students also provide you with a lot of feedback themselves if you bother to ask them and to listen to the answers. The typical answer to this question (coming from those who have no trouble with the subject) is something along the lines "Yes, I do need to see written solutions to exercises to have a sample of exemplary argument construction and mathematical writing I can follow". I buy this 100% and do not care in the slightest what the modern education theories say after that.


What if the school asks the students to submit the letters themselves? I have been applying to a bunch of grad programs recently and I have noticed that some schools, specially those based in the UK, ask students to upload the reference letters themselves to the application platform, instead of sending an e-mail to the nominated referees.
This puts me in an awkward position because the point of the letters is to be confidential and asking the professors to send them to me would mean that they would either refuse or send me a "plain" letter, as I have heard from colleagues that those are the replies they have been getting.
What is the proper way to proceed in this situation? How do I ask a professor to send me a decent letter that they would not mind me seeing?

I had this experience as a letter writer (in France). I just sent my letter to the applicant and she uploaded it. My letter was very positive so I did not think much about the situation although it did seem weird to me.
I think in some US Universities (in California?), when you submit your letter, you should indicate whether you allow the applicant to look at it or not. I do not write bad letters so I always indicate that I do not mind.


Is it OK to ask the graduate chair if my background is competitive? I'm planning to apply for a M.S. in some Universities at the US, and at one of those, I tried 2 times and failed (bad GRE scores). Now I reapplied, and got better results (Q:159, V:154, A:3.5), but not sure if it will put be in better shape than before. One thing I think it can be a differential is the fact I had an exchange program back at that university. Is it ok to send my grades to the graduate chair and ask if my application is competitive enough?

I am currently the Graduate Coordinator of my department (mathematics, UGA), and it is the season for me to get a lot of emails from would-be or might-be graduate students.  Variations on "Will my application be competitive if I apply?" are the most common question I'm getting.

It's okay to ask this question in the sense that it doesn't bother me at all and I will reply with something.  On the other hand, my reply in most cases has been along the lines "Thank you for your interest in our program.  I encourage you to apply."  I don't think it's in anyone's best interests -- mine, my department's, or the questioner's -- for me to try to evaluate the degree of competitiveness of an application based on very incomplete, self-described information.  I can (and do) address the required components of the application.  If based on the information provided it seems like applying to a graduate (usually PhD) program at a top 50 math department may be a mismatch -- e.g. the applicant's undergraduate major is in something other than mathematics (or a closely related field with many mathematics classes taken) -- then I might explore that a bit in the reply.  But the bottom line is that the application process is relative and competitive, so more than likely we can't know how any given applicant will fare until we see all the applications: i.e., until we go through the application process.  (However, if the self-described profile of the applicant sounds very strong, then I may mention that and encourage them more enthusiastically.)

A few final comments:

1) I can see that it is frustrating to apply, perhaps repeatedly, without knowing one's chances.  But in fact the state of applying for a bunch of things without knowing whether one will get them is a quite common one in later academia, so maybe it would be well to wrap your mind around it now.  (It is not a trivial thing to wrap one's mind around.  I was a really excellent high school student.  When I took the PSATs I expected to become a National Merit Scholar, and I did.  I applied to the University of Chicago not just because I expected to get admitted but because I expected to get a merit-based scholarship, and I did.  I had enough of this kind of expected success that when it came to optional academic competitions / scholarships for which the outcome was in real doubt -- and especially when I didn't see success improving my life in any clear way -- I often didn't apply / show up / give my best effort, to the point of occasionally disappointing my mentors.  Looking back at all this, I must say that I find my behavior quite rational.  But it's not the way that "grownup academia" works.) I spend weeks every year writing a big national grant application; thus far, I've applied for the grant five times, gotten it once, not gotten it three times, and the latest time is pending and will be for many months.  For this grant (NSF), I do get feedback every year, which is helpful overall (though sometimes frustrating in its particulars).  On the other hand, I have applied twice for a smaller, privately funded grant (Simons).  When I didn't get it the first time and got no feedback about it, I was pretty taken aback and felt like complaining about it.  But I thought it through: it was clearly to my advantage to suck it up and apply again.  I did, and I got the grant the second time.  That's grownup academic life -- relatively successful grownup academic life, in fact.

2) There is a kernel of advice lurking in point 1) above.  The best time to ask for feedback is soon after someone has carefully evaluated your application.  If you've applied to a program and didn't get in, you have every right to ask why and how you could improve your application.  It sounds like you think that the reason you didn't get in were your GRE scores: is that what you were told?  If so, given that you improved on the thing they told you to improve upon: that sounds good, you should probably reapply.  Finally, if you already spoke to someone at the program, they told you to improve your GRE scores, and now you have, then it makes considerably more sense to me to continue that conversation with the person who told you to improve your scores: given that your GRE scores have improved so-and-so much, do they think you should reapply?  In that situation you have a better chance of being told something substantive, I think.

3) My program is relatively small (we generally enroll no more than 15 students per year).  In quality, the distance from the very top programs and from "less than serious" PhD programs are each rather large.  Once in a while we "steal" a student from a top twenty program, and sometimes for various reasons we take chances on students with inferior backgrounds.  So our admissions process really plays out a bit differently every year.  I could imagine that a program which is significantly larger, better or worse than ours might have less variation.  I suppose I would nevertheless be surprised if such departments were significantly more forthcoming in their reactions to questions like this, but I don't really know.


Should I finish all work that I started before PhD graduation? I have enough work done for my PhD dissertation, but I also have one on-going project which I don't plan to include it in my dissertation. My advisor suggests that I have to finish all the work before I graduate. Is it so?

My advisor doesn't currently have funding and I am not being paid now. He also wants me to share my codes with him and other students, should I do so?    I don't quite want to share my work because 1) I was not be paid; 2) I wrote the codes totally on own and didn't receive any technical helps from my advisor (my advisor is a good story-teller, but he barely knows anything concerning technologies). Am I thinking correctly?

If you are not being paid, you should not be spending your time on a PhD.  You should tell your advisor you are not able to continue without financial support.

It is your advisor's job to recommend what you should include in your thesis.  Nobody who has not read your work will be able to advise you on this.

You want to keep the code you have written secret.  To determine if you can do this, you need to consult your university's intellectual property policy.  Very likely the policy says the university owns the rights to all your work, in which case you should hand it over.  In any case, keeping secrets when secrecy is not an ethical requirement is poor scientific practice.


Is making minor adjustments to an online tutorial for a coding assignment considered plagiarism? For one of my pieces of coursework I have to make a game engine and I wasn't completely understanding what my lecturer was going on about. So I looked online and found a tutorial on how to make one and its been really useful and I understand better how it all works but my coursework is basically just the tutorial code.

I submit it in a couple of weeks so it may be a bit late to start thinking this but isn't it just plagiarism? I'm not copy and pasting the code but I'm writing it practically word for word. But on the other had there only so many ways you can use OpenGL and make it look different and do what you want it to do.

General Rule: Make it clear what your own contributions are, and where the other stuff is coming from.

Simply adding an explanation to your coursework on how you followed the tutorial, how far your modifications went, etc makes sure that you are not committing plagiarism. However, it is still perfectly plausible that your lecturer decides that the extent of your own contribution is insufficient. Thus, I would recommend checking in advance of the deadline.


Strategies to remember papers that you read What strategies do you use to remember papers that you read?
I usually take notes, but when after a while I look at the notes, I don't remember most of the details. So I have to go back to the original paper and read many sections once again.
Are there better strategies for remembering key points from papers you read for a longer time? I am mostly talking about CS and Math papers in which details can be very easily forgotten.

The advice I was given by my supervisor is to write about a paragraph on each of the four following points for each paper you read (note, this is from a very CS perspective):

What's the context for the paper, in other words, what is the issue that the paper's trying to tackle, and what's the prior work in the area, or the work that the paper's trying to build off. For word published as parts of bigger projects, what's the overall aim of the project, and how does the paper fit in.
What's the key contribution of the paper, i.e. what is the central idea, or improvement that the paper presents over the state of the art. I (personally) find this one of the more important sections (especially in terms of remembering papers later), as this is where you need to really hone in on what the code idea behind the paper is, without all the extraneous implementation detail/proofs/arguments.
Criticisms of the work, no research is perfect! I'm personally terrible at looking back at papers I've read with rose tinted glasses, leading to a little bit of imposter syndrome. Having a list of criticisms of the paper can help to dull that, as well as providing a good counterbalance to the "key contribution" section.
Any other thoughts. As the purposes of the four points is to help remember the paper later, it's also important to make a note of what you personally thought while reading the paper. Really liked a sidenote they made? Make a note of it. Found an corner case you don't think they cover properly? Make a note of it - you could turn it into research later!

