How should a "brief synopses of each paper" look like? I'm a exchange student that just arrived in the US. The professor is asking us to do this:

  Please write and submit brief synopses of each paper before class which include the following:

  the title and authors
  a one paragraph summary of the paper (do not copy the abstract - how would you summarize the paper?)
  1-3 things you found most interesting (at most one paragraph)
  1-3 questions that arose for you while reading the paper (at most one paragraph)

I never did this before, specially in English. How should this look like ? You have rules to do (spacing, font, etc.) ? And are the "Title and authors" for my text or the authors of the papers ?

This is a fairly simple assignment. To answer your questions:

Obviously your name and class information should appear at the top of the assignment (unless otherwise instructed by the professor).
The "title and authors" referred to by the professor are in reference to the paper that you are discussing, not you!
You are told to write in complete paragraphs. That means no bullet lists, so write everything as complete, well-structured sentences.
Spacing and font are up to you, but in general, I'd use at least 1.5 times normal spacing and 11 pt or larger font (unless you're working with LaTeX, in which case the formatting is handled for you).


Teach in a university with a master degree I don't know if here is the best place to ask that but I'm finishing my master degree in pure mathematics and I would like to travel and know another countries before enter into a doctorate school. In my country with a master degree you can teach in a private university or even in a public university with tenure in small villages or in public universities with 2-years contract in bigger cities.

I would like to know if in your own home country is easy to work in a temporary job as a "professor" or be a permanent professor with tenure in smaller areas with a master degree.

Remark

I know that is impossible to teach pure mathematics with only a master degree, but there are a lot of faculties of civil and food engineer, actuarial sciences, computer sciences, etc... which have logic, calculus, linear algebra, etc... courses, i.e., simpler courses with doesn't necessarily need a PHD professor to teach it.

Thanks a lot

In the United States, a master's degree typically qualifies you to teach at the junior college or community college level, and also to teach as a lecturer at the university level.  However, you should know that in mathematics there is substantially less supply of these jobs than there is demand for them.  That is, they are hard to find and don't pay very well.


Working paper to published paper I have a couple working papers on ssrn.com that I am preparing for submission to a journal.  If it is accepted, should I pull the ssrn.com copy from the website or block people's access to it by making it private?  Is there either a duty from the copyright change to remove it or if there is no legal obligation is there an ethical one?

Their FAQs section states:

  10. Does submission to SSRN restrict in any way what I can do with my paper?
  No. And if at any time you wish to immediately remove a paper from SSRN, you may do it yourself through SSRN HQ, or contact us to remove it for you.

Contacting them is always an option to make sure though.


what do you do if your PhD advisor publishes a solo paper on your topic? I was working with my advisor on a research topic for six months and we had some results. The important idea was his, but the initial idea was mine and we worked on it together. Now my advisor has published the results without my name in the authors. The paper is in an important conference.

What do I do ? Is this normal ? Should I talk to my advisor about how I get my name in a paper ? How do I approach that topic ?

I'm his only PhD student and he has joined the department recently.

Edit : The paper was written by my advisor but we derived the results together, although his contribution was more important. He included my name in acknowledgements. Should I risk upsetting my relationship with my advisor over this ?

You asked,

  Is this normal?

The answer is no, it's not normal. If two people work on some research together, the "normal" thing is for them to write the paper on it together, and for both to be authors on the paper.

It's possible that you seriously overestimated your contribution to the work and don't actually deserve authorship. Even in this case, it's clear you were involved in the research and it's not normal for your advisor to go ahead and publish it without discussing it with you first.

(When I publish work that involves students whose small contributions do not warrant authorship, I always discuss it with them first. I explain why I don't think they can be an author, give them a chance to state any disagreement, and also tell them what additional work they could do in order to merit authorship.)

However, the latter (your contributions did not merit authorship, and your advisor failed to discuss this with you) is somewhat more forgivable than the former (your contributions did merit authorship and your advisor published without you anyways). (You do say your advisor is new, and probably inexperienced in advising.)

To answer

  What do I do?

You should talk to your advisor. This is the only way to really understand which case you are dealing with.

You can bring this up in a non-combative way without upsetting your advisor; for example, you can ask "What do I need to do in order to deserve authorship on future papers?" This gives your advisor an opening to discuss why he thinks you didn't deserve authorship on the conference paper, and for you to respectfully state your perception of the situation.

There may still be a chance for you to get some credit for this work, if you come to agree with his point of view that you didn't do enough to deserve authorship on the conference paper. For example, once you and your advisor have come to an agreement on what it takes to get authorship, you can propose that the two of you work together on an extended version of his conference paper for a journal - on which you will be an author :)

Unfortunately, it's also possible that after this conversation you believe you did deserve authorship, and that your advisor published your joint work without you for no valid reason (i.e., committed misconduct). In this case, the best advice I can give you is to start looking for another advisor.

Finally, the lesson for the future is: talk to your collaborators about authorship early and often.


Having trouble getting recommendation letter for masters I completed my undergraduate degree with good grades five years back. After that I have been working for a well-known organization for the last 5 years.

I recently decided to pursue a master's degree. One of the major requirements being recommendation letters from professors, I am having a bit of trouble providing those, since I have not been in touch with my professors for a long time.

I can provide letter from my supervisors from my past and current organizations, but I am not sure how much value it will add to my profile, since none of them are from purely research-oriented background. I have been worried regarding this from quite some time, will it be a road block for my application though I have good grades and relevant industry work experience.

You are not required to provide a recommendation from people who are professors. What is needed is people who can comment on your ability to do research. While it is helpful to have recommendation letters from people who work as researchers (whether in industry, academia, or other non-university organizations), if they are not available, you have to work with the resources you have at hand.

What can such people comment on? Well, your ability to solve problems independently and creatively, as well as any capabilities or skills in teamwork and leadership would also be helpful. Other "soft" skills relevant to research—good oral and written communication skills, and so on—would also be helpful. Of course, just mentioning that you have the above abilities is insufficient; the letter writers should provide helpful examples to support their claim (just like in research!).

One thing to also note here is that having letters from your undergraduate professors is not entirely helpful if they only knew you in a classroom context. Three recommendation letters from such people would probably not be as helpful as someone who knows you in a more work-related environment.


Etiquette for sending another email after the first one went unreplied I applied for study abroad program and so far, now it has been a week after the expected decision date. Whether I get admitted or not also affects my class schedule for Fall semester which will start in the coming week, so I need to get the decision by this Friday. I sent an email to study abroad office, which is the only contact information available, on Monday to ask for an update but did not get any reply. So, my question is: If I choose to send another email, how to make it sound not rude (since my first email was sent just two days ago)?

The important question is the interval between the time you applied and the time you expect an answer.

If you applied on the day before the decision were announced it is quite possible there was not time to assess your file and sending another email will not help.

If on the other hand your documents were received months ago then another email or better yet a phone call if possible is not inappropriate.

Be mindful that applicants are often optimistic to expect academic decisions to be made within a few days of reception of documents.  Admissions officers may have to deal with 100s of files each containing multiple documents to be scanned so the information can be properly stored and distributed to appropriate faculty for later evaluation, and every link in the chain takes time.


Submitted wrong file while submitting the revision My paper has been accepted in a journal with minor revision. However, while submitting the revision I mistakenly submitted a wrong file. What to do in this case ? Should I inform the editor ? Thanks

Yes, you need to contact the editor immediately. You don't want them to waste time putting the wrong version into the production system. If the submission was online, they may have to reset the system to permit the update (or not). You can offer to send the paper directly.
If an online system permits an update, then do that, but also inform the editor so that there is some assurance that things are put right.


How to avoid self-plagiarism when adapting dissertation into a paper? I have recently completed a dissertation and have been encouraged to publish the work.

My dilemma is that I find it quite difficult (and painfully tedious) to rewrite the same thing couched in new language. Whereas I don't plan to copy and paste the whole thing verbatim, it would be nice to take chunks of the original text here and there, and proceed to break-apart, edit, and reassemble the bits and pieces to create a newly condensed version of the dissertation.

How does one go about this whilst avoiding self-plagiarising?

It would seem sensible to make generous reference to the fact that the paper is derived from the dissertation. However, does one really have to effectively rewrite everything and reference every last page and figure from the original text?

Thanks.

The dissertation is not a published work in the same sense as a journal or conference paper.  It is normal for a recent graduate to take large chunks of their thesis, with minimal or no modification, and use the excerpts in more formal publications.  You do not need to worry about self plagiarism in this context.

The copying often goes the other way as well.  If you already have published papers when it's time to write your dissertation, you may take large chunks of the published papers and reuse them in the dissertation.  In some fields (mathematics or theoretical physics, for example), this is quite commonplace.  People talk about "stapling your papers together" to make a thesis.  In reality, there is more to it than that.  Introductory and concluding material are needed, but many theses have chapters that are based on published manuscripts, with relatively little editing.


How to interpret division of Korean names when citing articles? I'm preparing bibliography using Microsoft Word's bibliography creator, which look like this:

I would like to insert Korean author Won-Hwa Park. Where to put his names in the "Add name" section? What is his first, last and middle name? What are rules that govern citing Korean authors?

