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Q: What to do if assignment is against student's religion? What is the proper course of action if while teaching an undergraduate or even secondary school course an assignment violates the religious beliefs of a student? For a more concrete example of where this might happen, let us consider an art class with a Muslim student (Disclamer: I am not an adherent to, or scholar of, Islam; please forgive me for any misunderstandings this post might contain): Within Islam it is considered haram (forbidden by God) [1] to produce images of non-plant living creatures (including humans), this is called tasweer.[2] Now if I were to assign a portrait of a person to the class as an assignment, what would be the most ethical option, should a student raise a concern to me about this? Would it be appropriate to assign an alternate assignment? [1]: Similar to a christian sin, but with a stronger connotation from what I can tell; literally: taboo. [2]: I believe this is from a hadith, but one that is deemed to be the most accurate/reliable. A: If you can make an accommodation that allows the student to participate without violating his religious observance, and without compromising the educational goals of the class, and without requiring an extreme amount of effort on your part, then it is reasonable to make the accommodation. I regularly miss classes and exams due to religious observance. My school has a very clear policy on the matter: If students have to miss a class session, exam, or are otherwise unable to participate in a course requirement due to religious observance, they must notify the professor and a certain dean in a timely manner (the definition of "a timely manner" is further specified in the policy) If said student follows the above requirement, they cannot be penalized for their religious observance and the professor must offer a fair alternative (e.g., makeup exam or assignment) If your university has no policy on the matter, feel free to adopt mine, and specify it in your syllabus at the beginning of the semester. However, I would not take a class where I know the main requirement of a class would violate my religious observance. Indeed, I know people who have refrained from pursuing a career because a non-negotiable required class for that field would require something that violates their religious observance. * So, if the course is Figure Drawing and someone registers knowing that he cannot draw the human figure... I don't think you are required to let him pass the class by doing still lives instead. If the course is Introduction to Art for Non-Majors, it may be possible to offer an alternative to the portrait assignment. This applies more generally as well. If a student in good faith (i.e., not to get out of doing work) considers an assignment illegal, unethical, compromising to his health/safety, etc. it seems reasonable to offer an alternative assignment if it does not compromise the educational goals of the course. * See: Can a Kohen become a doctor? A: It's not the job of places of learning to give way to superstition. Indeed, quite the reverse: the whole Enlightenment Project was about bringing light into darkness, and all the Academia I'm familiar with puts itself broadly in the Enlightenment tradition. So yes, this answer will read as uncompromising. Because, from experience, I've found that rigorous education is incompatible with compromising that rigour in favour of molly-coddling someone's religious beliefs. There is no sane middle ground. If you're going to start compromising the quality of your teaching to avoid offending someone's belief, you'll quickly find yourself running out of space. Someone's going to get offended that you're teaching males and females at the same time, sat next to each other. Someone's going to get offended that anyone's drawing the human figure, let alone that they have to. Someone's going to get offended that you don't mention their pet crank theory alongside science as if they were somehow of equal merit. If a particular course's actions are in contradiction to a student's religion, then there are two routes here. If the student is legally a child, then the student completes the actions - they are under the school's guardianship when in school. If the student is legally an adult, then they have the problem, and it's not fair on any of the other students that they should make their problem, the institution's problem. They can either fail that part of the course, or they can do the work. If a student's beliefs contradict knowledge, science or art, that's not the problem of the place of learning. That's the problem of the student. If this is about children, then the responsible adults are guilty of abuse, for bringing that state of affairs about, and the school should do as much as it reasonably can to make amends for that failure. Note that I am not saying that a religious upbringing is necessarily abuse. I am saying that teaching children nonsense such as creationism is abuse, because it can cripple that child's future opportunities. If this is about adults, then they've taken responsibility for failing that part of their education, and should be marked down accordingly. This has been something of a hot topic in Britain recently, where the teaching of creationism and other ignorances is on the rise, where state-funded schools have been breaking equality laws by selecting staff on the basis of gender, sexuality and religion, and where pressure has been put on educational establishments to subvert the teaching of several branches of knowledge, including the censoring of some exam questions on evolution, and the censoring of two university atheist society's display of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and of "Jesus and Mo" t-shirts, because these were inconsistent with some extremist religous interpretations. Academia is the bulwark against ignorance and superstition. I'm not saying that religion = ignorance and superstition. Creationism = ignorance and superstition. Refusing to draw the human figure = ignorance and superstition. Avoiding listening to or playing music = ignorance and superstition. Preventing females from being educated = ignorance and superstition. A: If the student chooses, or sucumbs to parental directives to refuse some components of education, then the student or their parents have to accept that they can't achieve so much in that realm. One day the student will have to make A PERSONAL CHOICE as to their direction. Offering them a free ride is not appropriate to that choice. If they persist with their choice, to not participate in some aspects of the multicultural society they live in, then they surely will be happy that they are not 'infected' with whatever perceived ill they deem to spring from the offensive activities. Why do they want to be seen as masters (ie high grade scorers) of a system they partially or wholly reject? Do we really want to teach children to lie to themselves and others like this? Make your choices (yes, even as a child) and take the consequences.

Q: Computer Science master's vs PhD I'm about to graduate with a BS in computer science, my question relates to even higher education. I generally found most of the topics (Aside from the post calc 2 math) pretty easy and am graduating with a 3.5 GPA. I had the chance to get into an early entry MS program but applied over winter break and 2 of my instructors didn't send their recommendation in time. Now I don't have enough credits to double count as masters level credits for the next semester. I plan on working and letting my employer pay for my Masters degree after a few years, but they won't pay for a PHD. Would it be worth the extra time, work, and money to get a PHD? I don't want to be "overqualified" and denied jobs because of the extra salary and I'm not super interested in working in academia (At least not until I'm about to retire). If there is someone with a PHD who would offer their input I'd love to hear from you. Thanks! A: By looking at the wording of your post, I suggest you to run away from a PhD degree as fast as you can. A PhD degree is one of the milestones in an academic's life and is not something to pursue if you don't know it's worth it. Getting an extra salary and having a PhD is two different things. A salary is based on your value for the company. A PhD is something that you earn by conducting quality research. It seems you try to have a PhD degree just for some extra money. That is not the way to go. PhD would not teach you how to be a good employee and an inevitable member of the company. If you want to earn more in the industry, you should keep away from academia and start putting all your effort into your job. Your employer of course would not pay for your PhD because i) it is usually 4 years long, ii) a PhD student will have numerous opportunities to earn scholarship and iii) pursuing a PhD will require some time, which means your productivity for the company will drop.

Q: E-Mailing supervisor during Masters Thesis - How often and how much? I am in a terminal masters program in the Humanities. I will have to write my masters thesis at some point and have been told that I will have 3 meetings with my professor. I have never worked on a thesis or with a professor as closely as this (I did not write a thesis as an undergradute), so I am a bit worried about the whole process. What am I expected to do exactly? Am I allowed to email my professor with emails? Is it even expected? And if so, how often and much is appropriate between the meetings, and what can I expect to get out of the emails (as opposed to the meetings). Sorry if this seems basic to some of you - it surely is. But it would be great to know if there are certain academic standards or rules I might not be aware of. A: There is no standards about contacting your professor. I think the proper answer to this is : ask your supervisor about it. Only he can tell you what he expects of you and how available he is. If you keep your email or contact with him civil and polite, their is nothing more to do. Depending on how many student he has to supervised and his working habits, he might tell you whether he prefers emails or meeting, or if he is able to make extra meetings with you should the need arise.

Q: How much of a paper does a reviewer fact-check? I'm mainly interested in the level of fact-checking of computer science conference papers. Do reviewers normally read the entire paper and exhaustively check the correctness of proofs, algorithms and claims? I have read papers at top conferences where implementation details are sketchy and conceptual claims are inaccurate. My guess is that an exhaustive level of fact-checking is often not done particularly in cases where the reviewer might not be familiar with all the concepts in the paper. Is this true? If this is so, then it seems unfair that the merit of a paper is essentially just based on how well the paper is pitched in the first one or two pages. A: I'm afraid there is no one-fits-all answer to your question. It highly depends on the tier of the conference. There are some that examine more into the work than others. However, the level of scrutiny in CS conferences are generally less than that of a journal of comparable reputation. This is because, such journals go through multistage reviews and edits before the final print is published. Most conferences look only into the conceptual matter and usually have insufficient time to exhaustively implement and test the proofs of each of its candidate papers with limited reviewers. Having said the above, there are some journals that scrutinize lesser than some conferences. Like I stated before, it all depends on the tier and reputation of the publisher.

Q: Do we have a citation ethics in science? Citations matter! Everybody knows this and Google Scholar (or Publish or Perish) shows it. Over the last years, I met people with different citation "ethics": Supervisors and professors require students to cite their own papers, even if they don't really relate or if there is a paper which would be more appropriate to cite. Journal reviewers nicely recommend accepting the paper for publication if only more two or three references (paper from the reviewer) are included. And even when an author cites a paper, there is often the question if the "idea" is cited or a specific "result" etc. E.g. there is a study showing that wrong citations are often inherited in papers that cite the misspelled citation, which indicates that the author didn't really read or access the paper and cites it only because of its general reputation. Similar to the IEEE Code of Ethics or ACM Code of Ethics, is there any Citation Code of Ethics? A: Citations have only one practical purpose: indicating to your readers where they can find the published material on which you built the work that's described in your paper (methods you used, hypotheses that your work support or contradict, etc.). Everything else is just more noise in an already too noisy signal. Citations should not be used to show deference to senior researchers, to increase citation metrics of a person's supervisor, nor to "grease the palms" of reviewers or falsely infer relevance to a given journal. Please refrain from doing such things, they hurt science.

Q: How to penalize students who copy each other but don't realize they have plagiarized? I gave my students an opportunity to rewrite one of their papers for extra points. As I was grading, I realized that two papers were almost identical. They had a similar structure, organization, and presented ideas in a similar manner. I asked the students about plagiarism but they denied it. Since it was a rewrite, I told them that I wouldn't add any points to their grades and they should never do this again. One of the students, however, emailed me stating that she is worried their final assignments might look similar as well. She was trying to convince me that her paper is her original work and the second student "worked really hard to make sure their papers don't look alike!". She included screen shots of their fb conversation as evidence. In FB conversation the one with the original work is telling her friend to use her paper as a basis but change the sentences and examples so it won't look like plagiarism. This is a clear case of plagiarism. Correct? I am not sure how to handle it. I know they are not realizing that's plagiarism, otherwise they wouldn't have shared those fb conversations. So I don't want to report to the school (yet!). But I am also not sure how to penalize them? Give a zero for the assignment? What do you recommend? Should I give zeros to both of them? A: Learn about your school's policy. Learn about whether your school has an honor code, defines plagiarism in its catalog, or requires mandatory training such as an online orientation. Many schools have specific rules about what kind of punishments are allowed, and these rules may be based on their own interpretations of local laws or their past experiences with lawsuits. For example, my school's policy specifically tells us that we are not allowed to give a student a failing grade in the course for dishonesty, and it also spells out different levels of consequences for a first and second offense. Look at your own syllabus to see what you said about plagiarism; usually administrators will support you on anything that's laid out clearly in your syllabus. Don't assume that administrators will support you. Their priorities may be very, very different from yours. Once you have done all your homework, talk to your dean and propose how you want to handle the issue. Make sure your dean is on board with what you plan to do. Consider "soft" penalties such as forcing the students to meet with the dean. A: This is a matter of education. Some students think plagiarism is only copy and pasting from one another. They also think placing a citation is a license to copy. Some also define it as ok if software, eg turnitin, cannot detect it. In my case I make it clear. If they steal one sentence it is an automatic zero. It is also a zero if they steal the structure of a paragraph or section. These need to be emphasized multiple times until they eject their old ways out of their system. A: This isn't just plagarism - it's out and out cheating - and both students are guilty and one of them has kindly produced proof of their guilt. I would escalate to whatever process is usually undertaken for cheating students. That they apparently have failed to grasp the concept doesn't make them any less guilty of the infringement and it simply doesn't matter whether they "meant to cheat" - they did. The appropriate way to deal with cheating students is to escalate it to the system for dealing with cheating students. You should trust that this process will take their ignorance into account while (a) being fair to other students and (b) expressing the appropriate level of opprobrium for their actions.