I usually find that I take about 10 minutes writing notes on each paper, along with about the amount of text that I've written for this answer. Your mileage as to how much you want to say about each paper may vary however.


Potential Change of Supervisor: Who to talk to first? I am considering trying a change of PhD supervisors.

While I do get along with my current ones as humans (they are nice to me), I feel like this is not the case academically. Our interests don't align as much as we originally (end of last year, when I started) thought, and I feel like they are going to take me into a kind of project now that does not fit my expertise or where I want to go as an academic.

There is a group at my university that does things that would fit my expertise and that I would be interested in working with. I want to contact them about it and see whether they would be willing to "adopt me" (I am funded by the university with funds that are not bound to a project or a supervisor).

My question in this situation: Who should I ask first?
I am worried that if I tell my supervisors about this without having sorted my "exit option" I would put myself at risk of alienating them and then being stuck in that situation if the other group does not want me/this or if I somehow need them to make this change. Then again, if I talk to the other group first, they might point out I should just talk to them first. Any advice?

This is very hard decision to make.
I would first talk to my group, let them knom my opinion and how I don't feel like that their path is my path. So i would talk to them like person to person, and listen to what they have to say. For me, this is more ethical, and less serious consequences may appear.
After the conversation, I would rethink what to do next.


Forced out of an abusive advisor relationship, how to find an advisor in another university? I'm posting for a friend in the interest of anonymity.
For context, they're in the third year of a US mathematics PhD, and are currently without an advisor following the failure of an 18 month academic relationship with a highly prominent senior faculty member. What can be said of their academic relationship was that it often consisted of generally unhealthy behaviours (e.g. frequent extended yelling) from the advisor. The decision to terminate the relationship was taken by the advisor, and the official position is that the cause of its failure was personal incompatibility and diverging research interests. The advisor officially is available to provide strong recommendation letters to potential alternative advisors.
My friend intends to remain in the PhD program, but the problem is that there are no other professors with a similar research interest at their institution. They currently have a new internal co-advisor, and the department is generally on board with supporting an external arrangement. The alternative would be to start from scratch in a radically different research area at a somewhat late stage in their degree.
The question is, how should they go about cold-emailing potential advisors from other universities? Their interim advisor has suggested that the most important aspect of such an email would be addressing the double red flags associated with having an previous academic relationship fail and their stated research incompatibility with any of the many other members of their department. My friend believes that it is necessary to clearly address the situation (in neutral terms without negative language) in such an email, and that not accounting for their work over the past 18 months is not an option.

(Written as if directly to your friend.) Depending on where you are, "starting over" may not mean starting at the beginning. In a new program you would likely be already more advanced than you once were. In particular, you may be much closer to passing any necessary comprehensive exams. And you have a more sophisticated view of research in the subject.
But, to remain where you are, with your current co-advisor, I'd suggest that you first try to work through that person rather than cold-emailing people and having to explain a difficult situation. While the blame for the current situation might lie completely with the former advisor, it won't necessarily be interpreted that way by people you contact yourself. "Why would I want to work with someone who ...?"
But your co-advisor has contacts, I hope, and they can contact others. The explanation of what is going on and your potential for success will be better believed coming from a third party.
Of course, there may be other faculty level advocates you can also use.
But at least you should explore this possibility with the co-advisor. Likewise, the possibility of moving can be discussed and the co-advisor can also help with that if necessary.


confused after accepting PhD offer? Your experience or advice is very much appreciated! I have recently accepted a PhD offer. The subject is very close to what I was working on during my Master's years. I really worked hard back then and fortunately managed to publish high-quality papers.
I had several offers at the time and it was really difficult for me to choose between them since they were all good universities. I finally chose the university that I felt better about it and I was happy by my choice at that time. The factors that I liked about the place I chose were that:

•   Their field is very close to what I have done during my Master's years and therefore I can easily proceed during my PhD.

•   The supervisor is a well-known person with a good resume and lots of connections in academia.

•   The chemistry seemed right and the supervisor seemed supportive and was very eager to have me as a PhD student.

The problem is, after some time passed, I started to develop lots of negative thoughts and now, some issues that were not important to me back then, are freaking me out right now.

I am thinking I decided too quickly and I should have applied to some better universities that I didn’t consider at that time.

First of all, The PhD offer that I have accepted is in a non-English speaking country. Although at first I was very eager and excited to learn a new language, it now freaks me out to live in a place where people don't speak my language.

Also, now I am thinking maybe my current field of research is not something worth pursuing. I was really passionate about this topic during my Master's years but now I am thinking maybe it is not a worthy topic and it will be too restricting when applying for a postdoc.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to decline my offer since I think it would really annoy the professor. And considering the fact that she has lots of connections in academia and that the academia is a very small world, I think it would be very bad for my reputation. But I just can't get rid of these negative thoughts.

I was wondering if anyone has been in this situation before and if this is common between students.

I appreciate any advice on this situation. Your thoughts and experiences will be a great help to me.
Thanks a lot in advance. 

UPDATE:
Hi every one. Thanks for all the answers. It has been 6 months from when I posted this and I just wanted to share my experience, I hope it might help someone.
I talked to the professor and asked for some extra time to decide. I was really lucky since the professor understood my situation and didn't pressure me. I ended up finding a much better offer and accepted the new one and I am totally happy about it.
Here is my advice to help others not to make the same mistake:
Never ever accept a PhD offer too quickly. Even if it sounds very good. Take as much time as you can and consider every option you have. Do talk to your classmates and previous professors. Their opinions might be very helpful to you when choosing an offer.
Hope that helps :)

Some doubts are pretty natural. While the bird in the hand may be worth two in the bush, those others look pretty sweet from a distance. I don't think any of the issues you raise should cause you to really want to switch except, possibly, the language issue. However, you should note that academics nearly everywhere are English speakers even if imperfectly. If the other country is, for example, in Western Europe, you will find that nearly every working age adult (and all kids) speak English very well. The issue will be in group situations in which they might prefer their native language over English. Then it would depend on their willingness to accommodate. If you are in a field in which large groups of people much interact it might be an issue. For daily life you can get along pretty well nearly everywhere.

I've not been in your situation but have colleagues all over the world and language has seldom been an issue.

For everything else, I'd just suggest you relax.


Respond to the interview invitation late I received an invitation of interviews for my PhD application. However, I missed the email and found it was in my mailbox a week later.

I replied the mail as soon as I found it on the last Friday, and I sent another one on Monday after not receiving a timely reply. Am I worried to much ? I know the coordinators might be very busy at this moment.

What should I do to confirm my very strong wish to let them arrange interviews for me ? Is everything too late already ? Should I call ?

The following is the full text:

'''

On behalf of the XXX Graduate Admissions Committee, I am pleased to invite you to interview for our program. As you are an international applicant, we will be scheduling 2 - 4 skype interviews for you with multiple faculty members. This will give different faculty the opportunity to speak with you about your interests and experience.

Email your SKYPE ID to Ms.X , the Program Administrative Assistant, at: X@yyy.edu. All the logistics with your interviews will be coordinated by Ariana.

Please keep in mind that all skype interviews will be scheduled before the end of January. From January 9th through January 27th , send all of your date and time availability to participate in a 20-40 minute interview, as well as your location so that adjustments can be made for time zone’s.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Admissions Committee

'''

I can't imagine you would be knocked out of the running because of your delayed response.  However, since this will create something of a headache for the scheduler, I hope you can offer them a lot of flexibility in the scheduling.  For example, if you have any non-urgent doctor's appointments coming up (during working hours in the target time zone) in the next two weeks -- if possible, reschedule them.

Make sure you outline very clearly any remaining constraints on your interview availability.


Research in "Research Engineering" from Wikipedia:

  Software engineering (SE) is the application of a systematic, disciplined,
  quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance
  of software, and the study of these approaches.

I was wondering if there is something similar for research, something that we could call Research engineering. I imagine it to be a research field on its own, with students "researching on how to do research". I believe software development has benefited a lot from research in SE. Maybe research could also benefit from Research engineering.

The questions are:

is there some institute or some university department in the world where they work on Research Engineering?
in which faculty you would position such department/institute?

Edited: After getting a couple of good answers, I am still not completely satisfied, so I would like to clarify my question. What I am really interested in is indeed a "software engineering" approach. I am not interested in philosophical or sociological research. In fact, the question I had originally in mind was whether it's possible or not to apply actual software development methodologies to research. In more concrete terms, I am wondering  whether anyone has studied the application in research of models similar to the waterfall, or the spiral model, or things like extreme programming, Scrum, etc... (Note: these are just examples, please don't comment to each of them one by one).