There are three general naming conventions you need to familiarize yourself with for proper citation in a modern context: European, Middle Eastern and East Asian.
European
(Primary Given Name) (Optional Secondary etc. Given Name[s]) (Family Name)
(John) (Mephistophiles) (Smith)
East Asian
(Family Name) (Given Name)
(Huang) (Jieshi)
or
(Park) (Hwa-won)
In this case the Family name is usually 1 Chinese character, and the given name is 2 characters (even if the characters are no longer used as in Korea and Viet-nam). In Chinese, Korean, and Viet-namese that usually means one syllable per character, but in Japanese it varies wildly.
Many times the romanization of the East Asian names will join the given name with a hype (Won-Hwa) or have them as a single, unbroken word. However, sometimes they are broken apart, in two words, but they are still one name. When in doubt, Google the name you suspect to be the family name. If it is the family name, there will be lots and lots of people with that name. (Park is the most common name in Korea).
Middle Eastern
(Given Name) (Father's Given Name) (Grandfather's Given Name) (Tribal or Locational Name)
Sometimes the Fathers and Grandfathers given name is preceded by an article like 'bin' (Arabic), 'ben' (Hebrew), 'ibn' (Classical Arabic), or substituted for 'bint' or other female forms before the father's name if a woman. The locational name will almost always be preceded by the article, 'al'. The articles may be separated from the names by a hyphen or not, but when written should be included, but not usually when spoken unless in very formal circumstances.
(Mahmoud) bin (Hamid) bin (Abdul-Qadr) (al-Hashemi)
In a citation manager it should be entered as follow:

Following this table your entry should be:
Last Name = "Park", First Name = "Won-Hwa", Middle Name = ""


Should I include publications where I am a "team member" in my CV Related to but different from Should I include a publication where I'm only acknowledged (and not one of the authors) in my CV?

I'm a part of some publications which officially are written by author A and B and then the Team Members. Should these publications be on my CV? I contributed to the project (hence the team co-authorship) but don't want to seem like I'm trying to pad my CV.

Currently I have my publication list broken up by sections: Journal, Talks, Technical Reports, and then Other, and I have the Team Member publications listed under Other.

Is this appropriated and/or reasonable, or should I remove them?

Looking at the CV that's linked to your website, I don't see anything inappropriate about what you've done. The only thing to make sure of is that when you have a team listed explicitly as the author in a paper (e.g., "Author X, Author Y, and The A-Team"), you will need to make sure that there is a publicly available listing of the team members available for reference. This could be as a supplement to the paper online (as "supporting information"), or it can be on a permanent web site for the team's endeavors. However, people should be able to confirm that you are a member of this collaboration beyond just what's on your CV.


Should I stay in my uni for four years even though I already have 50 credits? Since University of Alabama offers me full-ride scholarship, I will probably go to this school rather than more competitive schools, not because I'm poor but because it seems silly to me to pay $200,000 for merely an undergrad education, even though I can buy a house by that money. I'm going to get PhD, and the name of undergrad school doesn't matter in my career. I'm worried about research opportunity in the school since I want to excel in admission of PhD program, but I think I can make up for it with my enthusiasm and knowledge. I'm going to major in Biology, and I want to study about regenerative medicine and stem cell in grad school.

Until I will graduate from my high school, I will certainly have about 12 AP scores (mostly 5's) and be able to get about 50 credits, even though the school's graduation requirement is 120. It seems easy to graduate within 3 years (or even possible to do within 2 years), but graduating early seems to put me in a disadvantageous position in grad school admission. I can probably get 70 credits in two years, and then what should I do for the next two years? Can I concentrate on research for this period, or should I take classes to get about 30 credits per year? Should I apply for grad program in the third year and try again in the next year if the admission won't be successful?

If you have some opinion not only related to the topics about college credit but also my choice of school, please tell me that, since I still can change my choice of university. Other schools of my choice are such as Reed, Carleton, U of Michigan, U of Wisconsin, and U of Manchester. I'm an international student.

First of all, I know nothing about Biology at all. I can't comment on specifics. Instead, I rather say something about the comment:

  Do you think double-majoring using the available time gives me a significant advantage in my admission? Or should I just concentrate on the area which I will study in grad school?

You are far away from grad school yet. Undergrad education is for you to build the foundation of your academic career. You need to use it to broaden your knowledge base. Many courses can be benefit for you. You should consider taking the courses about humanities, fine arts, other sciences (math, chemstry, physics, computer science, etc.) and writing, etc.etc. Just don't limit yourself to a specific field. You won't know you're interested in something until you learn it.

The above is from the bottom of my heart. I wish someone would have told me this when I was an undergrad student.


Formulate an answer on PhD defense about mistakes you've made Imagine, you did data evaluation, published. When preparing your data for the thesis, you've realized that your approach was wrong. It does not change the main course of the paper and do not damage main conclusions, although it does affect the quantitative part of research. It is more than 1 year back published, so instead of erratum you decided that you put your updated data in your thesis and will do your best to address your mistakes in the next publication.

Question is how to formulate decent answers during the PhD defense if the committee asks why didn't you publish erratum/correction if you've made a mistake in your data evaluation?

Could I answer in a way "I've realized I've made a mistake and it will not happen again. The correction will not change main conclusions of the publication. I will make sure to address these points in the next publication concerning this topic to avoid any misunderstanding"

Maybe some other ideas?

Thanks in advance!

If I were on your committee, the key take-away I would look for is that the mistake will be corrected in the literature.  Either an erratum or an explicit correction in a future publication would satisfy me, though in the latter case I would ask, "What additional steps need to be completed before this future publication will be available, and how long do you anticipate that may take?"

If the future publication is still quite far away (by the standards of your field), then I would recommend an erratum in the meantime, which should do no harm.  I would not consider a long period of time since publication a very strong argument against providing an erratum.  Here is one famous paper in my field that received an erratum after 3.5 years.

A promise that no mistakes will happen in the future would strike me as naive and unrealistic.


Is it okay to put up a submitted paper and a paper which is about to be submitted on Academia.edu? I'm applying to graduate school (CS MS/PhD) this year and I wanted to put up a copy of my papers online so that admission committees would be able to see them. The problem is one of the papers is currently under submission at a conference and notification for the same is only on Jan 22nd. Another one is still in preparation and I will be submitting it soon to a journal/conference. So I was just wondering if it is okay if I put up these papers in my Academia.edu page?
Actually one of my friends' told me that since Academia.edu submissions are searchable on Google, the conference I have submitted to and the journal or conference I would be submitting the other paper will have a problem. Is he right? How else can I provide a way for others to view these papers?

For your submitted paper: Check the copyright and "prior publication" policies of the conference you've submitted to.  It's very likely that they allow you to post a "preprint" of your paper on your web page.  This is a very common practice in Computer Science, since it allows researchers to share their work without being delayed by the peer review process.  You might also consider posting on a preprint server such as arXiv.org as this will further increase your audience (this is also usually allowed).  And it would also be a good idea to include a copy of the paper with your applications, or at least a link; don't expect the admissions committee to find it by themselves.

For your not-yet-submitted paper: Again, there shouldn't be a problem with the journal/conference, but it's probably best to wait to make it public until it is completely finished and ready to submit.  However, you could certainly include a copy with your applications.


Under what circumstances is it beneficial for an advisor to seek sole authorship when their advisees deserve to be listed as co-authors? I have seen several questions on this site which suggest that there are (presumably and hopefully rare) occasions where an advisor seeks to publish work as the sole author on a collaborative project that they are working on with their advisees.

Some questions which highlight these occurrences:

My advisor submitted a paper with my work without including me as an author
what do you do if your PhD advisor publishes a solo paper on your topic?

While there has been some discussion on this site (e.g., here) about whether the advisor should be listed as a co-author on a student's paper, in my field (in the U.S.), it is common for the advisor to be listed as a co-author on their student's papers. So, I'm writing this question to come to some understanding of the "opposite" problem:

  When it (rarely) occurs, what are the benefits for an advisor to seek sole authorship when their advisees deserve to be listed as co-authors?

In my (admittedly naive) view, it would seem that the advisor would benefit more from co-authoring papers with their advisees than trying to pass the work off as their own, if nothing more than to show (to, e.g., tenure/promotion committees) that they are actively engaging their student researchers in the research activities of the group. Perhaps an element of "ego trip" is involved here as well, but I wonder if I'm missing something more fundamental as to why this happens on those rare occasions.

Edited to add — I certainly do appreciate that there is variability in the ways that different departments/institutions in different parts of the world do things, and am attempting to gain some understanding about the not-so-obvious (from my perspective) motivators that lead an advisor down the road to the aforementioned behavior.

In my (admittedly naive) view, it would seem that the advisor would benefit more from co-authoring papers with their advisees than trying to pass the work off as their own, if nothing more than to show (to, e.g., tenure/promotion committees) that they are actively engaging their student researchers in the research activities of the group.