Q: Green card or student visa (J1) for a post-doc in the US? I'm a non-US citizen, considering a post-doc in the states. I'm eligible for a 'green card' through marriage (my wife is a US citizen). I'm deliberating whether I should apply for permanent residency right now or go through the standard path of a student visa (e.g. J1) once I find a post-doc position. I understand that not being a 'US person' somewhat limits the funding options of prospective advisors. Does searching for a post-doc as a permanent resident holder indeed opens up more opportunities? What are the advantages and disadvantages of holding a green card instead of a student visa, both prior and during the post-doc? A: Get your green card as soon as possible, do not waste your time with J1 visa. As Patricia said, you have to go back to your country where the visa was issued and you can't come back to USA for period of time (there is 2 years rule) stated on your visa. It is very restricted visa. Talk to an immigrant attorney and find the quickest way to get the green card.

Q: Is it better to NOT have an RA, and instead be doing a TA for the first couple of years of PhD? I am a first year PhD student intending to work in convex optimization and its applications. I don't have an advisor yet, so I am still TA-ing. I had a long talk with a very helpful senior grad student in this field at my university today, and he recommended that I focus on taking lots of classes and learning a lot of mathematics for the first couple of years while working on small class projects and reading lots of papers in different areas, as opposed to trying to find an RA. He said having an RA means one is forced to work on one problem, and that doesn't let you explore on your own. This is a totally new perspective to me. Until now I felt very ashamed of not having an RA, as I thought it reflected professors' lack of confidence in my capability as a researcher. Now maybe I am starting to see this as an opportunity to explore. However, I want to know other people's thoughts on this too; is it wise to spend the first two years just studying? He said that this would make life very easy for me about three years down the line when I am actually attacking problems. But I am just scared that this would be too late. Do people in theoretical fields typically do this? Or do they learn on the fly? I don't want to be left behind and have regrets after two years at having taken things too slow now. A: There are two separate issues here, and it is important to keep them separate. You absolutely need to get involved in research as soon as possible. The entire point of a PhD is to do research. It's important to get into the practice of doing research from the very beginning of your PhD program, if not sooner. Do not wait until you're done with classes. Do not wait until you've read another book, or five more papers. Do not wait until you have an advisor. Start now. Yes, your inexperience does mean that there are problems you aren't prepared to work on; work on something else. It is not necessary and it may not even be desirable to have an assistantship to support your research. First, you work in a research area that does not require specialized equipment or a laboratory; your research only requires time. You can acquire that time either by acquiring a research assistantship or by signing up for research/independent study/thesis credits. If you can't do the former, do the latter; arrange your classes accordingly. Second, accepting a research assistantship may constrain you to work on one of your advisor's research projects, but you need to develop your own independent research agenda. It's your PhD. You need to hunt it down and kill it. In short: You absolutely need to be doing research now. Being an RA is of secondary importance. (My students and I are theoretical computer scientists.) A: In my field (Engineering) being an RA at the beginning is actually important. You get to work on 1-2 problems, publish 2-3 journal articles and couple of conference papers. This will help you in the long run, since publishing, establishing your name and getting citations needs a long time. The earlier you publish, the better you chances of getting higher number of papers and citations (will help when applying for academia jobs or even immigration in some cases). TAing will help too (but let's as an assistant professor, having a good research background almost wins over having a good teaching exp. Since as a TA, you do not really get to have the full teaching exp. (search committees know that!!). This is my 0.02!!

Q: What to do with long equation-heavy solutions? I am writing a paper about a problem that involves solving a certain equation. The problem is that the solution is very long and there are a lot of terms. My question is: Is there a way to present the solution in an attractive manner instead of just typing the solution, which is about a page long? Also, would the fact that the solution is long and looks unattractive affect whether the paper get accepted or not? A: This happens not just in mathematics but in many other disciplines as well: modeling of biological systems, for example, often involves a vast number of terms in the equations. The best approach that I have found for these sorts of situations is to look for the structure in the system and to build your presentation around that structure. In most cases that I have encountered, it is not true that there are simply a bazillion essentially unrelated terms. The true story of the equation, then, is not the expanded mathematical form but the process and relations that generate it. This opens up a number of approaches for factoring out the equations in order to make them more tractable to present, including: Abstracting sub-structures as variables (e.g., X^2+XY+Y^2, where X and Y are complex terms presented separately) Separating variables from parameters (e.g., a reaction network where each reaction uses one of several standard Hill equation models, with the parameters of the models presented in a table) These sorts of factorings also lead to a much more informative and interesting presentation of the equation as well. In fact, the Big Equation itself may often end up being relegated to an appendix, where its page-busting form is of little concern. There may be, of course, certain systems in which such factoring is impossible---and that fact is quite interesting and worth clear discussion! A: Quite often, following @jakebeal, a formula with many terms can be factored, or split into groups with similar interpretation: terms with similar powers, or groupings that are consistent (for instance in convective and diffusive terms with differential equations). You may put the emphasis on the most important terms, and group the negligible ones. If you are a LaTeX user, you may use different font sizes: How can I change the font size in math equations? to help the reader focus on important parts. Or if your equation is parametric, and your paper only requires a subset of solutions, those can be given in the text, the rest can be, as suggested, put aside in an appendix. If you want montruous examples, you can have a look at What is the longest equation known?

Q: Is copying lab results a form of plagiarism? A quick question, which I'm asking out of curiosity rather than an actual problem. Plagarism and how to detect/combat/punish it seems to be a common topic on this SE. When I was an undergraduate, 20 years ago, I don't remember ever plagerising a book or other student, or any of my classmates doing the same (at least not that I knew of). However, I did a practical science in which we had 1 or 2 full-day lab workshops every week. It was very common for most of the students in these labs not to get the "expected" result, due largely to inexperience and poor technique. It was equally common for all the students to then copy, and subtly modifiy, the results of the few students who did get it to work. They would then independently use this in writing up the assignments by themselves. Would this be considered a form of plagerism in a modern academic environment? If so, what should science students with poor practical results do to write up their assignments? EDIT: after comments, I feel compelled to make clear these were undergraduate labs with previously verified results. We were not undermiming scientific process here. A: Some universities seem to have started using the term plagiarism more broadly, to refer to almost any kind of misconduct that has something to do with sourcing. (See some of the references cited in this question for examples.) Especially in that context, copying someone else's lab results certainly might get treated as plagiarism by some schools. But that doesn't really get to the heart of the matter; for instance, I don't see a difference between copying someone else's results and just making up numbers (say, based on calculations of what should have happened). The actual misconduct here is the fraudulent reporting. But perhaps this is splitting hairs: this is unambiguously misconduct, it's just not clear that it's specifically plagiarism. As for what students who get poor results should do, I think this is case where it's pretty clear that one should just ask the professor or TA. I expect the answer would usually be to write up the results as they are, with the inevitable conclusion that the data didn't match the theory. In some cases the course might have some "typical" results on file, and might ask students to write it up based on those rather than their results. (Which is almost the same as what students were doing anyway, but without the dishonesty.)

Q: Doing PhD with a 'star' professor I have recently been admitted to a few PhD programs, and have to decide where to attend. One of them has a massively famous professor (over 50k citations, 'Reuters Highly Cited Researcher'). Other potential supervisors at other institutions are still quite famous (~15k citations). Could anyone share some potential differences in my experiences if I work with someone who is that famous, or not? The group sizes/number of current students are all comparable. A: I knew somebody who started a PhD with a super-rockstar in Computer Science. He told me he met with his advisor thrice in a year or so, once (a short meeting) when defining the thesis topic, once crossed him in a hallway, and came across him at a conference. It turns out the rockstar was on the road almost 24/7. He changed to a not-so-famous advisor, and was much happier. A: Agreed with vonbrand's answer, but I would like to add one thing. If the rockstar professor is nearing retirement, he could actually have a great deal of free time to supervise you. I took a topics course with a "massively famous professor"; there were only two of us in his course. After classes every week, he invited us into his office for casual conversations about his life in grad school and in academia - and what were the biggest surprises in mathematics during his younger days. We learned that he hadn't taken on a student in many years. My classmate convinced him to advise him on his thesis. The problem given to my classmate is an especially tough one, it seems, but he is thrilled to be working with this famous, yet gracious, professor. OTOH, if the professor that you are thinking of is still highly active in research, he will likely be on the road often -- he may not even attend many of the classes that he is assigned to teach for the semester. I've also experienced this, too. Good luck with your decision. A: I recommend you perform the following experiment. Choose several established people in your field whom you admire. Look up who their advisors were. See whether or not they were, themselves, ``famous''. Draw your own conclusions.

Q: How random is the graduate admission process in the United States? I wonder how random the graduate admission process is in the United States. I am mostly interested in the fields of computer science, and PhD programs (i.e., not Master programs). One way to quantify it would be following a similar methodology as in this study (mirror), which showed that half the papers appearing at NIPS would be rejected if the review process were rerun. Of course it may not be flawless, but might give some decent approximations. I am looking for referenced numbers, not guesses. A: There is without a doubt some randomness in the process, but I find your question impossible to answer. In the question, you implicitly assume that the "quality" of an application is a well-defined concept that could be used to replicate an experiment. But this isn't the case. The only way you could do this is by submitting N "equally good" applications to the same graduate programs in the same year, and expect the same outcome for all. But this is clearly not a workable concept. Rather, different graduate programs may look for different candidates (for example because they have different areas of strength), and possibly may want to balance areas in successive years. In other words, the "quality" of an application is a concept that can only be measured against the current needs of individual graduate programs. You can't repeat the experiment at a different place or different time and expect the same outcome.