There is plenty of "research on research" (or "science of science").

There are dividid into different fields, e.g.:

Scientometrics - measuring citations, networks of collaborators, relations between topics and other quantities characterizing the scientific output.
Sociology of science - treating science as a activity of groups of people, with its history etc.
For example there is a great book Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Research on collective intelligence, innovation (when, where and how does it happen), etc.
General fields related to education, didactics, teamwork and management.

As you asking about engineering (i.e. how things work in practice), I don't even mention things like philosophy of science. Also, as you see, the answer depends on scale - from an individual, through a group or an institution to a country, the world nowadays or our civilization.

Typically it is done under umbrella of complex systems, complexity, network science, econophysics or data-mining and modeling in sociology. There are institutes doing it, see e.g. the front page of the Santa Fe Institute. Also, there are some projects on it, e.g. QLectives.

ADDED:

As you are interested in the optimization (not only the observation) and on the micro scale: some findings may implicitly give hints, e.g.:

R. Kenna, B. Berche, Critical mass and the dependency of research quality on group size (2010) says that you need a critical number of researchers to make it working smoothly,
B. Jamtveita, E. Jettestuena, J. Mathiesena, Scaling properties of European research units (2009) says that the larger an institute, the higher percentage of administrative workers it has.

Other things may be harder to find, as in science it works a lot in apprentice-master mode, with approaches differing from a group to a group. So it may be not as easy to be serialized (as in different fields, countries, etc. one may need to have different approach); and when you don't a large enough sample, you cannot use quantitive methods in a meaningful way.

Moreover, now we are in the phase preceding formalized studies, as only recently people started to share with the world their soft and subjective findings on that matter, e.g.:

Materials for Nurturing Scientists (a collection) on Uri Alon Lab website (BTW: he is the right person to talk about it, as he promotes such exchange of information on research)
G. Whitesides, Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper (2004)
J. Gallian, Advice on giving a good powerpoint presentation (2006)

and on things like academia.SE, for a bit of self-reference.


Open university and admissions into a US Masters Can a student with a bachelor's in engineering with very little chemistry take some courses in chemistry to get into a chemistry masters? How do US masters view courses taken from Open University, particularly in chemistry?

Some of this may be superfluous but the US system is very different from anything in UK or EU. In the first place there is no national system at all. Even within a single state, policies can differ widely, though the official state university system (so called public colleges, but not the same idea as UK public colleges) will usually share a set of policies within that state. But many schools, including some very highly rated ones (Stanford, Harvard, Yale, etc. i.e "Private colleges") aren't part of any system. Some "flagship" schools within a state may also have more rigorous admissions than the rest of the state system (UCBerkeley, UMichigan, etc.)

While Open University in general is highly regarded, each college (or system of colleges) will have its own admissions policies. These can even differ by discipline, so Chemistry might be different from Mathematics. Some admissions systems are more personalized, depending on interviews, and some have various requirements on grade averages, required courses, and other things.

The only real way to know if X is acceptable at a US university is to ask that institution or to apply formally. If your situation is non standard you might get asked for additional information. If an educational program is very popular and also highly regarded the unusual cases might be easier to simply reject as there are enough very highly qualified applicants who are easy to judge.

In general, however, a Masters degree application won't face extremely rigorous requirements. This may be different from European experience. It would be a different story for doctoral study, of course.

With all that said, I would guess that if you meet a particular school's requirements for prerequisite courses, roughly what an undergraduate would be expected to have in that discipline, and your grades were good, and you represent yourself well in the application, then I doubt that having studied at Open U would be an issue - most places. But the only way to know is to ask the institution in question and expect to get different answers from different institutions.

BTW, students in the US think of this "system" as perfectly normal.


How should I reply to this Professor's email? The following is the last email I received from a Professor in June 2019, and recently (in Dec 2019) I submitted my Ph.D. application to this University.

"Thanks for writing and for the great ideas -- I see a lot of energy and promise in your thoughts, and I encourage you to try to pursue some of these questions -- most, in fact, are exciting and open research areas. I also encourage you to apply for PhD at YYY University.

Best wishes,
Professor X"

Now that I have submitted my application, I want to send a simple email to this Professor reminding her about my interest to join her group and the discussion we had 4 months back (through emails).

Can anyone suggest a draft of the email that I can send to this Professor?

Can anyone suggest a draft of the email that I can send to this Professor?

Reply to the Professor's original email, so that your response appears in the same thread; perhaps include the original snippet, i.e.,

  Thanks for writing and for the great ideas -- I see a lot of energy and promise in your thoughts, and I encourage you to try to pursue some of these questions -- most, in fact, are exciting and open research areas. I also encourage you to apply for PhD at YYY University.

and write something along the lines of:

Further to your positive encouragement, I have submitted my PhD application to YYY University.

Thereafter, it depends on your agenda. E.g., you might want to reopen discussion of  joining her group, for which you could use:

Given the seeming alignment between our research interests, I would like to join your group. Can we discuss that possibility, perhaps by telephone?


Worldwide Dissertation Database? or French, German, Italian ones? Is there a global/worldwide database of dissertations? If not, how can I access French, German, Italian, etc. dissertations online?

I am not aware of an international database, but basically all german dissertations have to be submitted to the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek), so if they exist in physical form they can be accessed at the libraries in Frankfurt and/or Leipzig. If they only exist in electronical form, they are still registered at the library. The following link is going to give you a list of all german dissertations that are freely available online:
DNB search

The DNB also has a manual about searching for dissertations, however I could only find a german version that is available here


Academia vs. Industry in a short graduate program (computer science) I am an M.S. in Computer Science student at an excellent school, and I am trying to decide between pursuing a career in research (getting a PhD), and going into the industry to work for a company like Google. Unfortunately, the program I am in is only 3 semesters long, so there is not really sufficient time to do research before graduating without sacrificing a course I really want (and need) to take (I also did not do Computer Science as an undergraduate so I have a very high return for any courses I do take / high opportunity cost for any courses I don't take).

With this in mind, my questions are:

What type of factors should I be considering, knowing that doing research to see if I enjoy it is likely not on the table? How does one know that they want to do research? Is loving the theoretical aspects of your courses enough?
I am quite confident I could do the PhD at my current school, which is my top choice given the faculty advisor(s) I would have. The research would be absolutely fascinating, well funded, and almost certainly set me up for a fantastic career in either academia or industry when I graduate.
Getting the PhD would take 5 - 6 years (starting from now).
I would be giving up roughly 600k in income (before tax) if I did the PhD, not including any promotions I may get during the the way or inflation, which would drive this number up. I would also expect to be doing fun and interesting work in industry.

My program is geared towards setting people up for a career in industry, but it has also been made clear that it can be molded to set students up for a PhD track as well. My apologies if this is too open ended. I can clarify further if you would like.

I actually don't think you have to pretend that your choice is firm.  Lots of people leave Ph.D. programs and join industry.  Some of them then go back to their Ph.D. programs afterward.  Lots of people work in industry for a few years and then do a Ph.D.  Some of them go back to industry afterward.  And this is true in lots of disciplines, not just CS (which is rather closer to industry than some others I can think of).

It's a mistake to think that this is a choice you have to make right now and then the rest of your life will be a march down a fixed road.  Careers, and educational paths, don't work like that.

It's also a mistake to think that these kinds of decisions are hugely consequential for one's happiness.  A lot of happiness comes not from choosing the right path for you but from finding the you (as it were) in the path on which you happen to be.  See, e.g., the many Cal Newport posts on the subject, e.g.: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/09/10/the-danger-of-the-dream-job-delusion/

If I were in your position, I'd apply both to PhDs and to industry jobs, see what I get, and then make a short-term decision, with the recognition that long-term decisions do not necessarily follow.


How long does it take for a citation to show up online? How long does it take for a cited paper to show up online? I can see a couple of papers that were cited very recently and the papers containing those citations are currently online since a week or two. How long should I expect it to take before those citations show up as citations through Google Scholar or other indexing services?

Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge, Scopus and other indexing services have their own ways how the papers get into their database. For Scopus, the journal has to be registered there, and then actively send the data. It's similar for Web of Knowledge I think. Google gets the data from who-knows-where and I doubt you can control it efficiently. In general, it takes couple weeks to several months.