I tend to agree with your sentiment here. The problem is that not every evaluation committee (for tenure, for promotion, for regular end-of-the-year raises) is that sane.

Example 1: in my old university, we had for some time a hard tenure rule that required applicants to have a small number of recent single-authored papers. In applied computer science, basically nobody writes single-authored papers. It is simply not done. I don't know any concrete cases, but I would not be surprised if that rule led to some "single-authored" papers where the work was really done by a master student.

Example 2: I have heard of universities in Asia that base end-of-the-year raises on accepted papers. The concrete amount is dependent on the number of authors, as well as on the place in the author list, making it very attractive to "forget" authors or put the supervisor's name first.

Here on academics.SE, we tend to forget that academia varies more than we think, and just because a certain unethical behavior would not make sense in our university, there is no reason to believe that this is true everywhere.


Is it reasonable to do number theory without active/good prof in uni I'm from the top math university in my country (it's not really world class but on average one guy from every other batch in my uni goes to Harvard/MIT/Princeton/UChicago/Stanford/UMichigan for PhD).

I'm in my second year and I'm broadly interested in number theory and geometric analysis, but there's no "good" faculty in number theory in my university (there's only one prof and he don't do any active research and don't have much reputation outside my country), so I'm almost on my own to study number theory.

It's pretty hard to learn everything by myself with simultaneously handling the coursework, so I'm wondering whether it's a good/sensible idea (wrt say grad school application where I need to compete with many people from top colleges in USA who are taking legit number theory courses by world class number theorists) to switch completely to geometric analysis and ditch number theory ? I think I can focus more on geometric analysis in that way too -- the only thing that is bugging me from switching completely is that I like number theory more than geometric analysis.

There were one guy from my college who went to Princeton for number theory who wrote a solo number theory paper as an undergraduate, but I'm nowhere close to being that smart. Also I can do reading courses/summer internship under some active number theorist researchers in my country, but the problem is that you need to know some nontrivial amount of number theory before you can do some internship under some reknowned number theorist !

Number theory is perhaps the historically deepest, most studied area of mathematics.  To even begin to understand research in most areas of number theory, you need two full years of graduate coursework over several subfields of mathematics.

What one can learn in an undergraduate course, or even a first graduate course, in number theory is so far from the frontiers of research that it makes absolutely no difference whether the person teaching is active in research or even has ever done research in number theory.  You probably won't get into the 20th century in an undergraduate course, and not much beyond the 1940s in a first graduate course.

Except for a few exceptional students who are taking several graduate courses while still an undergraduate, no one is doing serious, mainstream number theory research as an undergraduate.  Hence, it doesn't matter.  You're not competing with people who have somehow learned lots of number theory already.

I should add that, in the job market for permanent positions in pure mathematics that support significant amounts of research, the sky has fallen.  Only exceptional people are getting permanent research-oriented jobs now.  Given that your job after your PhD (and your postdoc if you get and do one) probably won't involve doing research in either number theory or geometric analysis, you might as well study what you're interested in.


Doing extra research worth the effort? I am currently doing research for my masters and also doing a full time job from 10 to 7 excluding the weekends.By the end of our research ,all of the students would get at least one good paper. I am also expected to get one. I have two more opportunities for research.
One comes from one of my semester projects on computer simulation.My professor told me that I might get a good publication out of it if I extend it a little.I have done most of the work on this project.I only have to do about 20 or 30 percent more work on it.
The second opportunity is regarding GPU acceleration.I haven't started work on this one.
I was wondering that will it be worth the effort if I choose to go ahead with these research opportunities? I am free on the weekends but I am worried that I might get burned out if I work all the time. Would it be beneficial for me if I plan to go into teaching in a few years? Would it be beneficial if I plan to go for a PhD?

Doing more research and get publication are always good, especially if you want to go for PhD and/or follow academia path. However, as you're working full-time, I wonder if you can do intensive research as it's a very hard work. So, my answer is: Yes, it's worth to do more research but you need to reschedule your time and prioritize which activity you want to do most: work or research.


How should a student deal with personal criticisms from an assistant professor? I am a PhD student. In the past I have met with an assistant professor for some general advice about my research, both times he has made off the cuff comments on my lack of competence as a researcher and overall career suitability in academia. During my continuation, he made further comments in this area. I prepared for 3 weeks solid for my continuation (or transfer or confirmation, in my case, it's like the defense of the first paper) and it went terribly. I can take constructive criticism and I welcome it, so as to better my paper. However, his behaviour I feel is inappropriate, as the focus should be my paper, and not my personal qualities.

I am not sure what to do, if I should even do anything at all. In general, I consider my PhD progress to be very good, and my supervisor as far as I know shares the same sentiment.

I'm cautious to respond to the  assistant professor, because he tells me I am being defensive, but then I am cautious of being too silent because he tells me I am not contributing enough.

I have not spoken to my supervisor since my continuation or told him about my past encounters with this professor. Do I express my disappointment and confusion in our next meeting, or do I just leave it? I am lost on what to do, and I feel very deflated now.

He may be competing with your supervisor. He may not like your general topic. He may not like you. Or, he really believes what he says. Or he wants to test you. You don't know.

You have to live with people who confuse what's going on with prejudice- or agenda-coloured "truth". Practically all successful researchers have encountered such put-downs.

Schechtman (later Nobel winner) got a "Introduction to Crystallography" book put on his table when he first reported that he got a 5-fold symmetry, hence quasicrystals, in his experiment. Feynman got put-down big time initially by Oppenheimer and was only saved by Dyson's aggressive intervention.

You think your progress is good? Your supervisor does, too? That's enough for you to go on, then. This guy may be a big shot, but for you, it doesn't count. Big shots are usually right when they think something is cool/great. They can be awfully wrong when they think something is not good. Trust your instincts.


How much does a FAIL grade in thesis credits affect PhD admission chances? I am doing an integrated BS-MS in Biological Science from an Indian university and currently am in the 6th (post-final!) year. In this MS part of the program, I am supposed to take a few grad level classes and mainly focus in research. I also need to pass 8 MS thesis courses (worth 3 credits each), in which my supervisor grades me on my research work that particular semester (I can take as many as 4 of them in one semester). The grade for this course is either S or X i.e. Satisfactory or Fail.

I took one of the 8 courses in the summer following my senior year. I worked very little and met my supervisor only 3 times in the term. As a result, I received the X grade in the thesis course. In the following semester (Fall), I took 3 MS thesis courses. My performance was better, I met him more often but according to him, it was not worth passing all 3 - he said it was only good enough to pass 1 of the 3 thesis courses. But since failing 3 thesis courses would have led to termination of my degree, he gave me pass grade for 2 of the 3 courses and cautioned me that another fail course would mean the end of the program for me.

After this, my performance research-wise has been good, I have been more regular. My relationship with my supervisor has also improved, although it could be much better. I have received a pass grade in all the remaining thesis courses and retook the 2 I had failed. Since I had not made enough progress in the one year, I continued my work further until it reaches a publishable position. I am finishing my second year this summer (6th year overall) and the work seems to be coming to an end.

I applied to for PhD positions at US universities last fall. When I asked my supervisor for recommendation, he said - "Ya, I will write one for you, but it won't be a glorious recommendation. I will mention what you did, your performance in my course...". Anyway, the results came out, and it was not good (1 accept out of 9).

(hope this was enough of a background!)

My question is - How much does an X grade in thesis research course (2 such, in my case) affect my PhD application. Are these thesis credits looked at closely? Such X grades are rare in my department, so I don't know how bad the situation is.

EDIT - I think this question is sufficiently different from others asking about a failed subject course. I am asking about failing thesis credits, which is different because a) these can be easily retaken and one can take as many as 4 of them in a semester and b) they directly corroborate with your research performance as opposed to normal courses.

I would be SINCERELY OBLIGED if someone could help me with this. It has been troubling me for months, and any answer towards this question/situation would be enormous for me!

To be successful in applying for PhD programmes, you need to demonstrate your ability to perform research.

Unfortunately, failing a thesis research course says rather the opposite to the admissions committee. By the sounds of it, your lukewarm recommendation letter from your supervisor will have done nothing to help matters either.

To improve your chances if you are planning to apply again, I would suggest trying to publish your work (you hint in your question that this may be possible) and, if you can, finding someone else who can write you a much stronger letter of recommendation.


Does listing several research directions in SOP give the impression that I have a shallow research interest? I am applying to MS in CS degree. In my SOP I wish to talk about four distinct, non-overlapping research directions. Two of these pertain to computer vision and the other two pertain to machine learning. (I am interested in how computer vision utilizes the theory of machine learning.)

Now my question is, if I talk about all four of these distinct, non-overlapping research directions and quote a paper each in these 4 directions, will it give the impression that I have a shallow superficial research interest? Also I don't have any particular research idea in my mind for any of these directions yet.

As I am still in college, I don't get enough time to conduct research on these directions. My college coursework keeps me busy for most of the time. So as of for now I can't narrow down to one of these directions.