Q: PhD supervisor is taking really long to read my thesis I am at the final point of my pretty satisfying PhD. I like working alone and I did not need constant supervision, and I had a pretty good relationship with my supervisor until now. I noticed in the past that when it was time to proof-read papers, it took EXTREMELY LONG TIME to do it, and almost always waited until the day of the deadline (however, it was always corrected at the end). Now that it is time for my thesis, though, things are getting difficult. I sent the first experimental chapter more than one month ago, and it still hasn't been read, every time saying that there has some other deadline. I have been asking three times a week, and every time the the same thing is said. Of course, I don't find any pleasure in keep pressuring my supervisor, and I wish it was understood that it HAS to be done. I am afraid that it he takes 1+ month to check a chapter, it will take a year to read the whole stuff! In the meantime I have kept working on the thesis and I will finish writing the first draft soon, but it hasn't been corrected yet. I am not sure about the course of action here. How to deal with this situation? Should I talk with the director of studies? Should I keep pressuring my supervisor? Should I give a deadline? If I decide to talk with the director of studies, should I tell my supervisor first? The main point is that until now I have had a good relationship and I don't want to ruin it just now. However, I need to find a way to push to get the supervisor to complete the job. Edit to add some related details from the comments: I'm in the UK, and my research is in a field related to psychology. My second supervisor is not involved in my project, and it wouldn't be appropriate for me to contact them for this question. My scholarship ended a few months back, and I'm now being paid as a research assistant with my supervisor for a few more months. All research work has been completed, the analysis are done, and I'm almost finished with writing. Changing departments is not an option. EDIT: Thank you to everybody for your help. This is the way I proceeded: without mentioning to my supervisor about this chapter again, I just discussed about the timing to complete my PhD, mentioning that I plan to finish writing in around one month. This requires me to complete some bureaucratic paperwork soon, which means that we have to set up some deadlines, find examiners etc., which also means that my thesis will be corrected before a deadline. Since my supervisor works better with deadlines, I think that this method will work. Therefore, I ignored the particular problem about correcting the single chapter, and I used the main topic (finishing my PhD) as a way to get things rolling. Not sure if this is the best solution, but I think it may work for me. Thank you again, your support has been very appreciated. A: A good starting assumption is that your supervisor has good intentions, but like many of us, has trouble getting things done because of workload and/or procrastination. Artificial deadlines may help. Perhaps your supervisor is too busy right now but would be able to agree on a date several weeks in the future by which he can read the chapter. Or even better, perhaps you could agree an overall schedule for completing your thesis, including deadlines by which you will send each chapter, he will review it, and so on. This could help prevent the problem from recurring in the future. If this doesn't work, I would have a chat and share your concerns with him about how you feel this is needed for your own successful completion of your thesis. If all of this still doesn't have any impact, you are in a tough position. You are dependent on your supervisor, but outside of extreme situations, there is no real formal mechanism requiring his action. You could try getting your second supervisor involved. Even if you have had no contact so far, you do have a formal relationship with this person, and that is a good enough basis to do so. Talking to the director of studies would be a last resort. It probably isn't worthwhile until the continued inaction is clearly going to delay your PhD completion. If you want to maintain a good relationship, I would discuss this with your supervisor first, making it clear that the delays are about to have a big impact on your life, and you feel you have no other choice. A: While dan1111's answer is good, I have a different perspective. First, calm down. Asking him 3 times a week about something is way too often. To calm down, see the points below. Second, it sounds like you didn't agree on any timeline for the thesis writing process and feedback, but you're concerned about it so you should have this discussion. Third, it's perhaps not a big deal if your advisor doesn't give you critical feedback during the initial writing process, and I don't know that this is so common. Possibly when you write later chapters that you will realize some ways you want to revise your earlier chapters anyway. Your advisor and committee will give feedback before or at your defense, and maybe your advisor should provide feedback once or twice before you arrange the defense just to make sure the thesis is reasonable (this should be discussed in your conversation about the timeline). I don't think I gave my advisor drafts of my thesis chapter by chapter, but just a full draft when I was done (though he had given me feedback on paper write-ups beforehand). A: I concur with Kimball's first suggestion: calm down. My second observation is that it appears you feel entitled to have your supervisor help you: "I wish he just understood that he HAS to do it" and "I need to find a way to push him to do his job." These statements have a very egotistical tone to them. Your supervisor doesn't have to do anything. His taking you on as a student is adding more to his workload so you should be gracious he took you on in the first place. I think a lot of PhD students misunderstand this (I know I did). Editing your drafts is a small part of his job, just remember that. My suggestion, go and meet with your supervisor and explain your concerns. If you want to be done by a certain date, let him know. I met with my advisor once and we had this exact conversation about when I was going to graduate and we set some tentative deadlines. My advisor was ridiculously slow at getting back to me with written feedback but he eventually did and all was fine. Now that I'm on the other side, I know why he was slow and I have no problem with it. The bottom line, talk with him and do not go above his head. If you go above him without telling him first, depending on how spiteful (and tenured) he is, you may have to find yourself another supervisor. He may have a lot of work just pop up and might not have time to have you as a student anymore or the work you are doing is no longer good enough to earn a PhD. Probably won't happen but why take the chance of potentially angering your supervisor.

Q: Citing an author who changed his name I am writing a homework at the moment. One of the authors I cite, changed his name from A... to B... due to marriage (I know him personally). In the Bibliography I clearly should use the name given in the papers (sometimes A..., sometimes B...). But how should I refer to him in the text? "B... also mentioned...[1,2]" or "A... also mentioned...[1,2]", where [1] lists him as A and [2] lists him as B. I could imagine calling him B and remark in a footnote, his former name was A. What do you expercienced authors think about this? A: I would distinguish between narrative and citation. In narrative text, it is best to refer to a person by their current most preferred scientific name. In citation, on the other hand, it is best to provide the information that will best guide lookup of the document in various search and databases. When the two are not clearly connected, giving a footnote or parenthetical note will help make it clear to the reader that the difference is intended and not accidental, but it is not strictly required. A: I agree with the answer above. Cite papers using the names they were published under, and add a footnote or other indication in the narrative tying together the apparently different authors in the citations. I once wasted a lot of time chasing a reference because the paper I got it from used the author's currently preferred scientific name in the bibliography, but the paper was actually published under a different name (the author had changed her scientific name in the meantime). It would have been much better if the citing paper had given the correct name that the paper was published under, with a note explaining that the two names belonged to the same person.

Q: Asking for a Fourth Review I have submitted a paper to a conference with a rebuttal phase. I have received the first round of reviews, and should be writing an answer which addresses issues raised by the reviewers. I have received two very positive evaluations, with one accept and one weak accept. The third review however was -2 (reject). The reviewer that rejected the paper did so under the argument that the paper defined a nice problem, but "without interest for the community of the conference". He also tried to shift the focus of the paper from the main result to a very auxiliary result by treating the auxiliary result as if it were the main. 1) Would it be worth to send an email to the conference chairs asking for a fourth review? 2) What would be the likelihood that the chairs would do that? 3) In case the fourth review is positive, would it have the potential to be taken into consideration when accepting/rejecting the paper? A: I don't think it's worth it. I've seen conference program committees accept papers with such scores many times. I think if you address this reviewer's concerns, perhaps offering some changes in the introductory parts to reemphasize the main result, you've got a better chance of acceptance than if you ask for special treatment.

Q: How do I refer to a picture I added in my essay? I'm trying to write an essay about the elements and principles of design in Michelangelo's Pieta. The essay must be in MLA format and I need to include a picture to visualize a central point I'm trying to make in one of my paragraphs. There is clearly a hierarchy here too, with the Virgin Mary at the top, and Jesus at the bottom, and they seem to form the shape of a triangle. (figure one or something) How do I refer to a picture in this context, and furthermore, how I include pictures in an MLA formatted essay? Should there be any? This professor is pretty lenient about how it's formatted, so I'm just sticking with what most people know. These are her instructions. Cite all work using APA or MLA Double space, font size 12, Times Roman font A good paper will be 3 pages, not including photos (place your photos at the end) No heading or title whatsoever! iLearn does that for you already Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks. A: A good guide to MLA figures and tables may be found here. In short, you simply say "Figure 1" for the first figure, "Figure 2" for the second, and so on.

Q: Citing an ISO standard with multiple parts, using Harvard style? I would like to cite an ISO standard that is split into multiple parts, I want to cite the whole standard but am unsure of how to do this in Harvard style. ISO 14230 Road vehicles – Diagnostic systems – Keyword Protocol 2000 has 4 different parts ISO 14230-1 Physical layer ISO 14230-2 Data link layer ISO 14230-3 Application layer ISO 14230-4 Requirements for emission-related systems In my text I would like to cite the whole document something like ISO 14230 (year) but am unsure whether this would be correct, Which year would I put the year of the first part or the last part? (The different parts of the ISO have been published or updated on different years) My bibtex currently looks like this: @techreport{ISO14230, type = {Standard}, key = {ISO 14230}, year = {1999}, title = {{Road vehicles - Diagnostic systems - Keyword Protocol 2000}}, publisher = {British Standards Institution}, institution = {International Organization for Standardization}, note = {Available from: \url{https://bsol.bsigroup.com/en/}} } A: After speaking to university librarians about this and although they could not find any official guidelines, they suggested that within the Bibliography I reference each part of the ISO individually: @techreport{ISO14230part1, type = {Standard}, key = {ISO 14230-1}, year = {2012}, title = {{Road vehicles. Diagnostic communication over K-Line (DoK-Line). Physical layer}}, publisher = {British Standards Institution}, institution = {International Organization for Standardization}, note = {Available from: \url{https://bsol.bsigroup.com/en/}} } @techreport{ISO14230part2, type = {Standard}, key = {ISO 14230-2}, year = {2013}, title = {{Road vehicles. Diagnostic communication over K-Line (DoK-Line). Data link layer}}, publisher = {British Standards Institution}, institution = {International Organization for Standardization}, note = {Available from: \url{https://bsol.bsigroup.com/en/}} } @techreport{ISO14230part3, type = {Standard}, key = {ISO 14230-3}, year = {1999}, title = {{Road vehicles. Diagnostic systems. Keyword Protocol 2000. Application layer}}, publisher = {British Standards Institution}, institution = {International Organization for Standardization}, note = {Available from: \url{https://bsol.bsigroup.com/en/}} } @techreport{ISO14230part4, type = {Standard}, key = {ISO 14230-4}, year = {2000}, title = {{Road vehicles. Diagnostic systems. Keyword Protocol 2000. Requirements for emission related systems}}, publisher = {British Standards Institution}, institution = {International Organization for Standardization}, note = {Available from: \url{https://bsol.bsigroup.com/en/}} } and then within the text to reference using the years in brackets: ISO 14230 (2013; 2012; 2000; 1999). Noting that even though the years do not correspond with the order of the different parts but when referencing works by the same author the most recent comes first.

Q: I can't access a reference of an article I am reviewing: what shall I do? From time to time, I cannot access a reference of an article that I am reviewing, either because my university did not subscribe to some journals (and I failed to find it myself on sci-hub, Google, and other places), or because the article doesn't seem to be available online. Pinging the authors of the article (either the one that I am reviewing or the one that was cited) may work, but not always: legal issues (some publishers do not allow sharing papers online), unanswered emails, blind review preventing from contacting authors, etc. Shall I just ignore the cited article in that case, even though it could be useful to review the article? Or are there other options, aside from asking my library to pay for it (hoping they would agree)? A: While online access is very useful, it is not the only access. Every university I have been affiliated has provided an ILL service either at no cost or a nominal charge (e.g., a $1 processing charge). US University libraries can make requests to both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Medicine. I am less familiar with the ILL system in the UK/Britain, but I believe ILL requests can be made, possibly through a university, to the British Library. There are of course some articles/books that are truly hard to find (e.g., not held by the LoC with deceased authors). In these cases, it seems reasonable to request a copy through the handling editor. You should never contact the authors of a manuscript under review directly. A: So far, all my invitations to review contained an offer for access to publications via the publisher, i.e., they provide you with a temporary account allowing you to access papers. However, I have no experience with such a service as I’ve never required it. If the publisher does not provide such a service or it does not cover the publication in question, you can still ask the publisher directly for it. This way, you do not break the anonymity of peer review and ask somebody who has a direct interest to supply you with the article – as you cannot properly peer-review otherwise.