As dgraziotin pointed out in comments, Google Scholar indexes citations from arXiv quite quickly, in couple days. However, by many people and many institutions, arXiv papers are not considered at all regarding citations, unless they are published properly elsewhere and properly Journal-ref'ed; even then, many people don't trust that the arXiv version is correct, because nobody makes any check of this (I mean, you can put whatever Journal-ref to whatever your arXiv paper, so it's not trusted).


Short rejection after two years I've submitted a short paper to a well-known cs journal. It got rejected after two years with the below one para explanation. While I admit that the submission was not strong, I feel cheated because of waiting for two years for this explanation (no full report was made).

In the paper, the author shows that NP-completeness for [...].
The proofs are very basic and standard. The results are reasonable, so it may be acceptable if this paper was written in 1990s. However, as far as I
know, such a kind of paper is obsolete nowadays. Since 2000s, among
such papers, few papers are acceptable for [...] only when there are
some extra value to be published. For example, they solve big open
question, or the NP-completeness has very important influence to the
other research. From this viewpoint, this paper is not strong enough
for the recent [...]. So my recommendation is reject.

  What shall I do? I think this situation is unacceptable, let me know if you disagree.

I've already complained of course to the editor upon receipt of the report, but I got no answer.

ps. Btw, imo the given journal still publishes NP-completeness proofs regularly, that's why I've chosen it for my result.

You seem to mix two different aspects: Your (understandable) disappointment about the response and the long time it took to get the response.

You cannot really complain about the response itself because it generally seems to be rational and the reason for the rejection is not the long time it took. Right now you can only try to use the helpful aspects in the response to improve your manuscript.

On the other hand, you should complain about the time it took. Two years is indeed inacceptable. If you will get no reply, there is very little you can do, I'm afraid. It is probably best to look for an alternative journal.

My advice for the future: Do not submit to the journal again, but count it as an important experience: next time, you could ask in regular intervals (not too short or long, let's say every three months), and also give the process a maximum timeframe.


Is there a self-consistent citation system? I study undergraduate philosophy. My school of philosophy allows its students to use whichever citation style they prefer to use. I've used a few different styles; however, I haven't yet found a methodical one.

I'd prefer to use a style enables the user to derive the formatting for any given type of reference (e.g. a website, or a paragraph from a printed publication of a compilation of translated public-domain articles) from a set of just a few rules.

Do you know of a system like that?

Work out which journals you are most likely to be publishing in. Read their authors' guides. Pick the citation style that occurs most frequently.

Start using that now.

That way, you'll have all the tools you need in place for when you start submitting to those journals.

I think reference management software these days typically includes the ability to incorporate new citation styles, often encoded in CSL (Ctitation Style Language), as well as having the most commonly-used ones built in.

Any decent reputable citation style will be internally consistent enough, and will have rules for papers, books and various species of grey literature.


Is paying someone to fix LaTeX issues in one's thesis ethical? For my bachelor thesis in theoretical CS I paid someone to

fix some weird LaTeX issues I had
make some figures in LaTeX for which I provided exact (!) hand-drawn pictures
adjust the document class/template (font size, margins, ...) to university standards

In particular, all the text, formulae, figure sketches and remaining, say, 70% of the remaining typesetting were done by. Let me also say that I got the best grade possible to highlight that my contents were more than substantial for a bachelor thesis.

By academic standards, is it ethical to outsource parts of typesetting one's (BSc|MSc|PhD) thesis by paying someone?

Note that I am looking for opinions about the academic culture, not about legal situations. My university regulations are especially blurry and demand that one's thesis must be solely produced (in German: angefertigt) by the author. Whether that includes typesetting and in what proportion, is probably up to interpretation.

Related post: PhD student hiring a LaTeX expert to typeset thesis? asks about pragmatic reasons, not about ethical concerns.

I do not see any unethical point in this.
You were supposed to make an original contribution to your thesis in terms of your research. With respect to writing, you can take help from your friends, supervisor, or anyone else (free or paid).

In our university in New Zealand, there was a dept. which used to charge a small fee to fix language issues for students with English as a second language. I suppose this should also work for the images/pictures thing as you are not an artist but an expert in your particular field.

Cutting it short, I do not see anything unethical in it.


How was funding handled in the medieval university? How was funding of research done in the medieval universities?

Your question is based on a wrong premise: There was no funding specifically for research, because there was no research at medieval universities. Initially, they were created as "self-help" groups of students wishing to learn, first and foremost, the practice of law that was becoming more and more important to urban life. For this purpose, they banded together to pay teachers. (You can find detailed accounts of this in the Wikipedia page or the answers to this question on History.SE). This quickly included also canon law, which brought increasingly many theologians to teach at universities (who, as Stephan Kolassa points out in his comment, did make many significant contributions to the knowledge of the time).

As Darrin Thomas points out, the first research in the modern sense (that cannot be described as doing philosophy) was carried out in the Renaissance by individuals not affiliated with any institution of learning, who were funded either through private means (inheritances, church postings that left them ample free time) or patronage -- in particular, by dedicating self-published monographs to various members of nobility. These later organized themselves outside of the universities in learned societies such as the Royal Society (founded in 1660, but the first seems to be the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, founded in 1488 in Cracow). These initially received no funding (apart from the wealth of their members; for example, Robert Hooke, who built many of the experiments for the Society, became very rich by his involvement in the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire), but later received (modest) grants from the government (hence the name, Royal Society). The role of the universities (as opposed to individual researchers, which might or might not hold posts at one) was seen as that of disseminating the new knowledge.

The idea of universities as a place where research should be done (i.e., professors being hired and paid specifically for their research in addition to teaching, rather than research just being what a good teacher did on their own) is a modern one, arising in the beginning of the 19th century with the foundation of the German universities based on Alexander von Humboldt's ideal (which also strongly influenced the new American universities). To quote:

  Just as primary instruction makes the teacher possible, so he renders
  himself dispensable through schooling at the secondary level. The
  university teacher is thus no longer a teacher and the student is no
  longer a pupil. Instead the student conducts research on his own
  behalf and the professor supervises his research and supports him in
  it.

Much like modern universities, they were funded by the state: A portion of the tax money was distributed among the universities, which distributed their portion among the departments, which distributed their portion among the professors to pay for their salary and any staff or resources they might require for their research. (Needless to say, there was heavy fighting at all levels about how the money was distributed.)

Funding of specific research via grants is an introduction of the 20th century, when technical and scientific innovation increasingly required expensive equipment. Initially, this was done by corporations and private industrialists, but World War II lead to increasing government support of science and technology. This lead to the creation of national funding agencies after the war. (For example, the NSF was founded in 1950, although the German DFG, founded in 1949, actually has their root in the "Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft" founded in 1920.)


How much domain expertise and network does a special issue guest editor need? I have been invited as a special issue guest editor.  The journal is genuine (I have both published and reviewed there multiple times) but not very prestigious and sometimes seen as "easy" to get into.  So far the special issue has a title and a deadline, but the scope is yet to be defined by the guest editors.  The title is broad enough to be its own journal.  Within the fields that would fit with this title, my expertise and network range from "a little" to "none at all".

I've been a little surprised by the invitation because I thought guest editors were senior researchers in their field, and no matter how much introspection I do on the impostor syndrome, I'm not a senior researcher in this topic.

I tentatively accepted, because being a guest editor could be a great learning experience and would enhance my CV, and perhaps I don't need that much domain expertise if the other guest editors are more experienced experts and my role would be rather to carefully read papers, reviews, replies, and more reviews, before accepting a paper (or not)?

Now it turns out nobody else has accepted yet and I've been asked to find others, and I'm getting cold feet.  Could people who have experience being special issue guest editors, or who are otherwise familiar with these roles, give some advice?

In special issues, are guest editors usually senior researchers with a lot of domain expertise and an extensive network in the field?  Or do you also encounter those whose expertise is at best tangentially related?
How much of a handicap would it be to lack the in-depth expertise?  Is this a debilitating limitation or one that can be reasonably accommodated?

The field of Earth Observation / Remote Sensing.  The publisher is based in Switzerland, specialises in open access, and its journals are indexed by the usual places,

I've edited journals without holding a PhD in the past (don't ask). Doing a mediocre job is not that hard - to invite reviewers for example you just need to do a literature survey of the paper's field, which is standard Masters-level work. You can then invite reviewers even if you don't know them. The success rate is quite good - I think roughly 50% of the reviewers I invited responded to the invitation (although a substantial number decline). Doing just this, it's possible to keep the journal operating, although of course it will not do well. Since you know something about the field you should be able to do better: for example you can desk reject with more confidence, make sure every accepted paper has something interesting to say, and so on. If you can understand what the papers are saying on a high level, you should not have to worry about not being able to do a good job.