Over the course of the last four years, I read papers whenever I got time and I saw a pattern in all these papers. I realized that the papers I read fall into these distinct directions. I realized how one paper builds on top of the other. It's just that I was casually reading this stuff not with an intention to contribute to either of these directions. But if you ask me to write a grad level thesis I would definitely choose one of these four directions.

Edit: The papers are pivotal papers to those directions. None of them are older than 2012 and they have established that direction. So omitting them could potentially jeopardize the coherence of my SOP.

As I read your question, it seems to me that you have one area of interest: Machine learning applied to computer vision.  Consider revising to emphasize that.

You mention quoting papers.  Unless they're papers you wrote, consider leaving that out.  Admissions committees want to know your interests and accomplishments.


Where can I find hard data on students' reasons for being students? Have any studies been done of students' motives for being students at universities?

At one extreme there are those who want to study at a university in disregard of the disapproval of their parents and friends and everyone else. At an opposite extreme are those who are there only because of the expectations of others. And there are those who regard study at a university only as a price of a job they hope to get later.

Do any hard data exist on the proportions in each of these groups or on whether some other motivations exist?

This is an active area of inquiry in US academia, as market research for admissions departments and also as part of the larger investigation into student "success". Our dean likes to remind us that the main reason for going to college used to be "to get an education" but now it's "to get a job" (and thus we need to be more get-a-job focused). I don't actually know which study he's quoting, but an article out this month seems to support his contention.

Twenge and Donnelly have published a retrospective study of students entering college between 1971 and 2014 surveying the students' reasons for pursuing higher education. From the abstract:

  Millennials (in college 2000s–2010s) and Generation X (1980s–1990s)
  valued extrinsic reasons for going to college (“to make more money”)
  more, and anti-extrinsic reasons (“to gain a general education and
  appreciation of ideas”) less than Boomers when they were the same age
  in the 1960s–1970s.

(Twenge, J. M., & Donnelly, K. (2016). Generational differences in American students’ reasons for going to college, 1971–2014: The rise of extrinsic motives. Journal Of Social Psychology, 156(6), 620-629. doi:10.1080/00224545.2016.1152214)

Other articles that may be of interest (by no means an exhaustive list):

Balloo, K., Pauli, R., & Worrell, M. (2015). Undergraduates’ personal
circumstances, expectations and reasons for attending university.
Studies in Higher Education. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/03075079.2015.1099623
Bui, K. V. T. (2002). First-generation college students at a four-year university: background characteristics, reasons for pursuing higher education, and first-year experiences. College Student Journal, 36(1). 3+.
Kennett, D. J., Reed, M. J., & Lam, D. (2011). The
Importance of Directly Asking Students Their Reasons for Attending
Higher Education. Issues in Educational Research, 21(1) 65-74.
Kennett, D. J., Reed, M. J., & Stuart A. S. (2013). The impact of
reasons for attending university on academic resourcefulness and
adjustment. Active Learning in Higher Education, 14(2). First
published on June 10, 2015. doi:10.1177/1469787415589626
Phinney, J. S.; Dennis, J.; Osorio, S. (2006). Reasons to attend
college among ethnically diverse college students. Cultural
Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 12(2).347-366. doi:
10.1037/1099-9809.12.2.347
Schultz, J., & Higbee, J. (2007). Reasons for Attending College: The
Student Point of View. Research and Teaching in Developmental
Education, 23(2), 69-76.


Getting proper credit for a paper: author order I am a PhD student and I submitted a paper formally co-authored with my advisor months ago. The core idea of the paper is mine. During the first (major) revision, among other much needed, yet very time-consuming, improvements I had to implement, I had to take the methodological section over in order to develop a more compact, precise, and overall stronger argumentation. A further revision request, while appreciating my effort, now requires to hugely revise the (relatively small) part he developed and wrote. In spite of my great effort, the author order is established by my advisor as alphabetical and I feel I am not getting enough credit for my work. My advisor does not seem open to other options, such as specifying contribution in the appendix of the paper while keeping the alphabetic order of the authors.

An author listing convention is not defined in my field: alphabetical ordering is not uncommon, although first authorship undoubtedly has a relevance.

Overall, I think I have contributed from 80% to 90% of the paper. I do not know what to do in order to get my effort more properly acknowledged (I strongly desire so), nor I know if anything can be done at all. I do not even know if this matter is worth the struggle, or maybe it is better (as for our student-advisor relationship) to let it go.

EDIT: thank you for your detailed answers. I appreciated both of them. I accepted @Buffy's answer for the slightly more practical approach - which I needed most - to the problem. I also felt the sympathy in @Titus' answer, and I appreciated it very much.

I suppose the alphabetical order is in favour of the supervisor. Unfortunately, if the excuse is indeed valid for the field you cannot do much. You can try and challenge it based on the practices of target journals, but you should be prepared for some confrontation.

An informal convention in many fields is that the PhD student gets to be the first author and the supervisors follow. It is within the power of the supervisor to uphold it but it is also violated both in favour of an undeserving student and to the detriment of a deserving one. Field conventions do vary, but as long as first authorship has weight and there is not a very good reason I am thoroughly in favour of first authorship going to the PhD student. I can only express my sympathy.

In my experience, a standard situation for publications stemming from a PhD is that the major bulk of the workload falls on the PhD student and supervisors undertake some rewriting (introduction/ conclusion/ discussion), polishing and getting the paper published. In that context, it is natural for the student to undertake as it is part of the learning process of the PhD.


Is it possible not to have a hypothesis in your thesis? I have been working on a research report in which forecasting is done on the basis of data, followed by an interpretation of the forecasted results.

Is it possible to have that kind of research without hypothesizing any statement?

If this question is off-topic kindly recommend a suitable community.

As a statistician, I'm inclined to say "no, you can't" as a short answer. Reason for this is simple: even in complete random datasets on average 5% of the correlations will be significant when tested in a model. So if you rely on only the data to make any kind of interpretation on association of variables, you're bound to publish false positives. This has been discussed for decades, eg this rather strong opinion of Ioannidis (2005) :

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

He says:

  Bias can entail manipulation in the analysis or reporting of findings.
  Selective or distorted reporting is a typical form of such bias.

If you don't formulate a hypothesis and still interprete the data, you're -probably unintentionally- reporting selectively. You select from the analysis those results that tell a story, and in doing so, you're likely to report something that isn't a solid association or relation.

That said, you don't always have to formulate a specific hypothesis. For example, if you compare multiple methods on efficiency, you don't have to hypothesize beforehand which one is going to be the best. But the statistical test you use for comparison, will imply a "null hypothesis" that there is no real difference between all methods. Also this is "formulating a hypothesis" merely by the choice of analysis tools.

And this is even more important to realize: you might not formulate a hypothesis explicitly, but the nature of the statistical tools you use to come to your interpretation, will imply a set of rather rigid hypotheses and assumptions. You need to be aware of those hypotheses and also of those assumptions.

Because that's something I see far too often: people not explicitly formulating a hypothesis, still interpreting results from a statistical methodology, but failing to realize that their data does not meet the assumptions of that methodology. And that invalidates your entire interpretation.

This problem is even more stringent when forecasting. If you use regression models, you should be aware that predictions outside the boundaries of the original data cannot be interpreted. The uncertainty on those predictions is simply too big. If you use spline methods, you can even get into trouble at the edge of your original data. So definitely in the case of forecasting I would write out both the goal of the research and what you expect the predictions to show, including the scientific reason why. Only in those cases you can use forecasts as some form of evidence for or against the expected relation. If you don't do that, your forecasting model might as well be a fancy random number generator.

So in conclusion: even if your research goal isn't necessarily a defined hypothesis, you still need to formulate the hypotheses you want to test before carrying out the actual statistical tests.

And in all honesty, writing down what you expect to see is always a good idea, even if it's only to order your own thoughts.


My master thesis is going in the wrong direction I'm a CS master student in a German university. Here we have to do a master project in one semester and the master thesis in another semester, so in total 12 months. In the project you start in defining and exploring the problem space and so on and building a preliminary software framework that will help you more in the thesis. In the thesis you build on that to expand your work and finally summarize everything.

My problem started with the problem definition. My supervisor didn't have an idea of what to work on, so he just came up with a fancy idea and told me to work on without knowing if it's logical or it can be applied or not. So I started working on that problem and trying to reformulate the problem into a logical project and thesis. I spent 8 months on that and finally I built the software framework and so on. However after finishing the work, I found that continuing with the problem in the same formulation as-is won't be logical and would make everything as rubbish work. So I found a better formulation to the problem that makes it much much better and would lead to publish a paper in a conference or a workshop. However my new formulation cancels out 75% of my previous work. This way I won't have much of stuff to write in my master thesis.

I sent my proposal to my advisor for the thesis and I'm still looking for his opinion, but I'm very depressed with what happened to me. Having a better advisor with a far clearer idea wouldn't have led me to this point.

Is what I'm going through normal?

As a researcher, you should expect to fail.

In general, you will frequently finding yourself coming up with ideas that don't pan out, results that suggest that what you did previously was wrong, or that a particular problem can't be solved yet (you need to do time-consuming step X before you can tackle interesting problem Y). Encountering these situations doesn't mean that what you've done is wrong, it means that you're doing research. (If everything you do is always successful, I'd argue you're doing development, as opposed to research.)