Q: What prevents reviewers from providing biased and very negative reviews? One of the fundamental features of science, maybe even the most important, is that publication of scientific results is peer-reviewed. I want to understand why peer review is effective in the scientific community, because I want to apply principles of peer review to a different domain. As I understand it, a researcher is reviewing work of a competitor who is producing scientific results in exchange for grant funds and reputation, usually same as the reviewing researcher does. Of course, this competition may not be very direct, but the reviewer is in an overlapping area of research. In addition, there is some natural bias of every human being to groom their own ego. Based on this, I expect most reviews to be very negative. However, it seems that biased and extremely negative reviews are rare for decent submissions. What stops reviewers from providing biased negative reviews? A: I think the main factor that makes the peer-review system to not fall in the trap you described is that academics are finally interested in the advance of science. If I have to review a good paper, then I enjoy it and want to see it published. If I review an almost good paper, I suggest some improvements and enjoy if these are incorporated and the work is published. The very mild advantage I may have if I reject more papers does not really seem to be worth it, if I have to act unfair and unreasonable to get this advantage. Another factor may be: The reviewer is not anonymous for the editor. Editors are often influential people and writing consistently bad and unfair reviews will make you look like a mean and unfair person. Also, the editor will not choose you again as a reviewer if you write such reviews and you will be effectively eliminating yourself from the review system for that journal (while you can still submit papers). In view of the bounty I gave the question another thought and here is one more thing: Community. Science is well organized in communities (e.g. I consider myself as part of the mathematical community, the applied math community, the community on mathematical imaging, the optimization community and some more). As part of a community one has a sense that there are some rules one should follow to be a valuable member of the community and of these rules is fairness. Being unfair feels like a misconduct by the unwritten community rules. So even though one may get along with several cases of unfair behavior, it feels like one is cheating the system. But staying a respected member of the communities is very important both for the scientific standing and also for productivity. This reasoning also explains that bad behavior sometimes happens, when several competing communities form which are somehow "enemies of each other": One can stay a respected member of one of the communities while still treating members from the other community unfair. A: The term competitors does not really describe the relationship between different scientists in the same field. Of course there is some competition for grants or such, or even to put one's name in a new result, but some aspects are deeply different: A publication in your field is a good thing, even if it's not from yourself. It makes your area important, and alive. It's actually very important when it comes to applying for grants. You cannot benefit from someone else's work by writing negative reviews. There is no way to simply slow down publication of one paper in order to publish the result first. A rejected paper will not slow down the "competitors" research. Sure they will have to improve it and submit it elsewhere, but this takes a marginal time compared to the research process itself. Dishonest reviews are clearly dangerous, as some people will see your review with your name on it (I'm thinking of other reviewers on such systems as Easychair). These people might very well be the ones reviewing your grant application a few weeks later. why would one risk being exposed as dishonest, when anyway there are several reviews for the same paper, and any deep difference should trigger an in-depth investigation by the editor? The most frequent bias I have seen are review of the form "you should cite those 5 obscure and vaguely related papers all from the same author", which clearly indicate reviewers in need of citation, but nothing much worse. A: I have nothing to do with academy, so take my answer just as something that I'd expect based on my understanding of human interaction and behaviour. Reputation The main resource you have is your own reputation, and that will be severely harmed if people are accusing you of being unfair, biased or "not objective enough". You might be able to get away with it once in a while, but overall, it's quite enough for the system to work. Worst case scenario, you slow down the propagation of the work in question, but in practice, the paper will find another way (another reviewer, journal...). Even if you succeed, you risk harming your reputation, which is extremely important in a field centered around collaboration with peers and promising understudies. Competition You only considered competition between individual scientists, which is mostly a thing of (1) competing for grants and (2) competing for reputation. I've already dealt with reputation. Competition for grants might be important for you if you're trying to adapt the process for something like performance reviews - it's the clearest cut case where hurting others can help you. However, it doesn't have much to do with the peer review process - that would indeed introduce a very strong motivation to be "as unfair as you can be without actually appearing unfair". However, there's also another competition going on - that between individual reviewers and their journals. If your paper was rejected based on grounds that are seen as fair and objective, you'll likely also be rejected by other journals. If not, the other journals might jump on the opportunity to publish your paper, while also implying that another journal has treated the paper unfairly. You can't do this very often if you want your journal/reviewers to keep being relevant! Points to take away If you want to use a similar system for another domain, make sure that similar incentives are at play. Have multiple independent reviewers, and let people choose their reviewer (while the reviewer has a chance to decline). Make sure there's not a lot of "authority" in play - for example, superior-underling relation doesn't make for good peers. Peer review works best with consensus and with reasonably objective / shared values. Make everything public (in the team / company). No anonymity, no "hidden" reviews. This is necessary for the reputation-based controls to work. In a way, it's a redundancy in the peer review system - it allows people to "review" the reviews themselves. It works best in mostly flat hierarchies. Thinking in terms of a performance review in a company, peer review will be a poor choice if managers order people around. On the other hand, if managers have to persuade others to follow with their plan, it might work great :)

Q: Do PhD students work alone in American universities? I came from India to UK for my PhD as I hoped to work in a team and learn from others. However, I am all alone as other students of my professor are. As I inspected this is the case in all UK universities. I understand that a PhD student is responsible for completing his project but I expected that my project is part of a bigger project and people who work on different parts have regular scientific discussions. I want to quit and apply in the US but now I am pessimistic if this is the case in the US too. A: The answer to this question is partly dependent on the field and the dynamics of the research group you are in. I used to work in a spectroscopy lab (in the US) where most of the work was experimental. My impression of the office was that periods of silent concentration were always interrupted by lively discussions, be it scientific or otherwise. We had white boards all over the office and they were never under-utilized. On the other hand, I've also worked in a lab with a more theoretical/computational focuses. There were more international students in the lab, and overall people in the lab were more reserved and largely focused on their own problems. However, I also know of theory labs that have a more lively atmosphere, so I hesitate to say that theory people are more prone to feeling isolated. I think the solution to your problem is not necessarily moving to a different country. For whatever personal or external reason, collaboration may not be easy for you. But ultimately it is your responsibility to reach out to other people and build collaborations. The easiest targets are people in your research group and your cohort who entered graduate school at the same time. But also consider going to departmental talks and conferences to network with external researchers. As you learn more about your own projects and other people's research interests, it will become easier to start a conversation and explore the possibility of collaborations. It may not come easy to you, but it truly is a necessary training for you as a scientist.

Q: Why (what and when) do we cite? Context: As I am writing my first paper, I cannot determine what, when and how I should cite scientific literature. It is because I don't know why I should cite (or not cite) other work. My fist 'newbie' approach was "Every assertion you write should be proven by a relevant citation, so that other can believe you". Given that "I know nothing", no one would then take my word for it and thus I must prove that what I'm saying is true. However, this lead to overcitation (and, I must admit, over-generalization of results), and frustration since I must find a paper corroborating what I want to say for every sentence, or so* Then if I'm leaving this strict rule, I tend to think I am writing triviality, or affirming things I am not 100% sure. I also fear to unintentionally plagiarize, when I say something someone else already stated. Question: In a scientific writing, why do we [have to/need to/should] cite? Clarifying this might help answering corollary questions: what to cite? and when should we cite? What to cite? Should I cite a paper (i.e. give credit) for ideas that are in its literature review, and that are totally not related to the core/added value of the paper? Should I cite every paper related to one field? Can I cite only not-that-much-cited source and not classic ones? etc. When to cite? If I am writing an assertion that is general (e.g. "Polar bears have mostly white fur"), should I justify it?(!) Which is the criteria to determine when an assertion need to be proven by a citation, and when it is admited? When I define a key term for my paper, should I always rely on past definitions? Disclaimer: Of course, I am aware of some obvious reasons for why we cite, such as giving credit and proving assertion, and I've read Arno's answer (who lists giving credit, for proof/evidence, and providing context as reasons) on a similar question. The originality of this question would be, to detail the link between the theory (why) and the practice (what, and when) of citing. Furthermore, I am conscious that there are multiple questions in this post, especially in the bullet point list. However, these are just here for explanation purpose, and should of course be asked separately to get a specific and detailed answer. * I know this should be done the other way (i.e. basing what I want to say on literature, and not looking for someone who could corroborate what I want to say) A: I recommend that you discuss these issues with an academic mentor who understands your discipline. You may also find it useful to visit the writing/tutoring center at your institution. That said, I've provided some short answers below. My answers are not intended to be complete because many of the questions that you are asking cannot be answered by people who are not experts in your discipline. Should I cite a paper (i.e. give credit) for ideas that are in its literature review, and that are totally not related to the core/added value of the paper? Generally, no. If you encounter something that you want to cite in a literature review, track down the original source. This should not be difficult, assuming that the paper you are reading cited the original source properly. Should I cite every paper related to one field? No. Unless you are defining "field" extremely narrowly, it will be neither possible nor desirable to cite everything. Can I cite only not-that-much-cited source and not classic ones? There is no universal answer to this question. The answer depends on your purposes for the paper and the disciplinary expectations in your field. Talk to a mentor. If I am writing an assertion that is general (e.g. "Polar bears have mostly white fur"), should I justify it?(!) You do not have to cite things that are considered common knowledge, but the question is this: What exactly gets to be considered common knowledge? There's no universal answer. It depends who you are writing for and what you are writing about. Here are some rules of thumb that should generally serve you well in American academic writing situations: If you would expect any given high school graduate to know something (like the color of polar bear fur), then you probably don't have to cite it. If you aren't sure whether you need to cite something, cite it, or at least mark it as a problem. You can always read back through the paper later with a mentor, colleague, or tutor who can help you to identify unnecessary citations. Which is the criteria to determine when an assertion need to be proven by a citation, and when it is admited? Again, there are no universal criteria for this. You'll learn the criteria that writers in your discipline go by as you continue to read and study in your discipline. When I define a key term for my paper, should I always rely on past definitions? In general, you should rely on past definitions if those definitions are (1) technical and specific and (2) an important issue in your paper. If you wish to break away from established definitions, you should explain why and make an argument for the new definition. Finally, a tip: It is practically never necessary to cite a dictionary definition in an academic paper.

Q: How does one ensure their knowledge of a field is complete when doing a literature review I am a new grad student who is both excited and scared as I embark on this transformational journey. One concern that I have is establishing a current snap shot of my field and identifying boundaries that are ripe for further exploration. This seems like an impossible task given the number of journals out there and rapid pace at which new material becomes available. I have been reading some posts on this board and it sounds like literature review is only one phase as a graduate student and then you move on. Given that you are on a time constraint one has to move from a reading focus to a doing focus eventually. My concern is I am moving forward with only half the story. My field is life sciences, specifically gene therapy. A: This seems like an impossible task. You're right, it is impossible. One can really never hope to gain a "complete" knowledge of a field, or even a subfield. You just have to do the best you can, in the time you have, to identify the most significant basic work related to your area of interest, and work that specifically addresses the questions you are studying. Part of your advisor's job is to help with this; they should have a broader knowledge of the field, and be able to help direct your literature search and point out any glaring gaps. But despite your combined best efforts, there will almost certainly end up being significant work that you overlook, or whose relevance you don't recognize. That is just part of doing research. Someday you'll learn about it and wish you had known it earlier, but all you can do is move on from there.

Q: Ways to tell interviewers you want some time to think about your decision (Employment in Academia) I am interviewing for employment in academic labs as a computer scientist, one of which a childhood friend is in and has some position of seniority. According to my friend who has spoken with the PI on the spot, the PI loves my letters of recommendation, my CV, my cover letter, etc. and the PI is willing to offer me the position on the spot if I don't screw up the interview. However, I am still wishing to keep my options open as there are other labs who have given me interviews during the same week as my interview with this current lab. How do I politely tell the PI I want some time to think about it? There are other factors that I want to weigh in like money, relative interest in the projects, my perceived contribution/role, etc. A: Usually, no one expects you to respond to an offer on the spot. An important distinction to make is that the PI may offer you a verbal offer on the spot but generally it takes some time to get the formal offer. Accepting the verbal offer does not necessarily mean you have the job. If the PI gives you a verbal offer, then just respond with a compliment (e.g., "Thank you, I am very impressed with your lab") and then ask when to expect the formal offer and when you should respond by.

Q: Do course buyouts happen in pure mathematics? I am a pure mathematician teaching a 2-2 load at a state research university in the United States. I know that many of my colleagues in applied math, engineering, and the laboratory sciences are able to buyout much of their teaching as long as they are successful in obtaining grant funding. This doesn't seem to be the case in pure mathematics, however. In the US, most external funding for pure math comes from the NSF or the NSA. A program officer at the NSA explained to me that they don't allow buyouts, even in lieu of requesting summer salary. I e-mailed the same question to a program officer at the NSF, and my e-mail was not returned. I also asked my chair if I could pay for a buy-out (down to 2-1) from my own money, and he said no -- only grants or startup money are acceptable for this purpose. I am curious -- are pure mathematicians ever able to secure course buy-outs, other than in their first few years (when this seems common)? Are there any funding agencies whose funding I might compete for that allow this? Alternatively, are buyouts from salary acceptable in other departments? A: The NSF won't generally allow a faculty member to take more than 2 months of salary per year from NSF grants. Since you would typically want summer salary before buying out of teaching, this effectively makes it impossible to buy out of teaching on NSF funding alone. However, if you combine your NSF funding with funding from other agencies (such as the Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, DARPA, DOE, etc.), it's certainly possible to have enough months of grant support to buy out of teaching during the academic year. Whether your program manager will agree to pay for this and whether your institution will allow it are still questions that you'd have to answer.