However, there are several potential problems I can see:

You've said it's an open access publisher based in Switzerland, which pretty much identifies which publisher it is. It doesn't have a great reputation. You could meet people who disapprove of you working with that publisher.
More concerningly, you are very likely to be asked to help solicit submissions. This is very different from reviewing submissions, and here a wide network will be helpful. You may also feel like the publisher is exploiting you - viewed one way, you are using your contacts to help them make money. If this troubles you, then that feeling could be exacerbated by the low response rate from other potential editors.
Yet another potential problem is "The title is broad enough to be its own journal". I would guess from this that the initiative for the special issue came from the publisher's staff, not the editor-in-chief. Although this isn't a red flag - there's a good chance the publisher got the editor-in-chief's approval before approaching you - it is something to keep in mind. Another issue is the broad scope could make it difficult for you to even put together a special issue since so many topics would be relevant. You could talk to the publisher and/or the editor-in-chief to narrow down the topic, if you feel it's appropriate.

One more thing probably worth mentioning is that you'll likely have a lot of scope to define what you want the special issue to look like. If the initiative really is from the publisher, chances are they will be willing to defer to your expertise, and the editor-in-chief won't object.

So, what to do now? If you don't care about doing a good job, you can go ahead. Leave the scope, invitations, marketing, etc to the publisher (they'll undoubtedly do a mediocre job at best, since they have no domain expertise) and just review any papers that actually are submitted. The special issue will not be pretty, but the amount of non-review work you need to do will be minimal. If you care about doing a good job, I'd suggest thinking it through before committing. Talk to the editor-in-chief, talk to a senior colleague, think about what you want the special issue to be about and who you might invite to contribute.

By the way: if you do go ahead, I'd recommend asking the publisher if they can offer free open access for your invited submissions.


Using industry productivity tools and techniques for managing student projects I'm heading a group of engineering students (from different fields) which need to build a robot (which performs tasks autonomously) as part of their courses.

There are 10 students in this group and they are divided in three or four subgroups which work on different engineering aspects. As the time frame is pretty short (2.5 months) and the students have a lot of other things to tend to, I wanted to optimize their work a bit by using some tools for project management and communication.

As I have recently been around a lot of IT people, I got to know about some of the methods and tools they use in the organization of small to medium-ish  sized(startup) companies. So my question boils down to:

Is it advisable to manage short term - medium/high workload student projects using productivity and management tools(e.g. Slack?) and techniques, or could this actually be of little use to the project(especially if the supervisor has no experience using them)?

Yes, but don't overdo it.

Using one or two services such as Slack (the one I have the most personal experience with) can be really helpful in the sense that it can facilitate and organize communication. It's easy to share files, and to collaborate and make progress even when everyone can't be in the same place at the same time (an issue with busy students). It's also good to have some kind of central communication system, where any and all meeting times and information are announced, such as goals, deadlines, progress reports, etc.

However, for it to work, everyone has to be fully aware of 1) what service(s) the team is using 2) how to sign up for and access the service (Does it have an app? Does it send alerts? Emails?) and 3) what is expected from them in terms of the service (How often are team members expected to check it? What are they supposed to report on?). Make sure that if you decide to use some service, that you have a meeting where every member of the team gets together, signs up for the service, configures anything necessary, and discusses expectations. If everyone isn't on the same page, then you're not really going to see any benefit from using it.

Also, limit yourself when choosing your tools. There's a lot of cool team management software, and organization tools out there, but for a 2.5 month project, you probably only need one or two that are most essential to the tasks at hand. Make sure that you have some tool for communication, because effective communication between busy team members is what will ultimately keep the project on track.

If you use a tool for a week and find that it's either hindering productivity or not increasing it, then either choose a different one to replace it or just scrap it totally. Don't persist in using something that isn't helping.


Etiquette for whether to send a follow-up email to a professor who will not have a reliable internet connection? I am writing this post regarding how to approach a situation I am currently in.  First, I am an undergraduate student in math who started working under a professor last Fall.  Prior to the start of Spring term, he let me know that he will be going on Sabbatical until early-to-mid April.  Additionally, they would not have a reliable internet connection.  During January I sent him an email with a question though I did not expect a response until he got back.  Given that he has presumably been back for 2 weeks, is it appropriate for me to send him another email with a follow-up or should I wait for a response.  I am sorry if this is a ridiculous question.

First, I am an undergraduate student in math who started working under a professor last Fall.

Congratulations!

  During January I sent him an email with a question though I did not expect a response until he got back. Given that he has presumably been back for 2 weeks, is it appropriate for me to send him another email with a follow-up or should I wait for a response.

That is a long time to wait for a response to an email! Definitely you should send a follow-up.

Old emails often get lost in professors' email inboxes. In general, anything that has been sent at least 2 weeks ago is probably lost forever unless you send it again (and in this case it sounds like it was 3 months ago).

I usually send follow-ups 1 week later.

  I am sorry if this is a ridiculous question.

Not a ridiculous question, but you are overthinking it :) Professors are just human; they aren't usually sitting around cursing anyone who sends them an email. Any question or concern you have you should go ahead and send -- as long as you can keep it polite and try to make it as easy as possible for them to understand and respond.

And since they are your advisor for your research, you need their feedback in order to progress successfully. Therefore, it is especially important to email them often (or connect through other means if email is not the best way with this individual).


Net salary for PhD in German university I have an offer of a Mathematics PhD position at the rate of €28000 gross in a German university. The position is itself great, a really interesting topic, but obviously I need to compare the financial aspect of it to my other offers.

I believe €28000 is 66% TV-L E13. What does this come to after tax, i.e. what would the net pay be for this position?

(I am 35 years old with no dependents if that makes a difference).

Expanding a bit on my comment: To find out the net (and gross) salary for any position at a German university (from administrative assistants up to and including the base salary of a full professor), you can use the online calculator at Öffentlicher Dienst.

It's in German only, but not that difficult to navigate. You need to know the following information (I'm not going down every branch, just the one you asked about):

For temporary positions (PhD, postdoc etc.), select TV-L ("Tarifvertrag-Länder", wage agreement of the states);  for permanent positions (lecturers, full professors), select Beamte (civil servant).
The state the university is located in (since every state has full independence in matters of science and education; this mostly affects civil servant positions). In particular, you need to select whether it's a former West or East German state.
The year you are interested in (the wage agreement is renegotiated somewhat frequently, so it might change even within a year).
The pay scale (Entgeltgruppe); PhD and postdoc positions are usually paid according to E13; senior postdocs with more responsibility such as lab management can be paid according to E14. Civil servant positions can be either A13 to A16 for lecturers (depending on administrative responsibilities) or W1 to W3 for (junior to full) professors.
The pay grade (Stufe): For some scales, you move up a grade after several years (used to be by age, now it's by time on the job). This is something you have to negotiate based on previous experience; for a starting PhD student usually only Stufe 1 makes sense. (For TV-L 13, you get bumped up to Stufe 2 in your second year and to Stufe 3 in your fourth year; if you continue on to do a postdoc, you can get up to Stufe 5; see http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/stufen.html.)
The additional pension scheme (Zusatzversorgung). This is basically the organization that keeps the money deducted from your gross salary to put into a pension fund. If you're in one of the western states, choose VBL, otherwise VBL-Ost.
The working time (Arbeitszeit) in percentage of a full (forty-odd hour) working week -- this is the important one for TV-L. PhD positions can be announced as everything from 50% to 100%; postdocs usually as 75% or 100%.  Your 66% is about par for the course (depending on the discipline); positions announced as 100% usually include teaching duties beside research.
The additional salary (monatliche Zulagen) is important for W2 and up, but very unusual for TV-L. In your case, leave it empty.
The tax class (Steuerklasse) makes the biggest difference in your net salary. If you're single and don't have another job, choose class I. If not, things can get messy -- I'll just refer you to the German wikipedia entry and wish you luck.
The church tax (Kirchensteuer) or tithe again depends on the state; if you're not registered with one of the officially recognized churches, select keine. (Otherwise it's slightly less than a tenth of the income tax, which comes out as slightly less than 1% of the gross salary).
The health insurance (Krankenkasse) depends on the scheme you're in -- it's either one of the public insurance companies ("gesetzliche Krankenversicherung"), in which case you pay a fixed percentage of your salary (which varies slightly with the company; currently it's around 15.5%) or a private insurance company ("private Krankenversicherung"), in which case you negotiate a personal contract with a certain monthly fee. If in doubt, leave the default (public insurance, current average percentage).