Success as a research comes from learning to cope with and overcome adversity. So I'd suggest that you use this as a learning experience. Rather than be depressed about it, try to work around your problems. It will be a valuable tool that will stay with you for the rest of your career.

Now, with respect to handle the master's thesis itself, this is something that you need to discuss with a number of people: your Betreuer (the person in charge of the thesis), as well as the head of the institute plus the person in charge of supervising students in your department. This is particularly important because your Betreuer is not normally allowed to grade your thesis, unless the Betreuer is a professor. Therefore, the people doing the grading may not be aware of the issues you had in the process. However, I would advise you to frame your questions in a positive way: that is, ask

  What can I do to make sure I end up with a successful thesis?

rather than

  How do I get myself out of this problem?

The former is much more likely to result in a satisfactory resolution than the latter.


Paper revision exact deadline I am revising a paper submitted to IEEE TVT journal. I'm quite tight on time and trying to complete the paper revision by its deadline which is on Sep 10,2018 (Monday).

Does anyone have a paper on TVT and know the exact meaning of deadline for this journal ? Is it on Sunday night or Monday night ?

Relax. Journal deadlines are not strict (unless they are for special issues with a set publication date). They're more intended to help keep the journal organized. Chances are you can go weeks past the deadline and nothing will happen, although if you wait months, your submission might be removed as dormant.

If you're still concerned, ask for a deadline extension. It's likely the journal will grant it.


How much informal writing should there be in a research article? I am starting to write a research article in computer science area. While writing, I am using very formal terminologies and sentences which occasionally get quite boring. Sometimes, funny side of my personality pops up, and I end up writing some informal sentences which I have to delete later, picturing a very serious looking reviewer reading my paper draft. I always have this idea that a research article should be narrated like a story (keeping the facts and assumptions valid) to make it interested for the readers and stories often get quite informal. Don't they?

So the question is: How informal can I go in writing a research article even if my assumptions are correct? Do reviewers mind if the language used is not quite formal?

...funny side of my personality pops up...which I have to delete...

Good. Keep it that way. There is absolutely no place for jokes in academic writing*. This includes funny puns or things like that. The purpose of a research paper is to communicate science. Unless you are researching humour, do not do it.

What good can come out of it? Do you envision someone thinking "oh, that's a funny guy! I should hire him!"? No. This does not happen.

Jokes and what is considered good humour changes with time. Things you find funny now were not funny 10 years ago, and vice versa. Once this gets in a paper, this is forever in the scientific record. No matter how funny or witty you think you are now, you will most probably look back regretting that you did. This is also a cultural thing: things that are funny in Europe may not be funny (or even offensive) in Asia. There is also a language barrier. Some people may not even realise it's a joke and try to understand it in the context of the paper. This can only lead to unnecessary confusion.

As a reader I want to understand the science, and only the science. If you want to be funny, open a Twitter account, write a blog, post it on Facebook, put it on a poster and hang it on your office door.

*Humour is acceptable if you're a distinguished professor that made abundant contributions to science and you're writing an opinion paper. You'd have to be over 70 years old for that. And even then, use it sparingly.

Also related:

Amusing remarks in papers
Should academic papers necessarily carry a sober tone?
How much of humor in a formal academic writing is considered as disrespect?


What does "Awaiting SE Preliminary Decision" mean for IEEE transactions journal? I have a manuscript with IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology under peer review from early Jan 2020. Today, there has been a status update on the journal's ScholarOne online portal which says "Awaiting SE Preliminary Decision".

What does this mean?

What does the 'SE' stand for?
Why is the decision to be made by the SE classified as "preliminary"? Will there by further non-preliminary decisions made at the editorial office?

A reasonable guess would be "section editor", that is, an editor responsible for a thematic section.
The wording suggests that there will be a further check. In some journals, there is a final check by the editor-in-chief for every article. Normally, you can expect that the outcome of this check is positive, as editor-in-chiefs are usually very busy and inclined to trust their editors.


Why are conference papers so important in computer science (CS)? From my understanding many CS conferences are highly selective and the papers are peer-reviewed. The CS field also seems to publish traditional journal articles. I do not understand the difference between the two and in particular I am curious about the advantages of having two different publication streams. The type of things I am curious about are:

What is the difference between a paper published in a top CS conference and a top specialist journal?
Is one more prestigious than another and if so how do they line up?
Why not just publish conference papers as a special issues of a journal?

I'm afraid this answer may be unsatisfying, but at its root, it just boils down to the culture of the field, as determined by early choices in its particular history.  Now that it is well established, practices have developed that cement it in place, including clear distinctions between what goes in a journal and what goes in a conferences.

Michael Ernst has a very nice write-up of the typical way a computer scientist thinks about conferences vs. journals.  In short:

Conferences are fast, higher status, higher selectivity, and higher visibility.
Journals are where you put a review article or a final "extended version" of a paper (the typical threshold is "at least 30% new material").

Journals are also important for getting tenure at lesser institutions, which apply the same standards to biologists and computer scientists.  This also further lowers the perceived status of journals, since the best departments are less motivated to publish there than the worst.


Is it OK to mention dreams and future plans for a specific company in my SOP when applying for master's degree? I am about to apply for Master's degree at a University in US that specializes in game development. I have been playing and I am a huge fan of Blizzard games for almost 15 years and the reason I pursue a higher education is to broaden my knowledge and sharpen my skills so that I can land on my dream job.

I wanted to mention this (in a politically correct manner) because I think it shows determination. Is this a good idea or would it hurt my statement?

Unlike the other existing answer, I would advise you to tread carefully.

Maybe this is different for a Master's in game development, but generally speaking, "I like to play computer games" qualifies as the #1 worst reason we get to hear about why students are interested in computer science. One of the reasons why this is such a bad motivation is because it shows a certain level of misunderstanding about what computer science is, and I would argue that this is even true for a master in game development.
Even great computer game developers are, to the best of my knowledge, not only interested in gaming, but also in AI, computer graphics and animation, HCI, physical simulation, distributed systems, optimization, etc. Not all of them at the same time, but being "just" interested in building cool games seems rather weak, to be honest. I think it can be pretty much implied that you are interested in games if you apply for game development. Show and discuss your interests in other related areas that sets you apart from all the other applying gamers.
Also, having working at Blizzard as your dream job does not show determination. Many people have this as their dream job, and still do not follow through. Determination is doing something to make your dream a reality despite problematic circumstances, not having a dream in the first place. You should explain what you did, not what you hope to achieve.


Applying for internship in the US as a European Student My question is about applying for a US internship(4 scale GPA) as a European student(with 10 scale GPA).

I took a look at this thread. An answer mentions that 93% of grades are 'A's, thus leading to a 4.0 scale GPA. In my country, the average GPA in my school is 6.3/10, which depends on lots of factors (difficult exams, professor unwilling to help etc). Practically, students scoring A's (10/10 or 9/10) in courses are very limited and in some courses like Calculus non-existent.

I've seen many internship programs from large corporations where they require a GPA of 3.5 and above.

When only one student in the history of my school has scored 3.9/4.0 (converted to 4 scale from 10 scale system, 9.9/10 in 10 scale) only 1% every year graduate with 3.5/4.0 and above GPA, what are my chances of being accepted at a US program even with experience in my area of interest? Are European GPA's handled differently than US GPA's? I believe a direct comparison between the two is impossible since in reality they are two different grading systems.

As has been said, your last sentence hits the mark - a direct comparison is impossible.  I would argue that it isn't necessary, either.

I am a US native.  I am currently working an internship in the United States at a child company of a larger pharmaceutical business.  I know that my company had a "minimum" GPA for the application, but this was never mentioned in the interviewing process.  To me this implies that companies use GPA to see if a candidate meets a satisfactory minimum - it's a way to weed out applicants they know they don't want or need.  I think if you explain that your GPA is good by European standards, if indeed it is, then your application will be strong.

A few of my fellow interns are from Germany.  I don't know them well but I mention this to show that success is possible and that some companies in the United States, at least, have a good grasp of how grading scales work in Europe.  I think it worth mentioning that Europe seems to have a relatively smaller amount of grade inflation as compared to here.  That's an important point - grades are somewhat inflated here, and a 3.5 GPA probably indicates a level of performance that is different than you imagine.  Given this, I would say your chances of getting a job are good, especially if you adopt the normal tactics of applying to many positions and being prepared to take a few rejections.


How interchangeable are PhD students to most professors? Do most professors value their PhD students, or do they see them as easily replaceable by fresh, new blood?  If a PhD student stops working, will the professor try to fix things, or replace him like a cog in his machine?

Most PhD advisors invest a great deal of time, money, and effort in their PhD students. This is a sunk cost.

If the advisor acts as a selfish rational decision maker, he/she would evaluate the prospective (future) costs of continuing to work with the student, the likelihood of the student becoming productive again given some level of intervention on the part of the advisor, and the benefit to the advisor if the student becomes productive again. Other contributing factors may include the cost to the advisor's reputation of having a failed PhD student and the impact of a failed PhD student on the advisor's promotion prospects.