Q: How to Estimate Times for Projects in a Programming Workshop? I am going to be teaching a workshop on Julia for data science and scientific computing soon. I came up with a plan that has a lot more than we will be able to do (just in case), but was wondering about how to come up with a good estimate for how far along we will get. I find this hard to estimate since for most of the assignments I could do them really quickly, but that's because I am experience in the language and the biggest hurdle will be learning the documentation, syntax, and all the special issues of a new language. That said, do you have any good heuristics for how long projects will take in a workshop? It's hard to know the exact number of students right now, but I think it will be anywhere from 10~30, and I'd assume more students would make it go slower. I thought of doing something like "this takes me 5 minutes, so plan 20 minutes", but the number 20 has no basis in reality because I have never done this. A: Test drive Grab a couple of local students of comparable level and have them do the assignments. Your own speed is not indicative - something that takes you five minutes may take ten minutes or may be incomplete after an hour; only practical experience can show how it will turn out. In addition, usually setting up a working development environment can be a major time sink - if people use their own hardware and various operating systems, then some of them can waste a lot of time until they are able to run a 'hello world' program; you should have a clear plan on how you will handle it.

Q: Alongside my book proposal, I included by mistake a chapter with some typos (just a few, but major). Should I email the editor and resubmit the corrected version of the chapter? I have been trying to meet a deadline so I worked very hard on my book proposal. It was polished and ready to be submitted. In the last minute, I decided to write a new introduction for one of the chapters that I submitted together with the proposal. I did not print the chapter again, so I did not see the typos, and some of the extra words left hanging in the text. Those typos are only on the first three pages of the chapter--the rest had already been edited. Should I email the editor and let him know? He told me he already submitted the materials to the reviewers. A: I have never been in either pair of the shoes, but I will try to break this down: To me, it's better to lose a book deal because I reported an error in my proposal than to lose a book deal because a reviewer commented "glaring grammatical errors in the introduction." I would suggest sending the corrected version to the editor with an apology, explaining what the errors are and invite the editor to decide if it needs to be delivered again to the reviewers. That way, you did your job as a responsible intellect, and the editor remains in control. And even the editor decides not to resend another version and later a reviewer found the errors, you're already covered from the editor's point of view. That's why I really see no harm reporting that. Best of luck to your publishing endeavor.

Q: At what point in the rankings is having a PhD from one university no different than a PhD from another (differently ranked) university? There are some websites like topuniversities and times higher education that rank universities based on several criteria. I don't know if the ranking of a university is directly proportional to its actual reputation. It is obvious that top universities such as MIT, Harvard and Stanford in US or ETH, Uppsala, KTH in Europe should be considered apart from the rest, but at what point is having a PhD from one university no different than having another? Is it after 100? Between 300-400? Or is it due to another criteria than the ranking? A: It's worth keeping in mind that the overall university ranking is not synonymous with how they are regarded in the field. Even the breakdowns by discipline are not always going to reflect how the university is perceived in a specific field. For example, a university may not be in the top 10 in these overall rankings or even in a discipline (e.g., Computer Science), but they may be considered in the top 10 or even the top 5 for specific research fields (e.g., Database research). For a PhD, the ranking in the field will probably carry more weight than the general ranking of the university (depending on the field), as will the overall quality of the research. A: For many purposes, it isn't so much about the school that gave you the degree as it is your reputation in the field, which is a function of many things (including your alma mater). This can include your advisor, your graduate work, the number and quality of peer-reviewed publications, patents or copyrights you've generated, your research area, scholarships or grants you've been awarded, and so on--basically all of the things you'd include in your CV. The ranking of your PhD program influences your reputation, but it is still one of many factors. Many successful grad students who were accepted to a more highly-regarded program choose to attend a "lesser" program because they believe they can do better research with a particular advisor, for example. Rankings are an average of many things and may not reflect the research you performed or the education you received. Different programs are known for different things. Some physics programs, for example, are better at mathematical or theoretical astrophysics. Others are known for their work in quantum mechanics or optics. Still others have an excellent reputation in biophysics—or condensed matter physics, or plasma physics, or a particular type of engineering, etc. If your program you got your degree from excels in your area of research, that can often look better to those who are familiar with your field than if you got a degree from a higher-ranked program that did not specialize in your area of research. I suspect most of the rankings have quite a bit of variation and unreliability. Aside from the annual changes, most rankings probably vary by 20%: a program ranked 30th could vary by 6 rankings (between 24 and 36). The programs in the top 10 likely only vary by 1-2 rankings. This estimate likely varies with field, the entity publishing the rankings, and sample size. I doubt there's really a cutoff point, however. Imagine if there are 100 biology programs in your country. Differences between the programs ranked 45th and 48th probably aren't particularly significant, but you should expect differences between a program ranked 45th and another ranked 80th! Or suppose your country has 500 programs in biology. You should expect a difference between one ranked 350th and another ranked 500th! However, I would expect little difference between one ranked 450th and one ranked 490th.

Q: How serious it is not to disclose full academic history in your grad school application? Here is my story. I was accepted to top-30 world university to MS in Electrical Engineering(EE) progaram. In total I already have 3 degrees: MS in EE (GPA:4.0/4.0), BS in EE(GPA:3.9/4.0), and Bachelor in Economics(GPA:3.8/4.0). In my application I misunderstood instructions, which wanted me to list "all universities attended". As far as all my degrees were from one single university I though that I was not obliged to enter all of them, because formally I did list "all universities" by mentioning at least one of those degrees. That is why I decided not to enter "irrelevant" Bachelor in Economics degree and entered only BS in EE and MS in EE degrees. After few months I was successfully accepted to the degree program I had applied to. But after talking to some other applicants I understood that in application form they wanted me to enter not "all universities" but rather all degree programs attended. So I believe that I should have listed that economics degree as well. Apparently, concealing this degree didn't give me any benefits during admission, but most likely even might have "downgraded" my application to some extent. So I unintentionally presented myself to be worse that I am in reality. What do you think I need to do? If I contact admission office I can end up being rejected and I cannot risk that much. On the other hand, If I enroll and then they disclose this fact what they most likely will do? A: I'd leave it alone, or disclose to your department, not the admissions office. First, You got all your degrees at one university. Presumably, the school you applied to was sent an official transcript, and that transcript would show all the degrees conferred by that school. They have the info. Second, the odd part about your application package is the MS in EE, given that you're applying for a second MS in EE. Your new department knows this. They wouldn't even bat an eye at the second BS. Dual BS's are fairly common, and it wouldn't be a negative in your package. Lastly, you gave them what they asked for, which was all universities you attended. You followed their instructions to the letter.

Q: How good is phrase in letter of recommendation describing my smart but unorthodox solutions? I have a LOR from my previous employer and I want to use it for the MSc application I'm preparing. However, there is a certain sentence in this LOR that even though I understand its meaning (based on facts I know of course), I don't know if it will be good for my application. "Major characteristics of his job were the clean, well commented code and the smart, yet often unorthodox solutions." How bad can it be for my application? A: If I were reading this statement, I'd take it as quite positive. Clean, well-commented code is a very good thing, especially in a young programmer Smart solutions are good Unorthodox could be good or bad, but going into an academic context it's probably more good than bad. A: "Major characteristics of his job were the clean, well commented code and the smart, yet often unorthodox solutions." I don't see any way in which one could reasonably interpret this statement negatively. If the solutions were smart, then by itself obviously that's a good thing, whether or not they were orthodox. And if they were both smart and unorthodox, that's even better, because: the fact that they were unorthodox shows that you came up with them independently rather than just regurgitate some smart but unoriginal idea that everyone is taught in freshman year; the fact that they were unorthodox and smart means you are not only creative and think independently, but your independent thinking actually leads you to smart solutions that haven't been thought about by (many) others. What's not to like about someone who has such characteristics?! I think only in some crazy place like North Korea would this be considered a bad thing. Finally, the use of the word "yet" can be either a subtle logical error on the part of the writer, or a reference to the (probably correct, IMO) fact that if a solution is unorthodox, statistically speaking it is likely to be less smart than an orthodox solution, since if the unorthodox solution were superior then there would be room for someone to popularize the unorthodox solution so that it would eventually become orthodox. In other words, a situation in which there is a smart yet unorthodox solution is a kind of "market failure", or an opportunity for "methodological arbitrage", and hence somewhat rare. With that said, such situations clearly exist, and any person who has the ability to discover and exploit them is in my opinion worthy of high praise.

Q: How much does the choice of professors on my thesis committee matter? Would potential employers (for academic or non-academic R&D positions) care about who is on my thesis committee? Basically, I'm asking if there is any benefit in having more well-known professors on my committee who would provide me with little guidance, as opposed to assistant professors or research professors who are not well known but could possibly provide me with some guidance. I'm asking because I have been discouraged by fellow graduate students from including a research professor on my thesis committee. Their reasons are that if a potential employer looks him up online and sees that he is not a tenured professor they may think that I tried to put together an 'easy' thesis committee. The reason I would like to include this person is that he was the only member of my qualifying exam committee who read my paper carefully. He seemed to have a good understanding of my research and after I passed the exam he emailed me a list of suggestions for my future work. I think he may serve as a better committee member, although I could probably discuss my research with him even if I leave him off the thesis committee list. A: For academic positions, what is relevant for your application is your letter of recommendations. Who is on your committee does not matter (except the head). Your job applications will not even list the members of your committee---this will only be seen by someone who looks at your thesis. In academia, it's common that non-tenured (sometimes even non-tenure-track) faculty are on PhD committees. This is not viewed in any negative light. You want the most relevant people on your committee, so they can give you the best feedback, and will have a better sense of what you are doing to be able to write you recommendation letters. Often your supervisor can suggest who to put on your committee. I imagine that non-academic employers will care even less, as they are (typically) not interested in your research. A: The exact composition of your committee will probably weigh much less than the results you get (and any publications out of your thesis). Help in doing the work is more important than some final ceremony.

Q: Assessing supervisors? Since professors are assessed by students, I think many problems PhD students confront could be solved, if they could assess their supervisors. At the end, it is the PhD student who is paying with his time and very low scholarship (in contrast to a industry job) for a good-quality supervision. And - believe it or not - many famous professors aren't good supervisors. Some of them don't have the time to supervise their student due to many projects and postdocs. So often a post doc is assigned to the supervision of a PHD student. Is assessment of one's supervisors a way how to put the things right again? A: Such assessment would be of very little value (or use, really). The selection of potential advisors is limited; each of them has an advisor-advisee relationship lasting a couple of years, for a very limited number of advisees; if somebody qualifies (or not) as an advisor depends on a raft of issues, of which "student satisfaction" occupies last position (is tenured, got the grant financing the student, heads the research group in the topic, has built up the lab and other infrastructure to house students, and a few others come way, way before).

Q: Which is better, a paper with pedantic vocabularies or a paper easy to read? Many say that A good paper is a paper which is easily understandable by a reader. Actually when I am reading lots of papers in good journals, however, they are written with a sort of pedantic vocabularies, even though I can find simple and easy words which can replace the former. Should I use a pedantic vocabulary but clear sentences in order for other people (reviewers, readers) not to underestimate me? I think the previous statement (clear sentences with pedantic vocabulary) sounds like contradiction, or irony. FYI, I am EE/CS graduate student and good journals can be IEEE TMC, TWC and so on. A: There is a third way: Be pedantic about your vocabulary in the right way to make your paper more readable. Using established, clear, and consistent vocabulary and defining it when necessary is the best way to ensure that you are not misunderstood. The main advantage of “simple and easy words” is that they do not need to be explained to the reader, but this also entails that you rely on the reader interpreting these words the same way as you do, which may be not given surprisingly often. Defined vocabulary does not have this disadvantage. Moreover, you need to at least need to mention the established, “pedantic” vocabulary for context and to avoid the impression of reinventing the wheel. By consistently sticking to it, you avoid switching between different terms for the same thing, which usually impedes intelligibility. However, you should also bear in mind that readers unfamiliar with this vocabulary may want to read your paper. For these readers, define the more uncommon words and cite papers explaining the basic underlying concepts. Papers are not difficult to read because they contain new words, but because these words are not properly explained or because the reader does not understand the concepts represented by them. For example if you write a paper on theoretical particle physics, readers will have to understand some elementary aspects of quantum theory to follow your thoughts. Using vocabulary that can only appeal to readers without this basic understanding of quantum theory is pointless and only raises false expectations. Finally, if you get to introduce new concepts, you can try to choose words for them appeal to intuition, but this does not mean that you are relieved from the burden of explaining these words. A: There is a paper about that. It draws some surprising conclusions. According to Fig. 1 R3A, using unusual words (jargon) is correlated with getting more citations. http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004205 However, I would recommend you ignore these correlations and write to be clearly readable. Most likely after you have put a lot of effort into explaining things simply, reviewers will still say it is confusing, because things that were just figured out tend to be difficult things to understand.