Putting in the information you listed (66% TV-L E13, single, no kids) and guessing the rest (western university, current wage agreement, no church affiliation, default insurance), I get an average monthly net salary of €1497.36 (according to the current -- at the time of this edit -- collective agreement for 2016).


Should I list a sub-par paper on my CV? I am an undergraduate who will be applying to graduate school in the fall.

In my academic career, I have published 1 paper in a not so well known journal (International Journal of Applied Pattern Recognition) and I believe the paper is sub-par, especially compared to the rest of my CV. Should I still list it in my CV when I apply for graduate school?

I am worried that the paper might stick out like a sore thumb in an otherwise adequate list of experience and accolades. But on the other hand, since I do not have any other papers, this might be an additional evidence of research experience, especially since I published it at the beginning of my sophomore year (I doubt the admissions committee will look too deeply at the dates and come to that conclusion though..).

Perhaps your dim view of you paper isn't because it isn't good, but rather a reflection of your growth in the field since you wrote it. You have more knowledge and higher standards now. Your old work may seem naive now, though it didn't then, and it might not to other readers.

Yes, I'd list it in grad school applications. As you say it shows some understanding of what research entails which is pretty rare among undergraduates in some places such as the US.

And for most people, your first paper is never your best. It would be a disaster if it were.

Many writers, not just scholars, look back on their early work with a bit of horror. "How could I have been so bad and still succeed?"


Learning More CS, Physics, or Math on side as a Physics and Electrical Engineering major Background and Context: I'm a rising sophomore double majoring in physics and electrical engineering. My research interests lie in quantum computing, theoretical physics, energy (renewable energy and grid-scale energy storage, robotics & AI, and space exploration and tech. I'm just interested in physics and engineering and doing really cool, impactful research. Currently, I spend my time doing robotics and AI/neuroscience research full time at my university. I'm slated to take classes like Advanced Linear Algebra, Intermediate Electrodynamics (uses the Griffiths book), and some electrical engineering classes this upcoming Fall.
Question: My dilemma lies in how I'm spending time on the side to learn more. Physics, Math, CS, etc. are all very interesting to me. In the time outside my robotics research, I'm stuck between deciding whether to advance my mathematical problem solving skills by working through books like the Art and Craft of Problem Solving and learning more combinatorics and graph theory, advance my physics problem solving by working through Morin's Mechanics (if I were to go to advance my physics problem solving skills on the side, should I get a head start on E&M by going through Purcell/Griffiths or advanced mechanics like in Morin Mechanics), or advance my CS skills by doing some more low level programming and learning more in depth about CS like working through the Structures and Interpretation of Computer Programs book and some algorithms or data structures or operating system stuff. What would you guys recommend in order for me to maximize the utility of my learning in my free time and maximizing my chances to gain more intuition in what I'm learning and the research I'm interested in? All seem fun to me, so I'm not sure how to decide. I feel like the CS one would still be relevant to physics because I think it might arm me with a new kind of perspective in physics research (even theoretical physics). I've been trying to go about this with the perspective of doing on the side what I will not learn later in my classes, but I don't know if that's a good way to look at it because I'm not sure if I'm going to be learning mathematical problem solving like in the Art and Craft of Problem Solving book (which goes over olympiad math topics and problems), and maybe if I work more on my physics problem solving now, then when I take those classes later, I can understand the topics a lot deeper/understand it better and go into other related topics. I want to be able to gain the most fundamental skill that will have ripple effects on my other skills, abilities, and research.
Edit: My goal is to prioritize the time I spend on the side learning new things -- rather than splitting up the time on the side for all three of physics, CS, and math as I described in my question, I would want to focus on one area that will serve as the best use of my time compared to the others. All three are equally interesting to me. I am having trouble choosing which to pick. Ideally, I would choose the subject that would serve as best use of my time (I'm talking about perhaps 1-2 hours on the side per day or spending my weekends on it) and improve my skills as a whole -- I guess I'm asking which skills are the most transferrable.

If you want the most fundamental skill, Math is surely the most fundamental as the other sciences are built on top of it to some degree. However, whether the math you learn will impact your future research is debatable. I had a friend with your passion for self study who went off the deep end for about a semester on Group Theory. To my knowledge he hasn't used an ounce of it in his current work, but of course that doesn't mean it was a waste of time.
There is a point after which "getting a head start" has diminishing returns. It's like if you're running a race, but you don't know the course layout, your ability to predict where you should go rapidly diminishes once you leave the starting line. In this case, getting too much of a head start could work against you as you might have fully left the racetrack.
In that case I would simply spend your free time studying what seems most interesting to you in that moment, and let the future take care of itself. If, down the road, you start to think you really do need to brush up on your fundamental CS (or whatever), you can always take the time to study that at that time. The good news is that in most roles you will fill in the future as a scientist or engineer (and many other career paths, too), your job is not to know all the answers, your job is to know how to learn what the answer is.


Are there any journals or conferences that take into account the availability of the source code when selecting the papers to publish? Quite too many times I have read in a research article claiming that the source code will be made available, and, when I look for it, it turns out that the source code still hasn't been released.

Are there any journals or conferences that take into account the availability of the source code when selecting the papers to publish? By availability I mean present availability, not some vague promise of code release sometime in the future somewhere on Internet.

Now code availability is one thing, clarity is another. I have seen a lot of emphasis on the papers' clarity in the paper selection criteria, do some publication venues pay attention to code clarity during the paper selection process?

Obviously, I have the same issue with datasets, so I am wondering the same for them, i.e. are there any journals or conferences that take into account the availability of the dataset(s) when selecting the papers to publish?

I can confirm the answer given by amlrg in comments. I have recently published a paper in Computer Physics Communications and the referees pay significant attention to the code. There was no requirement, however, to upload the code as Supplementary Material with the paper — the referees were happy to consider our public github repository. It was probably the first time in my practice when referees have actually bother themselves to reproduce the results claimed. We had a number of comments regarding the clarity of the run files in the code (but not in the rest of it), and even a suggestion on design.


How to find out the average duration of the peer-review process for a given journal? I have a mathematics paper ready for publishing, but I can't decide to which journal should I publish it.

The main thing based on which I want to publish the paper to a specific journal is its short period of peer-review process (because I need to publish it as soon as possible).

Suppose I have a list of journals I want to publish the paper. How should I know the average period of peer-review process for each of them?

For publishing in mathematics you could check out the AMS' Backlog of Mathematics
Research Journals. Among other things it provides a current estimate of
waiting time between submission and publication and historical data for the time between submission and final acceptance.

I'd personally take these estimates with a grain of salt, but I suppose if you're desperate it's better than nothing.


Possibility to use PhD Thesis work in another university I was a PhD student in a Japanese graduate school until March 2015 when my professor retired. Just before I submitted my thesis and it got rejected by one vote. Indeed there were 30+ voters, of whom only 6 attended my open defense and one of them was a professor who hated my professor. He succeeded in convincing enough people to vote against me. Sadly there are no student council there and the university does not provide any official jury result with the comments about why the thesis got rejected.

Now the situation got worse, some other students of my previous lab also got annoyed by the same professor who now has a majority inside the department. There is also a new rule which forces the candidates to present the thesis to the professors of the department before being able to officially present their thesis to the university. Indeed, the department has to give their agreement before the official submission. Funny thing is that the department where I belonged to is not only controlled by the professor who tries to fail every student who were in my previous lab but also the students are allowed only 30min for the presentation while other departments allow 2h for the same thing. Yes the rules do not forbid that apparently.
Since my departure as a student I could stay in the lab of a professor who was a friend of my previous professor and I published another journal paper. However the department rejected my application because the last paper title was too close to another of my paper and feared a re-submission.
In the meanwhile I was told very lately to write a totally new chapter in my thesis and even later that i would have to get a publication to go with it. I am now waiting for the results of another journal paper to be able to apply again.

But I am now afraid of applying there again. If the professors of the department are so biased that they will do anything so my application can't go though to the official application and if i do not have any official way to defend myself to higher authorities what are my chances to succeed now ? Some professors are too proud and scared to admit the situation as their own students could start to suffer from it as well.

My thesis is completely written, I have published as main author 4 journal papers (2 regular issues and 2 short issues) and 5 conference papers. And a potential 5th journal paper.

TLDR:
Is there a way to not waste all that work and submit my thesis in another university as free candidate or something?
I am also afraid to not have the time and resources for another publication in a journal,  since i am no longer a student,  in case a university absolutely need a paper with one of their professors.