Based on these parameters, a selfish rational player could evaluate whether it is in his/her own best interests to try and "fix things" or whether to cut his/her losses and "replace him like a cog in his machine."

In other words, there is no single action taken by "most" advisors here - the best response of even a purely selfish advisor depends on the parameters of the situation.

Finally, most of the PhD advisors I personally know also feel some level of affection for their students and personal interest in their future, and would not necessarily make the strictly selfish decision described above. Rather, most PhD advisors I know would make an irrational decision that would consider the students' interests in addition to his/her own selfish interests. Depending on the situation, it may or may not be in the student's interests to be "fixed."


What is IRDAM Journal? I was reading Clinical Chemistry Guide to Scientific Writing Series. One of the articles is titled: “If an IRDAM Journal Is What You Choose, Then Sequential Results Are What You Use”.

I have encountered this term in this site also. Can anybody explain this term?

A Google search asks ”Did you mean: IRDA Journal”

In the article I linked, it is explained as "Introduction, Results, Discussion, and Methods".  I understand its meaning as this readily. What I would like to know following points.

Which type of journal articles are suitable for this style?
Which branches of academic endorse its usage?
Are there any other such styles exists?
Are there any other abbreviations exists?
finally but not least, why should I follow this type of sequence?

If you look at this article, you can see that IRDAM is an acronym for Introduction, Results, Discussion, and Methods. IRDAM is a style/format of presenting results in publications.

Quote from the article:

  The IRDAM format requires a substantial change in how the Results
  section is organized. Because the methods are listed at the end of the
  paper, or online, the reader is not exposed to details of the
  experimental protocols and methods before the results are presented.

See also,

  The format used by many high-impact basic research journals, such as
  Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of
  Clinical Investigation, and Journal of Cell Biology, is arranged so
  that the Results section immediately follows the Introduction. The
  Methods section is placed at the end, or it may even be published as a
  supplemental data file.


Adjective order in academia: "Italian young adults" It's always been my understanding that age precedes nationality in standard adjective order (see, for example, The Royal Order of Adjectives); thus, it should be "young Italian adults" rather than "Italian young adults".

However, I'm revising a demographic study and decided to double check this by searching Google Scholar. To my surprise, I found 539 uses of the latter vs. 217 of the former. Regular Google delivers 88,700(!) vs. 1830, and I get similar results with various nationalities and also from Google Books (though not from the news).

I don't think such a large discrepancy could be ascribed to overall misuse, and the "incorrect" order occurs mostly in academic texts. So, my questions:

Is there some reason why the order of age and origin adjectives
should be reversed in academic (specifically demographic) texts?
Is that really the standard?

I speak English only as a second language, and I don't do research that involves young adults, but my guess is that it's because "young adults" is a fixed expression that is very close to a compound word. So it feels weird to split it with an adjective. This would be a good question for English.SE, but I think that we are in the middle of a linguistic process where this expression is transitioning to become a true compound word.

Anyway, it is a common saying that "the international language of academia is broken English", so you shouldn't take academic texts as an example of style. For most academic writers English is a second (or third, fourth...) language, and many write by translating word-by-word constructs from their native language. It shouldn't be surprising to find the wrong word order.


Is it acceptable to put a future event in one's CV? I'm working on my CV for graduate school applications and was wondering about my "Presentation" section. I know that I will be attending the American Chemical Society Conference in Spring 2017 (they accepted my abstract), so is it acceptable to list that as one of my presentations?

Yes, but to avoid confusion, clearly label it as such.

Similar to how you can list papers with (submitted) or (under review), you can list presentations and posters as (confirmed) or some other indication that the plan is final and has been accepted.  If you don't label it as such, there is a risk the reader may believe the year is erroneous.


Branches of software engineering I have to decide on which branch of software engineering to focus my studies. In my institute, the branches are not fixed. Each student has the possibility to propose their branch. For example, I could propose to do my specialization in "learning machine". At the institute, there is no person who advises the student on what branches are currently available in software engineering. So I'm a little lost.

I wanted to ask if you can name me branches of software engineering that you know. On the internet I have not found much info about it.

I also appreciate advice on which branch is going to have a better long-term future.

Sorry for my English. I know it's a somewhat ambiguous question, but for me it's very important.

There is no fine line that separates the subfields of software engineering and there is a lot of overlap. However, below is a list based on my experience in the software engineering research community (and you can find one or more credible conferences that focuses on each of these):

Formal methods
Program analysis
Software engineering process
Requirements engineering
Models
Automated software engineering
Software maintenance
Testing
Empirical software engineering
Human factors
Program comprehension
End-user software engineering

I'm sure there are more, but this should get you started.


Using public profile data from website for research A member of our department plans to download millions of profiles from a public website. The data is freely accessible after you have logged in, though there is a company behind the website that does have commercial interests and sells premium memberships. The website’s terms and conditions don’t explicitly prohibit mass downloading of information and he claims that his software would simulate normal user behavior, thus not interfering with the normal operations of the site.

A preliminary evaluation from our ethics committee suggests that – from an ethical standpoint – everything would be fine as long as he doesn’t publish the dataset (which he doesn’t plan to do) and the data is anonymized. Also, he will aggregate the data, so no information pertaining to individuals will be intelligible.

Still, I am not completely convinced that this study should be done and the final vote is still pending. Are there any other things to consider? Could the company operating the website possibly sue the university (or him) for using the data or would that be condoned by an act protecting the freedom of press or anything similar? We are in Germany, so German and EU law applies.

What you're describing is the OKCupid data release, just without publishing the dataset. Note that the OKCupid "study" and similar studies on Facebook data were considered ethically controversial by some, who argue that users who participate in a website are not necessarily giving consent to participate in a research study, especially when users' profile data is only available to logged-in users. (Also see: “But the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in Facebook by Michael Zimmer.)

Re: avoiding a lawsuit, you should get the OK from the website. As Wrzlprmft pointed out in a comment:

  Unless the research could cast them in a bad light, they may be interested to learn something about their userbase as well. Also, you may get to know relevant information about the data, such as hidden selection mechanisms or similar

If you choose not to go that route, I'd recommend consulting with a lawyer re: the website's terms and conditions. Realistically, nobody here can tell you the likelihood of being sued, or of losing the lawsuit. A lawsuit would probably be based on the terms and conditions of the website; get a lawyer to review them. Your colleague's assessment that they "don’t explicitly prohibit mass downloading of information" is not exactly reassuring. (For example, language in the terms and conditions that enumerates the permitted use of the website can potentially exclude other uses, without explicitly enumerating the prohibited uses.)

The case law on this issue is far from settled. The decisions so far have been limited. There is no legal precedent that clearly establishes that "scraping is always allowed if the T&C don't explicitly prohibit it".  There are some select cases that have begun to map out cases where scraping is and is not prohibited, but the legal territory is not yet fully explored. Some further reading on case law in the US and EU:

Judge: Google cache kosher when it comes to copyright
Judgment in Ryanair Ltd v PR Aviation BV
Judgment in Innoweb BV v Wegener
Web Scraping in an Era of Big Data 2.0


"Professors do talk, you know" - What exactly does that mean? This is a phrase that I have heard on multiple occasions, both on this forum and in real life. But what exactly does that mean (in reference to talking about students)? When I hear this, I can't help but imagine a group of emeritus professors with grey beards sitting around in a room gossiping about the latest incoming student, with pipes in hand. An image that is both comical and scary if true, although hopefully far from accurate. So what I'm wondering is:

When do professors typically discuss students (performance or otherwise)? When they are going out to lunch with other colleagues or after committee meetings...?
What do the conversations usually revolve around? By that I mean are these conversations typically strictly professional, or are they more gossipy in nature like you would expect at some workplaces?
Have you ever been in or heard conversations that were "malicious" towards certain students? Like warning other colleagues off on advising someone?
Are these conversations more likely to be positive or negative? Do profs tend to spend more time praising star students or complaining about the non-star students?

Since students are a big part of our life, we discuss students both in casual situations (e.g., lunch) or professional settings (e.g., committee meetings).  Of course you shouldn't think students are all we talk about, and discussions about students mostly only come up in committee meetings when they're relevant.
The conversations are mostly professional, particularly the ones in meetings, but some things you might consider "gossipy" I would consider professional, e.g., where a student is going for grad school.  (As a department, we have an interest in what our students do afterwards).  Not that there is not no gossip going on, but at least I personally am not so interested in it, and I don't know too much about the personal lives of most of my students.  Most "gossip" is about other faculty.
Well, faculty often discuss about bad experiences with/performances of students with other faculty. Sometimes to get advice, sometimes to vent, and sometimes because the student has done something amusing.  Sometimes the student's name is used and sometimes it is not.  In my department, I think the student's name is not normally used in the case of undergrads unless it is in a professional context (needing advice or reporting a possible problem student).  But we don't often give explicit advice like "stay away from this student."
In general, I think people have a tendency to spend more time complaining than offering praise.  However, at least at the undergrad level, when names are used, I think it is more often to speak positively or neutrally of students than speak negatively.