Q: Is it possible to get a research assistantship between undergraduate and masters degree, while not enrolled as a student? I finished my undergrad in Electrical Engineering at the end of 2014, and since 2013 then I've been working on a startup that is soon going to fail. I would like to apply for a Masters in 2017, and to strengthen my research profile in my resume, as well as earn letters of recommendation (which I sorely lack), I'm considering working under a professor/ at a lab for a year or so (in a research area similar to that I worked on at my startup). However all research assistant/research associate positions seem to be advertised only towards students currently already studying in a graduate (masters/PhD) program. Is it common/normal/acceptable for people to work in a university lab between their undergraduate and masters, like I wish to? If so, what are these positions usually called in the US/Europe, if not Research Assistantship? To clarify, in addition to gaining experience, my main motivation would be to have a well known professor/someone at a well known lab recommend me, since I have a only one professor from my undergrad who would be willing to give me a strong letter of recommendation. I cannot expect anything from my present colleagues. Most applications seem to require 3 such letters. A: Sure, it is normal to work for a university lab with only a bachelors or masters. However, none of the people I knew did this as a transition between undergrad and grad, rather they did it to transition out of research. The job titles range widely though, especially across fields. I have seen job titles of "Research Programmer", "Research Engineer", "Software Engineer", "Systems Researcher", etc. This is in Computer Science so other fields may have something along the lines of "Lab Technician" or other domain specific titles. If you want to do research, then apply to graduate programs that are relevant to you and attempt to contact potential advisors.

Q: Admission in research based Master's/Doctoral programme with a bachelor's from a low-ranked University in India I applied in Master's programmes in Europe / Asia (mostly Germany) this year and most of them were rejected or are still pending. My GPA in the Bachelor's is 7.19 / 10 while my TOELF iBT score is 100 / 120. Most of the Universities stated on their websites that the GRE (General or Subject) is optional, so I did not take the GRE. After getting so many rejections and still being unable to figure out why, I am now thinking of strengthening my application to apply again in fall 2014. I have mailed universities / professors inquiring about reasons for rejection / shortcomings of my application, but none have replied. The only reply I get is that there were a lot of applications and mine just failed to compete with them. I wish to know more about why my applications failed and how to improve? Also, as I don't know anyone around, I prepared my Statement of Purpose, Letter of Recommendations, Research Proposal, etc by going through the internet and information on website of universities (I did not copy-paste, but used the tips on how to write and stuff). I have no idea if the reason for my failed applications were because of low GPA / no GRE score or ill-prepared statement / research plan. Also, where can I get these checked and get suggestions on improving them? I am very passionate about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Ubiquitous Computing. I am planning on quitting my job at Oracle Financial Services (where I'm working as as Associate Consultant, writing code since SEP 2011 after my Bachelor's) to prepare for my application and dedicate full time and energy. I am aiming for admission in top 20 universities for Computer Science of the world and also aiming for a good scholarship. I want to appear for GRE later this year and get very good scores to try to compensate for my low GPA. But, when I checked few top universities (like MIT), it was mentioned they don't accept GRE scores. How can I try and get into such universities? My goal is to complete my Master's, PhD and then continue researching on my areas of interest. Furthermore, the Subject GRE for Computer Science has been discontinued as per the ETS website! Is there any hope of getting in top universities with a Bachelor's degree from an unknown university which is practically nowhere in the rankings? What to do now and how to do it, I am pretty confused and hope that someone here can help me. Rahul A: Focusing on test scores will not get you into MIT. You need research experience — real, world-class, publication-quality, independent research experience. A paper at a recognizable (from MIT) conference or workshop would be a big plus. The top students from the various IITs have such experience. You need a statement that clearly and compellingly describes your research interests, experience, and vision, with enough specific technical detail to be credible. As an example: Describe a recent result (not just a paper title!) of your potential advisor, and suggest a credible strategy for applying or improving it. Also, your statement should frame your ambition in terms of "doing great research", not in terms of "getting into MIT". The top students from the various IITs write such statements. You need recommendation letters from well-known (at MIT) academics that praise your research potential in personal, specific, and credible detail, with positive comparisons against other students from your home institution who have gone on to a top-10 PhD program. Your recommenders must write the letters themselves; you should never even see them. In particular, you should explicitly waive your right to see the letters later, if such a waiver is possible; most US schools offer such a waiver in their recommendation forms. The top students from the various IITs have letters like this. You need contacts. Or more accurately, your recommenders need contacts. Coming from "an unknown university" with a "low GPA", there is a serious risk that nobody will even open your application. If one of your recommenders knows someone at MIT, either personally or professionally, ask them to send a quick email (or have a hallway conversation at a conference) saying "Hey, we have this great student Rahul Thakur who's applying to your department; you should take a look!" Sending such an email yourself is unlikely to help. CS professors get tons of emails from random students at unknown universities; we call it "spam". The top students from the various IITs have these contacts. You need some strategy. All else being equal, it is harder to gain admission to top CS PhD programs to study AI than to study other areas. AI seems to be the default areas for really smart, talented, qualified students who really have no idea what they want to do. Machine learning is either a subset or a superset of AI, depending on your religion. (Theory suffers from the same effect, to a smaller extent.) In your case, you're probably better off emphasizing your interest in ubiquitous computing in your statement. But remember, you need specific and credible technical detail. Finally, you need luck. Graduate admissions is an inherently random process; no one should apply to MIT expecting to be admitted. Coming from an unknown university, your chances of admission are smaller than someone with exactly the same application coming from a highly-ranked school. Aiming only for MIT is foolish; limiting yourself to top-20 departments may be foolish as well. Don't rob yourself of opportunities! After all, your real goal is to do great research, not to get into a top-20 program. Right? A: Getting into a top-20 university with a GPA of 7.1 from WBUT is an unrealistic goal. Instead of trying to get into a phd directly you should think getting a M tech degree first in India. I'll suggest that you should sit for the GATE examination and take admission for M tech in old IITs or IISc. Once you're in IITs or IISc, maintain a very good gpa and try to do some very good research. To just give you a hint how difficult it is, even students from IISc (which is the best institute in India) with GPA of 6.5/8 with publications don't get easy admissions in top-10 programs. After getting your Mtech from IITs or IISc you will be in a much much better position to apply for Top-20 phd programs in Computer Science. Many faculty members of IITs and IISc have got their phds from top-20 universities. So, they can give you very good letters of recommendation as well. A: I will share my story, it is somehow related. I got my BSc and MSc from a very average university in the Middle East (my GPA in BSc was below 2.7!!). So, of course I was conditionally admitted into the MSc program and by the time I graduated (2.5 years later), I had to work REALLY HARD and by then I was co-author of couple of journal and conference articles. When I started applying for PhD, I contacted many professors and applied in US and Canada but got rejections from most universities (although I had high TOEFL and GRE scores). Before I finished my MSc, my adviser has come up with this idea. To sent me to attend a conference to present my MSc research because he knew that some professors are going to be there. I went and met many of the professors that I have contacted by email (and never got a reply from). To be honest, they did not remember me as they receive 10s of emails from other students on a daily basis. Some have even told that they don't go over them. With couple of these professors who seemed interested in my MSc research, I have discussed my research interests as well as my BSc gpa and school issue. It turned out that it is risky to accept students with my gpa. The professor has to justify his decision somehow to the graduate committee. So, after one of these professors who saw my presentation, and knew that I was a co-author in couple of publication, said that he would go over my application one he gets back to his Uni. Few weeks later, I emailed him again and it turned out that the graduate committee would not admit me and asked me to redo my GRE and TOEFL to get higher scores! I did that, and finally got admitted! You should know that my school is top 50 in my field (civil engineering), my adviser is very well known, I got fully funded too, and I'm about to finalize my PhD!! This is the moral of the story; Get publications (its one of the only things you can control after you graduate, its too late to fix GPA or school name) Contacts matter! Attend conferences and get in touch with people NEVER GIVE UP!

Q: In choosing between MD-PhD and PhD, how should I factor in the expected age at which I'll start my career as a professor? My ideal career is to be lead a lab at a university as a professor. If I completed a residency and fellowship after an MD-PhD, which I think I'd love because of the 80/20 split that fits my interests, I'd be in my mid to late 30s by the time I was ready to start an independent career, as opposed to a Ph.D., which I'd complete, with fellowship, around age 30. I've heard the adage about scientists who don't contribute their biggest success before 30, and I'm concerned that close to 40 is far too late to start as an assistant professor. Would I be better off going into a Ph.D.? A: According to the NSF's report, the median age of a PhD recipient is 31.6 years old. That means you'll only be a little older than a typical graduate. This age shouldn't be shocking considering in the US it often takes 10 or more years of college to obtain a PhD, so that means that most people will be late 20s or early 30s if they never went to industry or didn't graduate early.

Q: Should I cite a paper for its literature review? Let's say I'm writing a report about sociological consideration of Aurora borealis in hipster communities. I want to support the value of my paper by showing that the way in which people consider Aurora borealis is a major and recurrent question. I have found a paper saying in its literature review: "Aurora borealis have been written about for at least 4000 years, starting with Chronicles of a Minoan watching the sky by Ithurts Myneck (~ 2100BC)". So this is a perfect example of an information I want to report in my paper. However, this paper turns out to deal with the physics of charged particles in solar wind - that means neither the scope of this paper, nor the scientific discipline it belongs to are related to my topic. Moreover, the reality of the book Chronicles of a Minoan watching the sky is evidenced by other means (i.e. this paper is not the only one that is talking about the book). But I cannot access the book to read it. Question: I want to write in my report that Aurora borealis has been a concern for a long time, and prove this assertion by giving the example of the Chronicles of a Minoan watching the sky. Should I credit (i.e. cite) the paper where I found this information, even if it is not related to the core/added of the paper? I want to give credit for the information I found, however, it is sometimes said: "When you cite a paper, you will be citing from [result] section. If you find yourself citing a paper based on something in the Intro [= literature review?] , you're just citing another citation." A: There is more controversy on this topic than I expected, so I've done some further digging. The results of this surprised me! Institution, Program, and Journal requirements The rules of your neighborhood may differ, so you'll want to follow whatever more specific rules are given to you in your program. For example, Columbia College demands secondary source citation: Indebtedness You must cite any text you read that helped you think about your paper even if you do not reference it directly in the text of your paper. However, the OWL APA style reference gives differing advice: Work Discussed in a Secondary Source NOTE: Give the secondary source in the references list; in the text, name the original work, and give a citation for the secondary source. For example, if Seidenberg and McClelland's work is cited in Coltheart et al. and you did not read the original work [emphasis mine], list the Coltheart et al. reference in the References. In the text, use the following citation... So if you merely were directed to the original work, but then attained the original work and read it, there is not necessarily any need to cite the secondary source - but the guide doesn't prohibit it. However, the IEEE has a stance as strong as Columbia, but in the opposite direction! As noted by York University in their IEEE style guide (page 5 of the pdf): Should I use secondary references? A secondary reference is given when you are referring to a source which you have not read yourself, but have read about in another source, for example referring to Jones’ work that you have read about in Smith. You should avoid using secondary references and locate the original source and reference that. Murdoch University has an even stronger interpretation: • IEEE style does not allow for the use of secondary source. • Locate the original source of information which is cited in a work which you have read. • If an original source cannot be located, it should not be cited. Jeeze, no wonder there are so many different answers! So it would seem there cannot be a one-size fits all answer - it depends. What is required in one field and style is forbidden in another, and optional in a third (and apparently even then people differ). A: Of course you should cite the paper. The content of the paper should be focussed on your topic and its field. But, this does not apply to the citations within the content. There is no such rule stating that the papers you cite should be within the scope of your topic. Anything you refer in any domain deserves to be cited as long as you utilise its information within your publication (be it paper or thesis).