Since you're well published, idea coming to mind is PhD by publication.
Re-purpose as much as you can from your PhD thesis to publish in journals, collections, editions, etc. that would be of an acceptable by a global high-ranking university in your field, and that's the trick done.

Basically, it sounds like your original submission was failed, which is very unique and should reflect poorly on the higher-education institution that failed your submission.

PhD by publication would prove that your research is worth being considered, and you would only need to write an overall introductory paper that demonstrates the significance of your contribution to the field, and how the publications brought together contribute a consistent body of knowledge and expertise to the field.


Can we first claim and then find the evidence when we write the literature review (i.e., using confirmatory technique)? I have a question regarding a researcher’s practice in writing.

Let me give you some background about this issue. Here’s what this researcher does when writing introductions and literature reviews. He makes certain speculations first and then proceeds to making claims based on those initial speculations. It is worth noting that the claims he makes are sometimes too specific. Following that, he starts looking for evidence to support his claims.

I have tried many times to convince him and have told him that this is not the right way to write a research paper. It’s more like writing a composition rather than an academic piece of writing which aims at making contributions to the world of education.

Here’s part of what he recently wrote in an email in response to me:

“I disagree that making claims and looking for evidence supporting them is "not academic". Maybe I am wrong but this approach is less exploratory than the method you have in mind. For example, [Michael] Kane's framework is based on this method: Claim --> evidence. Kane specifically stresses the importance of opinions/judgments etc. I personally do not prefer to tie my mind merely to the literature --I do not find it much academic in the sense it does not engage me in critical thinking. My method is: "The theory I wish to develop does not exist out there; I develop and support it"”

I would like to have your opinion regarding this issue. Is what the researcher claims really right? If not, can you introduce some published sources which have attacked this practice?

Claim -> evidence is a perfectly valid approach. It is just that evidence is not the same as only looking for supporting information, it means critically scrutinizing all aspects that speaks for or against the claim and then drawing an educated conclusion on whether the claim is good or not. In the end the "evidence" is the net outcome of positive and negative support to the claim. So to me the claim that one should come up for an idea an then look for support is either poorly phrased, leading to misunderstanding, or plainly bad.


Requesting a recommendation before the end of the course I am applying for PhD school and I need to 3-4 reference letters. I have 3 references but 2 of them are from my undergraduate institution and the 3rd is my current master's thesis advisor. I was told that it is not good to have just one recommendation from my graduate institution. I decided to try to get a fourth letter.

I took courses with many professors during my master's study but none of them really know me that well. I am taking a course this semester with a professor for the first time and I don't know what he thinks of me, but we have a final project which I tried to do so well that I can get a very good recommendation. After showing my project to my peers who already took the course they said that he will like it a lot and you can expect a very good impression. The problem that I have now is that the deadlines are very close to the final project presentation (only four days apart).

Also, We still have a final exam so I really don't know if it would be ok to get a recommendation is such a circumstances.

Is it OK to explain the situation to the professor and give him an early presentation of my work so that he can use it in his recommendation?

I don't see how what you suggest isn't worth a shot, if you explain the professor your reasons? It's what I would naturally try. I would go further and offer to hand it in early. Just be ready to back off gracefully if you hear that he is too busy now or doesn't want to do it like this, in which case I would ask if he has suggestions how to handle this respecting both your schedules and commitments (after confirming that he is open to help in principle).


How to write a "Related Work" section in Computer Science? I'm a new PhD student, wrapping up my first year of coursework. To date, I haven't published any papers, and my body of work is essentially null. For this semester's class project in one of my courses, my professor has tasked me with using the IEEE format for papers and using the following sections to describe my project:

Introduction
Related work
Proposed method
Experiment result
Conclusion
References

He seems very enthusiastic about the project that I coded, and the notion seems to be that he wants to send the paper off to a summer conference. I know this must be a growing pain as a young academic, resulting from lack of experience. How do I go about composing a Related Work section? Is it as simple as rummaging through conference papers published in my field on related topics? Do I need to look through the ACM and IEEE databases for articles that relate to my work? I certainly don't have anything that I've previously written/published to put in this section; any advice from someone with more experience would be immensely appreciated!

The problem here is likely deeper than just how to write a related work section.  In order to publish a (good) scientific paper, you need to be able to compare your results to prior results---often directly and quantitatively in your experimental section.

If you already have prior methods that you are comparing to in your experimental section, then that's a good seed for your related work.  Look at the papers describing those methods; look at papers that they cite and papers that cite them.  By spending a few days wandering around in this web of literature, you are likely to be able to get a good sense of what else is out there and which of those pieces of work are most significant overall or most closely related to your own.

If you don't have prior methods that you are comparing to, then you need to sit down with your professor and get some help.  If you aren't comparing in some way, how can you establish that your work is a significant improvement worth publication?


How to know if one is suitable for pursuing academia or Research work their entire life? I am a PhD student in engineering in an university in Canada. I am close to completion of my thesis but I am not very proud of my work. I have couple of publications from my work, all in decent journals. I feel that I have not utilized the opportunities available to me and wasted time in personal activities that did nothing to my CV.

Owing to my inadequate performance during PhD. I am constantly regretting my decision of pursuing higher studies. I was never a star student. My undergrad was from a very low ranking school where I had received very average grades. However, I somehow got into the top graduate school where too I struggled in getting average grades. My research there was very unimpressive and not a single professor urged me to pursue PhD. My master's advisor even expressed shock when I had asked for his recommendation for applying to PhD school.

However, luck struck again, and I got into a reputed PhD program. My advisor has had a lot of patience with me. She is a hands off kind of person, but she has never complained about my performance till date. Now as I am completing my thesis, I am confused about my future career trajectory.

I feel like I do not belong to academia or research industry as I don't possess the necessary skills (sound technical skills, exceptional analytical skills and focus). I feel like a failure who is in a wrong profession. I really don't know what to do now.

My only reason for pursuing PhD in my current field of study was that I loved the process of researching. I loved finding reason behind why a physical phenomenon occurs. But, I now feel that just love for research is not an adequate reason for doing PhD or master's degree.

In short; I have realized that I am not not suitable for academia or research industry as I don't possess the necessary skills for pursuing research. I should have taken the engineering job after my undergrad as I was never built for a life in research.

So you are going to finish your PhD soon and you are thinking about what to do?

I understand your regrets, but they don't help you (as you probably know yourself).

The question remains: What are your options now?

First of all, you do not make a decision for your entire life. You can start a research position and leave it after three years, it is not really helpful to try to plan for 30 years of more. You can either try to get a research position after your PhD, and if you get one, decide again after two to three years. Or you can look for challenging positions in the industry. Both approaches are entirely sensible.

Just don't consider leaving academia as a failure. Most people leave academia sooner or earlier and many find an interesting, good job.


What is a reasonable rate to charge for editing someone else's thesis? I'm a PhD student in engineering. My supervisor would like to pay me to edit a colleague's thesis for grammar and form. He asked me to look around for the going rate and let him know, but I'm not really sure of what figure to go by. Some thesis editing services are run by people with PhDs in literature and charge a lot, and others are run by upper year undergraduates and only ask for a small fee. What would be a reasonable rate to charge for such service in North America?

I don't have a better estimate than http://www.the-efa.org/res/rates.php whose rates work out to about 2 cents a word for basic copy editing or about 40 dollars an hour. For a thesis which is going to be very technical, I would expect someone with relevant expertise to get more. Grammar and form, probably is close to basic copy editing, but is probably more involved than that.


How can I help to participate in data collection or research work as a field researcher? To clarify my question, due to length limitations in question part.

For PHD, Researcher allowed to take part as research subject for data collection/analysis? How to include personal accounts of/experiences of a research phenomenon? Thoughts/decision making processes when playing a specific game on world class level?

This then mean a specific game where there are limited /very few really have mastered the game and subjects are not easily contactable. Also potential research participants are a handful 5 to 12.

To explain. If a researcher want to ask how tennis players think his accessibility to the top 20 of the world tennis players are really only 20 and not just anyone around the corner that wannabee play tennis.

The first step before starting a PhD would be to find a potential supervisor who has some expertise in the research domain (not necessarily the specific topic). First there will be some discussion with this supervisor about the exact research topic and the motivations for the research: a PhD student's expertise in a particular topic is not enough to justify research on this topic, there must be some scientific reasons why this topic is a relevant research area.

Then you will see with your supervisor about the best method(s) to achieve these research goals. Imho it's unlikely that a supervisor would agree with a method which involves you as a subject, but I'm not at all in this kind of domain. In any case your expertise would certainly be useful in contacting subjects and targeting the right research questions.