How often should one evaluate a plan for an academic career? I'm about to start my PhD. I feel I should try to plan my academic career; or set some general goals at least. The time line could be something like 5-15 years. The first years are easy to plan: study this, study that, publish a few papers etc. It gets more difficult to make plans beyond receiving the PhD. I think that if I don't know where I want to go with my degree, it becomes difficult to make decisions during the coming years: when to say yes, and when to say no. I know I don't want to just end up somewhere doing what other people think I should be doing.

How do you plan your career? How frequently do you update your plan and/or check have you progressed as you planned?

What I tell my students starting out is to make sure that they have realizable goals. Saying "I want to be a postdoc in field X in five years" is realizable. Saying "I want to work for Professor X at University Y on project Z in five years" is probably not realizable. Making sure you have a plausible goal in mind, and the ability to work toward it is incredibly important.

However, it's important to realize that goals and opportunities change over time. What you think you want to do now may not be what you want to do a year from now. So that's why it's important not to have goals that are too narrowly defined—otherwise, it makes it harder to change your mind later and still be satisfied with the way things turn out.

How often do you reassess goals? As often as you feel you need to. But you should also distinguish between the different ranges of priorities—short-range, mid-range, and long-range.  Short- and mid-range should be reviewed on a very regular basis (weekly to monthly); the longer-range stuff at least a few times a year. But these are guidelines that work for me; you need to find a system that works for you.


Can my adviser publish an under review work without my consent? I recently graduated from my PhD program. To put things into prespective I need to mention that I, unfortunately, don’t have a good relationship with my adviser. I currently have one under review paper with my adviser. We received the reviewers’ comments for this paper. However, I don’t have time to work on this paper anymore.

Recently, my adviser asked the area editor to extend the deadline. When I asked her to forward this email to me, she insistently refused to forward the email.

Can my advisers publish this work without my consent? Can they remove my name from the paper given the fact that I will not work on this paper anymore? How do I need to communicate this with area editor if at all?

Can my advisers publish this work without my consent?

No. But why would you refuse it? Just to harm your supervisor? That seems petty. You have nothing to gain by sabotaging her and throwing away months or years of work for both of you.

If the problem is that you have no time to work on the paper anymore, just write that to her. She might be happy to finish the work herself.

  Can they remove my name from the paper given the fact that I will not work on this paper anymore?

No. Assuming your past contribution was substantial, you are rightfully an author.

It would be a major faux pas for her to try to get it published without your name. You'd have every right to complain and ask for retraction, and plenty of evidence from your dissertation (if what you write is correct). That sounds like major academic misconduct. Her reputation, and possibly also her job, would be at stake.

  How do I need to communicate this with area editor if at all?

What do you wish to communicate exactly? Are you afraid that she is going to remove you from the list of authors? That seems an unreasonable concern to me. (See above.)


How to tell a professor at a foreign university politely and impressively that I can’t cover the costs of living for my PhD? When asking for an opportunity to do a PhD with a professor at a foreign university, he replied:

  As a prerequisite you would need to take care of your own funding to cover the costs of your entire PhD project (4 years, cost of living, housing etc.). If you have such funds I would be happy to discuss with you the possibilities.

However, I don’t have any money to cover the cost of living. How can I answer him politely to impress him?

As a prerequisite you would need to take care of your own funding to cover the costs of your entire PhD project (4 years, cost of living, housing etc.). If you have such funds I would be happy to discuss with you the possibilities.

This is the professor's polite way of saying, "We do not have funding to support you as a student.  If you obtain your own funding let's discuss further, otherwise there is little reason to continue this discussion."

  I don’t have any money to cover the cost of living.

Then the appropriate response is, "Thank you for your time and consideration.  Please keep me in mind if a funded position opens up in the future."

  How can I answer him politely to impress him?

It sounds as though you'd like to respond in a way that causes him to allocate cost of living expenses to you.  I doubt the likelihood of that - if there are funded positions available, professors typically allocate them and notify students for them first, then once the positions are filled notify those that didn't make it that they have none available, and self funding would be the only option.  So chances are good that he simply has no funding to afford taking you on as an expense for their program.  It's also possible that they don't fund PhD students at all in their program.

However, if you have some knowledge that they do have funding and are simply not impressed enough by what you've presented so far to allocate some for you, then your options are limited.  You need to sell yourself and help them understand that your ability, talent, and skills are well above average and would be an asset to them that would be worth paying for.

How you would do that really depends a lot on your program and area of study.  Further, if you had more to show them, you should have done so well before this point.  Trying this now once they've already made their decision has a lower chance of success than impressing them when you first apply.

All that said, there's another option you might want to consider: bring your own funding with you.  It's not easy, but you may be able to write a successful grant proposal for them that gets them the funding they would need to fund the first part of your PhD.  You may have to do this a few times during your time there to continue your education.  Honestly, this method also has its risks, as they would have to cooperate, and they would have to allocate the funds received - not all of which would go to your education.

If this educational institution is particularly important to you and you have to get into their program, you might consider some of these options.  You might, instead, have a better chance with a different institution, though.  Lastly, it's reasonable to take a year or two off from education, get a job, and save money.  Industry experience in your field can be quite valuable to some PhD programs and might give you a leg up on the competition the next time you apply, and if not you should be able to bring some self-funding to the table.  In some industries you may be able to make contacts and network with people in a way that makes you more valuable.

Don't get too caught up in having what you want right now - getting a PhD later in life isn't a disadvantage.  It's more important to have good evidence - research, papers - of your skills than it is to have done it earlier.


Breadth vs. depth of reading in preparation for postgraduate study I am considering returning to university to begin postgraduate study, but before that I plan to spend a year or two in industry to earn some money and also gain perspective on the idea. However, I'd like to continue reading about the area I plan to study while on that break.

My question is: Would I be better served, as far as preparing for postgraduate studies in an informal way:

Staying up-to-date with relevant research in the area I plan to specialise in, thereby having a relatively good idea of how things are at the moment, etc., or
Reading more widely, covering for example most of the important/foundational texts for the whole area of study (or at least more of it than I otherwise would), and so having a better understanding of the issues and key idea in most areas at the expense of in-depth knowledge of the specialisaiton area

Of course, I will likely be doing a bit of both, but I was wondering if either is more worth aiming for than the other.

EDIT: Regarding similarity to this question: I read that before posting and they seem to be asking more about the depth in which they should read given articles, while I am asking more for whether the articles/etc that I choose to read should be broad or deep in their subject matter. This question is different.

I fear answers to this question must be subjective and Am I reading enough of the scientific literature? Should I read for breadth or depth? seems to cover the general topic of breadth vs. depth pretty well. Plus you answered your own question in that you should try to do both.

As a returnee myself however I can't resist to share my experience. I also tried to prepare informally for a return to university, both deeply and broadly. I found that actually diving in deeply was very challenging since I had been out of academics and working in the software industry for 10-15 years. Consequently my math was rusty, my familiarity with notation and other formalisms was all but gone and I had a pretty huge disconnect between this new research and what little I recalled from my previous stint. If you haven't been out of the loop for as long as I was, things hopefully aren't this dour, but you can imagine this wasn't a particularly inspirational experience.

Thankfully I found catching up in broader terms made up for this. It was easier to pick up things closer to my general interest and which didn't require all that prior knowledge, but it also provided the context and motivation to understand the deeper, bleeding-edge stuff. Perhaps most interesting is that the really broad stuff, even way outside my field (physics to make math prep more fun, history and philosophy for context) have given me a perspective that isn't of direct use per se, but which adds immensely to the enjoyment of my study and personal development.

So to answer the question directly, do both starting broadly and dive in when you really want to know more deeply about a particular topic. It works wonders for motivation and they'll throw you into the deep end when you get back anyway.


Assigning presenters the role of a session chair without prior notice I am going to present my research on a conference in the near future. This conference is in the field of engineering and CS. It has several sessions in parallel and a total of more than 100 papers.

When I had a look at the program, I noticed that I (and another person) have been assigned the role of the session chair of the session where I am also presenting.
However, nobody has informed me of this, yet, neither have I been asked if a want to take this over.
I had a look at the other sessions, it's similar there: Two presenters in each session have been selected to be session chairs.

So far, I have never experienced something like that.
All in all I am not complaining at all (to be honest, I am looking forward to taking over this task!), however, I am still a bit surprised.
Is it common in other fields or other conferences that presenters are managing their own sessions and are not asked whether they are willing to do so?

UPDATE: I was at the conference and some other chairs and attendees told me that this is indeed common there: They just assign the session chair role to people and sometimes miss to tell them beforehand. Nevertheless, everything went well and as expected this was an interesting experience.

It's pretty common to assign a chair arbitrarily from among the speakers of a session.  After all, those are the people who are most likely to want to attend that session anyway.  If they assigned someone else, it might prevent that person from attending a different session at the same time, that would interest them more.