Q: How to quit/put on hold a PhD program due to personality clash with advisor? I've been trying to cope with a very abusive and mentally unstable advisor. In a recent clash she has been spewing lies and threats. It has become clearer and clearer that despite the four years of manipulations, borderline extortion, and five publications that I've survived through, I will never receive a degree from this advisor. I have decided to accept a job offer and I want to just close things up at the school in the best possible way. If possible, I'll leave a door open by taking a leave of absence for a year to come back to a different advisor. How should I go about my next steps? Do I email the Department Chair directly asking for a meeting? I have been warned such an email would probably reach my advisor first. Do I just walk into the student affairs department with a leave of absence form? If I should email someone, who should it be, and what should I write there? I'm funded by an NSF grant, so should I write them now in conjunction or after I finalize my leave at school? A: Five publications? Good God, you deserve a PhD more than me and anybody else I have known. FábioDias is absolutely right. I know of an identical case where the advisor wanted the student to do more work after six years and four publications...and refused to fund him AND wouldn't get him a TAship. He finally, talked to the graduate chair in our department. He was ready to go to the department chair and even the dean of the college...but it didn't come to that. The graduate chair immediately took charge, switched his advisor, emailed his thesis to three other faculty members to judge if his thesis was sufficient. He scheduled a defense. Half of the department (students and faculty) showed up. The abusive advisor was also present because he was kept as part of the committee, he was just not the chair nor the "advisor". He successfully defended and even the abusive advisor passed him. He defended and left within a month. You have done a lot of work and invested a lot of time and you definitely deserve your degree if you have so many peer-reviewed publications. I wouldn't recommend taking a leave because only rarely I have seen someone coming back after a break (whatever the reason may be for the leave) and finishing. And as you said, it will have financial complications and NSF wouldn't like it very much. In addition, would you quit your job a year later to come back to school? Or work part time? Start fresh with a new advisor, or continue the same project? Will you spend another four years with the new advisor? I would say that finish this as quickly as possible in your own favor. And how specifically would an email to the department chair reach the advisor first? Does he or his/department's secretary play golf with your advisor? I would say, without writing anything, just drop by the office of the grad chair. Talk to him first. Tell him everything verbally. You should think very hard before putting anything in writing as in an email. Ask him for help. See what he does. If he takes control, then good. Otherwise just drop by the department chair's office and talk to him. This also avoids the danger of your advisor seeing your email first because there never was an email. At the very end, I would compose a very careful email and send it to the dean of the college and/or the dean of the graduate school, making sure to CC both the department chair and the grad chair. These are all different levels of escalation. You should start at the bottom, give them a fair chance and a reasonable amount of time to resolve this in good faith. But if it doesn't work, then don't be afraid to escalate it to the next level and repeat. If you want to take it even further, there is the division of student affair and conflict resolution which is usually under the chancellor or the vice-chancellor. There is also the ombudsman office. At the very end, I would talk to the legal counsel at your school. In the US, even the hint of a possible litigation can have miraculous effects. The school's counsel will of course look out for the school but they might convince the school/college/department to behave rationally because the bad publicity is not worth a grad student. I'd say hang in there. Research these offices in your university. Read up on some of these policies. Be reasonable and fair but also firm and assertive. I know you have put up with so much abuse but you have to start at the bottom and move up fighting for what's rightfully yours. A: If you're in good standing with faculty overall, a leave of absence justified with a desire to temporarily join an exciting industry option might quite possibly be granted. Justifying it with "personality clash" strikes me as poisonous, so don't do that - at least not in a public request. You say you plan on coming back to another adviser; but it doesn't sound as if you've worked on finding one. I don't think you've thought this through: you leave for a year, with only a vague idea of coming back to "someone else" who you must believe you'll find while not even on location. If you don't have one, or several mentors behind you (other than your adviser) who you know have always been very fond and supportive of you, you'll have to explain to some other faculty, while away, why you don't want to come back to your old adviser. A person neutral in the matter will naturally want to hear the other side of the story, and talk to your old adviser who is likely to have similarly ambiguous feelings about you. This is anyway the right approach for faculty as the new adviser will not want to act behind the back of a colleague. This has only some remote hope of working out if the new adviser does like you a lot, and it's certainly made harder by - apparently - planning on tackling this while working in industry. This is to say that - in my opinion, and absent a powerful other ally among faculty very fond of you - you should first switch to another adviser; then consider if you still want a leave of absence, and see if this is cool with your new mentor. If either the former or the latter don't work out, you should accept the very real possibility that your temporary leave will mean the end of your Ph.D. A: Four years is a lot of time to just throw out, and 5 publications seems like you should (at least) be close to having enough completed for a Ph.D. Could you switch advisors to someone who would count your past work? Does she have any previous students you can talk to about what they did? Are there faculty with whom you are on good terms who could give honest advice? If what you say is true, you might not be the only one who has noticed this behavior.

Q: How does one do PhD? I'm currently a PhD Candidate in Theoretical Physics. After getting into the program, I realized that studying and being able to teach Physics is one thing and doing research is another. My adviser is giving me problems and I'm working on them. how does he know that such a work doesn't already exist? how does he know the problem in the first place? how do you search for problems to work in so that I may do the same thinking as him? When I am working on a theoretical question/problem, I catch myself wondering, is this work really going to help others? If not, which is generally the case, what am I doing? When do I know, if the paper I'm working on is worth publishing? A: Simply put, the answer for most of your questions is: experience. Advisors are usually people that are working on a specific field/domain for a while. They know the other people who work on this field as well (from conferences), and their work (from doing bibliographical reviews for each written paper). In my experience, while it is indeed interesting to work on stuff that have a direct world application, that is not strictly necessary. Pure science is still science and you never know what people will be able to do with your research in the future.

Q: What should I prepare for MEXT? I'm an average CS engg grad who wish to go to Japan. I've got to know, in India applications for MEXT will start from 2nd week of April, and I haven't found any resource online. How and what should I prepare? A: My wife and I were both MEXT scholarship recipients for the graduate school "research student" scholarship. I got mine in the US by embassy recommendation. My wife got hers in Japan by university recommendation. (University recommendation within Japan is highly competitive and would be impossible without very good on the ground connections at a university that receives slots from the Monkasho). Assuming you mean the embassy/consulate version, you need to apply to the consulate that covers your city. There's a written test and an interview. Depending on the numbers, they will either do everything on the same day (common in the US) or split everything across multiple days. To successfully get a scholarship via consulate/embassy recommendation from India, you are going to need to do really well on the written test for Japanese and the test for English. Moreover, I would recommend (against the instructions the consulate may supply) first identifying professors in Japan with whom you would be interested in pursuing a graduate degree. After you've come up with a list, e-mail them indicating you are hoping to apply for a MEXT scholarship. With this in hand, you can describe a specific project. This is key because you need to submit a project idea as part of your application. Preferably, you should write this in Japanese and get it checked by a native speaker capable of academic writing. With this in hand, you will also have an interview if you make it that far. I have no idea how the interview is evaluated, so I don't have any tips on that. At the time I applied, I was already in a PhD program in the US in my 3rd year, had Japanese grammar knowledge at about the N3 level, kanji knowledge at roughly the N2 level (currently, I have the JLPT N1). I had lined up a project with a Japanese professor. I may have already met with him at that point in time. Best of luck.

Q: Immigration and tenure track in the United States I have plans to apply for some TT positions in the US. However, I'm Brazilian and I don't even have a visiting visa. I've never been to the US. Therefore the whole immigration process is mainly unknown to me, with the exception of a small amount of information I managed to gather online. Ignoring the CV, merits, etc, which I know play a decisive part in the TT hiring process, my question is : How much the immigration hassle can change the outcome of the hiring process? Just to clarify further, I'm interested in the immigration factor only. Is it relevant? Of course, a foreign superstar would be good enough reason to overcome these obstacles, but I'm no superstar and I was wondering where they draw the line, if it is even worth to do the applications... (If you are extra curious, my scholar : https://scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=0D1ExLoAAAAJ) Possibly related: Is it more difficult to score a Tenure Track position in the US when applying from outside? A: I've taught at both large R1 universities and small liberal arts colleges. For the large R1s, we don't care -- we simply want the best person for the job, regardless of their nationality. R1s have very competent foreign scholar offices and lawyers who know how to do the proper visa paperwork. At smaller schools, it's more difficult. Budgets are tighter and the provost has more say over searches. If there are two candidates that are almost equally ranked, then the provost may suggest one over the other for non-academic reasons. There may not even be approval for international airfare for job candidates at the interview stage. You have to remember that an H1B application will cost at least $10,00-$20,000 in lawyer's fees, staff time, and application costs. The stack of paperwork for the Department of Labor certification itself is about 3 inches thick. Furthermore, even though there is an exemption, sometimes H1B applications can be very, very slow -- which means that an instructor hired in March might not be able to join the campus by August. This can be deadly for a small school that needs its faculty present. tl;dr Be the absolute best candidate possible for the position and the visa status won't matter. Otherwise, it is a factor amongst other factors. A: This question is about visa issues, which aside from being a legal matter are notoriously fraught with subtle technicalities, to the extent that even a lawyer may need many very specific details in order to answer a question on the subject. So let me start by saying that I am not a lawyer, nor a person with expertise on immigration matters, nor someone agreeing to be held responsible for any advice I am offering here. I am just a friendly person with an opinion, which I am happy to offer. I am also currently a department chair at a large U.S. university, so have a bit of experience dealing with visa-related questions on the hiring side. The main points that I think are relevant for your question are the following: As Nate Eldredge commented, U.S. universities are not subject to the quota system for H-1B visas. When a university wants to hire a foreigner, they can sponsor them for an H-1B visa. Assuming you are qualified, and assuming that the NSA doesn't know anything bad about you that we don't, I don't see a reason why it should be even remotely a problem for you to obtain a working visa for the U.S. It is true that sponsoring a new faculty member for a visa costs money. I don't know exactly how much; the $20K figure mentioned by RoboKaren sounds too high to me, but for argument's sake let's assume that it is correct. Well, although it is objectively not a small amount of money, it is in fact very small if you compute it as a percentage of the cost of employing a faculty member. At a good research university, a new faculty member in CS (not my area, but close enough for me to know something about) will typically be offered a startup package of at least $50-100K, and possibly quite a bit more, to pay for startup costs such as relocation, buying some equipment (computers, and other things depending on the kind of work the faculty member does), and to allow paying for travel to conferences, hiring research assistants and such for a year or two until the person is able to secure some grant funding. And then there is the cost of the faculty member's salary, which will be paid indefinitely until he or she retires. The point is that when you consider the hypothetical $20K expenditure in the context of the total benefit a good researcher brings to the institution, and the total cost of their employment, the $20K is actually a trivial amount of money. For a serious university, even a poor one, I think it is a no-brainer that it is worth making the effort to hire the best possible person for the job, even if that requires a modest extra investment of that sort, compared to hiring a U.S. citizen for whom that expense is not needed but who is slightly less qualified. I have never heard of a department that made the opposite calculation, and I have never heard of a foreign researcher at the tenure-track level who experienced difficulty being hired because of immigration issues. That does not mean such things don't happen, but if they do then that would be outside the realm of my own experiences. Lastly, you mention that you have never visited the United States. Although you asked specifically about visa issues, and my opinion is that visa issues are mostly or entirely irrelevant to your situation, I think it's worth mentioning that the fact that you've never visited the U.S. is in my opinion (very) relevant to your situation, and is a much bigger complication and potential hindrance to your job applications than anything related to visas. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with not visiting the U.S. -- far from it -- but I do think your lack of familiarity with the U.S. and its culture could be a real problem both when you come for an interview and if and when you move here after getting a position. The very fact of your applying for a high-level position in a country you have never visited could appear quite strange to people considering your applications, leading them to question how well you are likely to fit in at their department and institution. I don't know how much thought you've given to this issue, but I would strongly suggest that if you have a serious goal of securing a tenure-track position in the U.S., if at all possible one of the first steps in your plan should be to arrange to first of all visit the U.S. for a reasonably long period of time, say a month or two, and visit at least a couple of different geographical parts of the country, and certainly include some universities in your visit so that you can experience first-hand what academic life in the U.S. is like. Note that I absolutely don't mean for this part of my answer to be read as in any way a criticism of your desire to move to the U.S. or of your never having visited. I am merely saying that coming for an extended visit first will (in my opinion) make you a much better job prospect and a much better interviewee, in a way that I think you cannot appreciate given your lack of U.S. experience. By the way, although this opinion I'm expressing is specific to the U.S. and is not entirely symmetric with respect to countries, it would definitely apply in many other analogous situations; for example, I have never been to Brazil, and if I were to apply for a tenure-track position in Brazil without visiting first, my guess is that my lack of Brazilian experience (separately from my lack of knowledge of Portuguese) could be a serious disadvantage for my applications. (Though, of course, never having been to Brazil, I cannot be sure if that is indeed the case... :-) ) A: Caveat: I'm a US citizen, so my experience with this is from the hiring side and from discussions with colleagues who are not US citizens. The short answer is that it will not change things very much. All of the hiring processes I've been involved with paid absolutely no attention to a candidate's citizenship status. That doesn't guarantee this is true everywhere, but in most cases, I don't think it's a big issue. Universities have it much easier than almost any other employer under US immigration law (for example, they have an exemption to the H-1B cap), and while there will be a fair amount of legal runaround, I've never personally known someone hired to a TT job in the US who wasn't able to take the job for immigration reasons.