Old PI's coauthorship on a paper after finishing the postdoc, a preliminary idea developed then but rejected by him I understand that according the ethical rules, obtaining the funding does not automatically entitle the principal investigator (PI) for authorship. But I don't understand the unwritten rules.

I was on a postdoc. During the postdoc, I was paid from a grant obtained by the PI. At the beginning, he told me to find a good research topic and write a paper ("this will be your child"). I spent some time on literature search and very preliminary computations. I presented my idea to the PI but he told he doesn't want me to continue this topic. He even repeated this several times, on different occasions. He said my idea was too losely connected to what his group was doing. So I gave up that topic and did not do it any longer. Finally, I published a paper on quite different topic, together with the group members, and the PI was also a co-author.

One day I talked to a colleague from that group and I mentioned my old research idea. I said I would like to develop it anyway, when I finish the current postdoc. He told me that the PI should still be a co-author because I spent some time working on this idea in his group and I was paid by his money.

Now, it's been a couple of years since I finished that postdoc. I have independence and I can publish myself as the corresponding author. I would like to publish a paper on the idea I once had. Should I somehow credit the old PI? (And his grant? It's over already.)

The whole idea of the research is mine. The PI did not contribute whatsoever to it. I feel that crediting someone just for his funding is not ethical. The more so that he rejected my idea. But I understand the words of that colleague as a sort of a warning because he has been working with the PI for a long time and probably he knows his attitide. And that guy (the old PI) is quite well-known person in the community. Do you think I should somehow negotiate with him? Or stick at nothing and just publish the paper as entirely mine?

I cannot see why the former PI should have co-authorship on a paper they did not support or had any interest in. You are not a slave (or at least should not be) when on a post-doc (or any other position) and should retain the freedom to take own initiatives. As long as you fulfil any obligations within the position you are holding, no-one can prevent you from developing your own ideas. I can see an issue if you use materials that involve costs that you are not covering, for example, lab equipment or chemicals, electronic resources that removes capacity or resources otherwise used by the project. I do not count, for example, using a computer and printouts as such resources.

So, for me there is no question you can use the research as your own and you should add only authors that fulfil reasonable contributorship criteria, that is have contributed to the science of your work (see posts under the authorship tag for such criteria).


Publishing paper after graduation without advisor's name I recently submitted a paper derived from my masters thesis to a journal. Before submission, I sent an email to my masters adviser but did not get any reply. I guess he might have forgotten my name or my email was put in the trash (it happens sometime as I cannot use my school email anymore). I went ahead with the submission as the sole author. The paper was accepted, and when the paper entered the proofreading stage, I sent him another email. This time he replied to me that he would look at it.

Is it ok to publish this paper without my master adviser's name? I have graduated for more than 5 years and did not touch base with him for a while. I used my own money to pay for the journal publication fee and wrote acknowledgment to his effort during my master study.

This would depend entirely on whether he contributed to the work and, if so, how much. A minor contribution might require an acknowledgement, but if you worked together to develop the ideas in the paper he might well need to be co-author. You can probably judge this.

However, there is another possible angle to consider. If you are planning to go on in academia and your old advisor can help you with that, then even a minor contribution leading to co-authorship might be good for you in the long run. That would be especially true if your advisor is a major figure in your field.

But you have a delicate situation since the paper has already been accepted. Depending on what your advisor says you may want to delay, or you may want to use the acceptance to convince him that sole-authorship is fine.

See this question to get information on predatory journals also: With Beall's List gone, how can I tell if a journal is spam?


What are the benefits of attending international conferences at student level Is it beneficial to attend international conferences at student level, and what are tips to follow when attending such international conferences?

It is hard to tell - it depends on the conference!

Possible benefits (amongst others) can be:

Learning more about your field and getting more motivation for your studies
Learning about different countries and cultures
Learning how scientific conferences work
Preparing your own scientific contribution for a conference
Networking with well-known people in your field (usually there are some invited speakers)

I would strongly recommend to submit your own contribution to such a conference in order to participate fully.

For the "tips"-section:

Hang out with people you did not know before
Find a good mixture of new / unknown topics and things which are close to your fioeld of interest
Attend every social event
Don't hesitate to talk to foreign people.


Using a case study without company's permission In addition to academic work, I have done private work in industry that is directly related to the material I'm presenting. For one of my lessons, I would like to do a case study, where I take a problem posed by one of my clients and discuss the thought process and methodology I utilized to solve the problem.

For the case study, I do not intend to reference the company name (instead referring to them as "Company X"). I intended to keep the industry and solution mostly the same, although I would not present or divulge any source code from the deliverable or data from the actual company.

My concern is that the technology I developed for the company may be considered proprietary or a trade secret by the company. While I wouldn't be presenting enough for someone to identify the client or exactly how I solved the problem, I fear that I may no longer have the right to present on this information without explicit permission from the former client.

To enumerate, my question has the following facets:

Do I have an ethical or legal obligation (in the United States) to ask the former client's permission before doing an anonymized case study, even if none of their data or my deliverable is presented?
Is there any standard or rule of thumb for using personal real-world examples in an academic setting while respecting a company's right to maintain trade secrets?

To clarify, there was no NDA/Intellectual Property transfer document or other legal document that could complicate the situation. The work was performed as a independent contractor in the United States.

Honestly, I would not do this.
I am not familiar with US law so I cannot give you any legal advice. However, there are several other non-legal risks you have to bear.

According to your description, you intend to stick closely to the real case in your presentation. The students might be intelligent enough to draw the necessary conclusions or could even be involved with the company. I would not risk this.

As a result, the company could get the impression, that you have leaked confidential data to the students. Indepdent from the question whether this is illegal or legal, facing a lawsuit can easily have a disastrous effect on your career. Furthermore, this can also result in loss of trust, again impacting your career.

I only see two possible options here:

You ask your former client for a written(!) permission
You largely modify your example / problem

Both methods, when done correctly, will save you from a lot of risk.

I had a similar problem, when I wanted to write a paper about work I did for an industry partner. Usually, this is quite strict, since nobody wants to have their confidential solutions published. However, I was able to chance the problem and solution sufficiently. Despite the same ideas were used, the original problem and client remained hidden and I was able to publish my ideas. This was quite a lot of work to do, since I had to redo most of the code and experiments. Altogether, this was worth the effort since I do not have any fear of legal consequences and we still have a good relationship to our clients.


List Unrelated Degree on Application I am currently in the process of applying for PhDs. My question is whether it is frowned upon to have done a degree in a subject completely unrelated to my main studies. I just completed two masters at top universities concurrently, one in biology and the other in English literature. I did the literature degree to please my parents, my real passion is in biology. I steered my English degree somewhat towards the biology by writing my dissertation on the representation of tropical diseases in literature. I am wondering whether I should list this degree on my CV or just leave it off? I thought that it might prove how hard-working I am to do two masters concurrently. I also scored the highest mark out of my class in my biology master, so the other master did not affect my primary  master.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I would say to list it, for a couple of reasons:

It does show that you are hardworking, 2 concurrent Masters degrees completed and completed to a great standard.
Practically, it further demonstrates the abilities necessary to research, synthesise information, draw valid conclusions from a wide range of sources.

Also, you put in the effort, why not 'show off' your good work. By steering your Literature Masters in a biological direction with your topic of tropical diseases, you have also shown how this long-standing and serious issue (tropical diseases) have been portrayed to the non-scientific community.


How to mention colleagues from work in my thesis Right now I am writing a thesis in a Russian university on data mining to obtain bachelor degree. The thesis is related to my job field and I use an inner implementation of an algorithm to process some data. My supervisor is ok with using his code. I will cite the original paper that describes the algorithm, but how do I mention the supervisor in my thesis. Can I just say mention them during presentation as people who helped me?

Acknowledge those who should be acknowledged by name and for what they have contributed. A supervisor should be acknowledged for being a supervisor, a person providing code for providing code and referencing a paper published on a code or whatever you use should of course be in the reference list. It sounds as if one person fits all three bills and then you should simply cite the paper and acknowledge the person in the acknowledgement for being supervisor and providing code. You also find that there are more personal reasons to thank the person as well. It is not uncommon that supervisors receive acknowledgements for other guidance during the work. But only what is deserved should be mentioned. You can certainly build in an acknowledgement to your supervisor during the talk, either in the beginning, when you mention the code  or at the end. You could also stick the reference into the presentation when you present the code. It is always customary to acknowledge the supervisor anyway and whether you do it at the beginning or end is a matter of tradition or style.