It would have been more courteous if they'd asked you privately if you were willing, before putting it in the program.  But being chair isn't usually seen as being a big deal, so they may have thought it wasn't worth the bother.  Or they may be planning to ask you before the actual conference, but they put some names in the program tentatively, and it was published before they had a chance to contact you.

Of course, if there is some reason why it's not convenient for you to be chair, you can always write to them and decline.


Should I use the recommended environment in a programming course, if it's not mandatory? I'm a first year Physics  MSc student. This semester I'll attend to a practical course where we learn to use Python for scientific computing. The course is beginner-level. We will work on our own laptop, not institutional devices, and are expected to install all necessary software.

Yesterday, at the first lesson, the teacher informed us about the recommended environment and code editor (Anaconda and Spyder). He also told us, however, that, if one wishes to, he's free to use any other environment of his choice - only the teacher will have a harder time helping him.

The thing is, I already am a somewhat experienced Python coder. Of course I still have a lot to learn, but e.g. part of my BSc thesis was writing (and debugging) a 1500 line complex data processing Python program. While I wrote this, and other codes since, I got really used to a different environment (bare Python installation with Pip, and VS Code). If only for my convenience, I'd use this.

On the other hand, this is a beginner level course, and I'm sure a measurable deal of time will be spent learning the environment itself – so it's a good opportunity to learn something new. Also, if I get stuck and need the teacher's help, it'd be more convenient for him to use the environment he knows. And it's not my aim to get him frustrated... On the other hand, I think I'd be faster and more powerful using the editor I got used to, and that would be an advantage in time-critical tasks (like tests). Also, though I never used Spyder, from what I found online there's nothing it can do that VS Code couldn't – actually, VS Code seems to be the superior to me – so there may be no advantage in learning this environment.

Should I use the recommended environment, or is it okey if I use a different one? I'm sure the majority (maybe all) of my classmates will go with the recommended one, as they have no former experience with Python.

I'd like to get some point of view from educators. How big a trouble does a wayward student like me cause, may it annoy the teacher in the long run, even if he doesn't believe it now?

[I'm not really familiar with the tags here, I'd be grateful if someone more experienced could check them.]

The biggest difference you're likely to see if you use your own set up is the level at which your instructor will be able to answer questions. With the recommended method you might be told "Find and replace the string using control/command + R", whereas with your own setup you're liable be told "replace the string". Providing you already understand things well enough that you can make the translations in your head, then for a beginner's course and a mixed group you aren't likely to miss that much.

It's worth pointing out that it's perfectly possible that the teacher is more used to using yet another setup when coding themselves. Anaconda + Spyder is a good choice in this setup mostly because it works cross-platform in a reasonably consistent manner, rather than because it's a high productivity environment.


How would a collective recommendation letter from co-workers be perceived for admissions to MFA requiring work experience? I am planning to apply to an MFA program in product design, and one of the admissions requirements is having at least 1 year of work experience.

My office is structured pretty horizontally (so, nobody is nobody's boss and we're all equals). We also do all our work collaboratively, in the open. I'm wondering if submitting a letter of recommendation written collectively by my entire team would make a statement to the admissions committee of this type of program.

Have any of you seen this? If any of you have been in charge of admitting students, what's your reaction?

I had a "co-written" letter of recommendation when I was applying to graduate schools. I thought it was fine, and it was also somewhat unique, as did the people reviewing the application. The interviewer for one of the programs to which I was applying said that in two decades, he had never gotten such a letter before. So your letter will definitely stand out. However, there was also the comment that the letter was a bit strange and came across a bit "gimmicky."

I might recommend instead that you have one of your colleagues "officially" write the letter, and have the letter state that his co-workers (and name them!) also contributed to the content of the letter.


Will the asterisk (*) next to merged articles in my Google Scholar profile disappear? After merging two articles in my Google Scholar profile, an asterisk (*) shows up on the profile next to the merged items. Will it disappear after a while, or will it remain forever?

While forever is a long time, article that I have merged over a year ago are still marked with the asterisk. I would assume that this will not be automatically removed, and will remain until Google decides to change the design.


How will an online MBA be perceived in applications for a faculty position in economics and accounting? I recently retired and want to get back into pursuing higher education.

I am happily married and live in Los Angeles.  So, I am somewhat geographically constrained concerning my choice of MBA programs to attend.

I have now seriously considered online MBA programs, but I'm worried about the quality and perception and other potential risks of online degrees.

Another obstacle I face is that my employer will likely say that I was not a "team player" or a "good leader" for their organization.  Since MBA programs require so much teamwork and group projects and leadership skills, I don't think I am a good fit for traditional programs, hence the online programs would be better suited for me.

Can anyone provide some general comments about going the online MBA route?
I wish to become an Assistant Professor of Economics and Accounting.  So, I want to know how an online MBA will impact future employment in academia.

It will take you out of consideration for any faculty appointment. MBAs are headed to industry; to teach (be hired on tenure track), you need a relevant Ph.D. This doesn't depend on whether your program is online or not.

Come to think of it, depending on how interesting and high-level your prior job was, and if teaching (as opposed to research) interests you, you could target an adjunct position instead.


How do I communicate effectively and work in an interdisciplinary research team? Forgive the MS paint.

But as someone who often straddles two different domains of research and knowledge, how does one translate the jargon that is commonly found in one field and effectively communicate it to someone in another without coming off as a jerk?

Note: the intent was to use generally understood words within the field to communicate, not to come off as a jerk.

The example where my attempts to communicate between members of two different worlds and I received an earful was when I was tasked to develop a website with an existing member of a team who had extensive experience with the dept. but not with the technical details of developing a website.

Words like scrum, development cycles, production and development, were foreign to the individual. When I utilized them, I was called well... less than polite words.

After conferring with trusted confidants, I regrouped and re-approached the topic and design specifications while giving plenty of time to explain concepts that I perceived (through verbal, facial and vocal cues) that the individual did not understand. This resulted in a far better working relationship and the project was completed on time.

Now that I reexamine the subject, I can foresee that as a graduate student, inter-disciplinary collaboration with people from widely different academic backgrounds would be necessary, with differing depths of knowledge of necessary skills to complete a given research objective.

It is one thing to take the time to explain, which I don't mind if the person is willing to listen and learn. But at what point do I decide that the cost/benefit of additional units of effort expended results in diminishing returns? To put it more bluntly "you should know this already, I don't have the time to explain it to you".

It feels like this depends on who the "person" is. If it is a student who is doing a three-week internship, you might just not care (as in: it's not worth it). Same for a PhD student who is not going to play a role in your project.

However, you will have to make sure that the important people in both disciplines understand what the other part is doing and talking about. But none of them, as far as I understand your situation, "should know this" - they do come from a different field, don't they?


Do private religious institutions ever consider hiring someone clearly not affiliated with said religion for a faculty position? I am wondering if private religious universities consider hiring faculty members who are clearly not affiliated with said religion. For example, someone who is clearly Muslim applying to a Jesuit university for a tenure track position. Is it a waste of time for the very obviously Muslim candidate in this example to submit an application?

You should check the particular university in question.  They will usually make it pretty clear in their job postings and/or application process.

Some will say explicitly "We welcome applications from all candidates regardless of faith", or "We do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, ..., religion, ...".   The Jesuit institutions with which I'm familiar are of this kind.

If they say that, it's likely that they mean it.  They'd have no particular desire to get applications from candidates that they don't intend to consider; it would just be more work for them.  If they did want to discriminate on the basis of religion, they wouldn't have to hide it, since it's perfectly legal under US law for religious institutions to do so.

You might still be asked to demonstrate that you share their values, even if you don't share their religion, and that you will be comfortable working in that environment.  You might look up the university's mission statement (they pretty much all have one) and see if it's something you can get behind.

Conversely, universities that only accept applicants of a particular religion will typically signal this in the job posting.  (Again, they want to avoid wasting your time or theirs.)  A common way is to require a "statement of faith" as part of the application, in which the applicant is expected to demonstrate adherence to the appropriate religion.  I recall another posting that asked the applicant to state their religion, "for instance, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, ..." - their list only included denominations of Christianity, making it pretty clear that non-Christians need not apply.

You might also find this explained on a generic "about the university" page on their website.


Unoriginal research in Statement of Purpose I am applying to phD programs in statistics and I wanted to include my work on a project I had completed in the school year.  Unfortunately everything I did in the project had been published almost 20 years ago.  Just wondering how I should discuss this in my statement of purpose if at all.  Please let me know.

I think most admissions committees will be aware that undergraduate work is not likely to be groundbreaking.

Instead, emphasise the "soft" skills you learnt while doing the project; for example, independent learning, communication and team work, and how to build a good working relationship with a supervisor.

It would also be a great opportunity to discuss how your project led you to be interested in pursuing research at PhD level- did you enjoy discovering new things for yourself (even if they were 20 years old)? Did your work in that area spark off a particular new interest in statistics? Does the work have any modern applications?

Discussing things like this will show the person reading your statement that you have put thought into your decision to apply for PhDs, and how the work done in the past links to the state of the art (knowing how to avoid reinventing the wheel is an important skill for a researcher).