Q: How to write the literature review part of a paper when 'the perfect one' has already been written? Let's say I'm writing an original research paper about the design process in the helicopter industry. In the literature review (or context/related work) section, I want to talk about: the various design processes that exists; specific features of design processes in aviations; specific features of design processes in helicopter industry; how to study a design process; etc. I have found a major paper that deals with the design process in the airplane industry. This paper is recent (= references are up-to-date), frequently cited and published in a major journal (= acknowledged for its scientific quality). Its literature review is top-notch: clear, concise, well written, etc. It tackled the topics #1, 2 and 4 of the review I want to write. Question: How to write my review, since this papers does almost all the job in a perfect manner? A: I would use the other literature review as a baseline, and focuss on how helicopters are different from airplanes. So I would start with mentioning the other literature review, and saying that the basics are discussed there, and here I will focuss on how those apply and/or differ for helicopters.

Q: If a PhD student is bad in interpersonal communications, would he find trouble doing his PhD? As far as I know, some research involves group-work. If a PhD student is either introverted, bad at interpersonal communications or both. What difficulties might they encounter? A: Of course interpersonal skills are important in completing a PhD. As you note, a PhD some fields involves working in small to very large teams, where interpersonal skills are essential. Even in the few fields were individuals typically work alone, interpersonal skills are necessary to navigate relationships with peers, graduate advisors, other members of the community, etc. This is not to say that with poor interpersonal skills one is doomed. Such skills can be learned, and one can improve substantially with effort. It may even be true that in some areas of science, interpersonal skills are less important than in other jobs. But to say that they are not needed would be a gross misrepresentation of what it is like to get a PhD or work in academic science at any level. A: Suppose, a PhD student is either introvert or bad in interpersonal communications or both. Would he find any trouble? All of us, in academia and outside of it, are better at some things and less good at other things. People who are very poor at interpersonal relationships are often astonishingly good at many things. To be successful, one tries to exploit one's talents while at the same time overcoming or learning to work around one's deficiencies, or even turning one's worst liabilities into assets in some surprising way (e.g., a comedian making a career out of making fun of themselves for being a neurotic slob with bad habits). Some people have even become famous for completely overcoming a significant adversity in the form of a physical or mental disability that stood in their way of becoming successful at something. The case of Oscar Pistorius is one example from sports that comes to mind (notwithstanding his later downfall into infamy by being convicted of the murder of his girlfriend), and there are many other examples. In the context of academia, unquestionably the most famous person who can be cited as an example in connection with your question is Temple Grandin. I saw her speak a few years ago when she came to my university, and she is a remarkable and awe-inspiring woman. I couldn't begin to give a good description of how amazing she is, so I recommend checking out her books, or watching the movie (starring Claire Danes) made about her. Suffice it to say that she grew up with autism, and having a fairly extreme case of being "either introvert or bad in interpersonal communications or both", and yet became a stunningly successful animal scientist (her main job is as a professor at Colorado State University). She is a great inspiration to many people who are either on the autism spectrum or are just extremely introverted or different from what is thought to be "normal" in some other way, and part of her advocacy is in convincing such people and their families that they are often capable of achieving a lot more than the society around them assumes. Bottom line: if Temple Grandin could succeed, so can the PhD student you are asking about. And besides, many other less famous people in academia are both introverted and not especially good at interpersonal communications, and become very successful anyway. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good thing to be, and it may make sense for your friend to work on getting better at those things, but I absolutely wouldn't assume that it will be a career-killing problem. A: The answer is simple: Yes, someone who is heavily introverted, has bad interpersonal skills or both will have trouble doing his PhD. Someone who has these social issues will have trouble doing anything in life. Even the simple act of existing in modern society requires at least some modicum of interpersonal skills. This doesn't mean it's impossible at all! In fact, although I have no data to support my claim, I would estimate that the chances come out about equal for such a student to complete their PhD compared to the average student. It will simply require more effort from them. Every student has their weak points and strong points, most weak points can be strengthened and some can be partially or even entirely covered for with their strengths. The most important thing is to have the will to succeed.

Q: Can international students in USA intern in summer in industry? Can international PhD students go do internships during summer in industries? Does their F1 visa status allow this? From how I see it, this is neither an OPT or a CPT. I asked my International Office and they said I could spend a term at another university because then I'm still enrolled Full Time (just at another institution) which I believe is fine with some paperwork. However, they are getting back to me (it's been a while so I am asking here) whether anyone else has done something similar? A: Yes you can, and this is exactly what CPT is for. (assuming you get paid for the internship. If you are not being paid - I'm not sure what the rules are, but it might be easier than CPT) You can do it for up to 12 month (not necessarily consecutive) during your degree. Check again with your international Office for the exact rules (you might still need to be enrolled to 12 units if not summer quarter/semester). A: I was an international undergraduate in the US and I participated in summer research programs twice during those 4 years. This is slightly different from what the OP is asking, since I was working at a different university as opposed to a company. The way it worked for me was the following: I needed a faculty member at my home institution to be my 'sponsor', and I had to register for a 2 credit course over the relevant summer. Having finished my summer research, I was required to give a presentation (to some sort of relevant audience, for example, once to an 'Introduction to Research' class) and submit a journal/report. I believe my supervisor from the institution where I did my summer work was asked for a short report on my activities. That was all. The biggest hurdle for me was to find summer programs which are willing to accept international students, or at least to fund us (in mathematics, for example, REUs are typically funded by the NSF, which prevents them from accepting international students). In Math I was only able to find 2-3 programs which would do so. There were many more in biology/biochemistry. I have a list around here somewhere if anyone is seeking such information. On the other hand, this might be different if one is looking at industry.

Q: Sending my research proposal for a professor or offering to work on their project? I am trying to contact with professors to showing them a research proposal that I want to work on for master degree. Some people advice me to not do this, because professors get fund for their ideas not mine, so if my research proposal was incredibly liked by a professor, then he will have no fund to do this research project. So, I should contacting to offer working on their research ideas. I am not insisting to work on my idea, and to be honest my main goal is to reach a research project in brain computer interface field(I'm interested in any research project in that field) and I'm sure that I will show a great effort, hard working and innovative thinking, Which will supporting me to get a PHD position. Have saying this; how to know future research projects for a professor to offer working on? or it's possible to work on project in progress. A: Professors can get funding for projects if they write proposals for funding and the proposals are accepted. There are sources for funding for student projects in many places. I do not know about your specific situation, but I don't see why you wouldn't be able to approach the professor about your idea. If it's really good, the professor will help you find funding for it. If it is just good, the professor may have you find funding for it. Full disclosure - I am a professor. :-)

Q: How to label figures in response letter, so as to distinguish between figures in the letter and figures in the manuscript? I am looking for the correct way to write the caption name of figures in the response letter for a submission to an Elsevier journal. In the manuscript, the name is Fig. 1. This is caption I need add some figures in the response letter as well as revised manuscript. The figure number of these files will be different. So, if I refer to "Fig. 1" in the letter, the reviewer will not know which one I am referring to, the Fig. 1 in the manuscript or the Fig. 1 in the letter. I am not sure about using Fig. L-1. This is caption Fig. L. 1. This is caption to label figures in the response letter, or any solution... A: I am going to take a contrary opinion to what has been suggested so far, and strongly suggest that you do not put figures in your response letter. My reasoning is this: as a reviewer and an editor, I often see an author put material into the response letter that would be better put into the manuscript. If you need to explain something clearly and carefully to a reviewer, you probably need to explain it clearly and carefully to your readers as well. That goes not just for text, but for figures and tables and references also. Rather that writing it twice (and typically ending up with significant differences between your two instances, since they're in different contexts), write it once in the manuscript and just refer to it there from the response letter. In short: if you think it's important enough to put in the response letter, it's important enough to simply put into the manuscript.

Q: Expecting students to use a code base that is known to be buggy? Suppose an instructor is teaching a course on a particular field in computer science. He uses a language that is popular for said field, but itself is not the topic of the course (though its use is still required). The instructor provides a code base he wrote that the students may base their course project upon. However, this code base is very buggy and does not follow many accepted "best practices" in the language's usage. You are not technically required to use this code base, but to use anything else is most likely impractical given time constraints. Is it justifiable to expect students to use a buggy code base you prepared, or is it lazy? Or neither? A: The answer to this question is "Sometimes." Given that an instructor has roughly X hours/week to devote to this course (given their other responsibilities), sometimes the best way to utilize that time may be to write a code base for students to use in some fraction of those hours (even though it will be buggy and not up to best practices) and devote the rest of those hours to other things. Sometimes improving the code base isn't the best way to utilize instructor time - sometimes that time is better used offering more office hours to answer students' questions, or writing better lecture notes, or something else that is of greater benefit to the students' learning than making the code less buggy. It's usually up to the instructor to make that determination of what will best serve the pedagogical goals of the course. (I'm assuming the professor isn't intentionally trying to give students some experience working with a buggy code base. But that's also a possibility.) As a student, I didn't think about the time and resources my professors devoted to preparing their course materials. As an instructor, I gained a very different perspective. For example, the first course I taught as instructor of record was a course that I was only assigned about a week before class started, in a subject outside my area of expertise, and I had very limited time to prep the first few lectures and assignments. I agreed to teach it despite knowing that my teaching would be underprepared (by my own standards) for the first part of the course, because I thought it would be better for my students than the alternative (the course being cancelled because the department couldn't find any other coverage.) As a student, I would never have thought about my professors being put in situations like that. A: The instructor's expecting you to use poorly written code with known bugs that you might have to work around? Sounds like he's doing a good job of preparing you for real-life programming work. I'm only about 25% joking - while I wouldn't think he's inserted the bugs intentionally, having to work with existing buggy codebases is something that every programmer faces routinely, whether in academia or industry or elsewhere. So it's certainly not unreasonable to expect students to be able to handle it, or learn to do so. Evidently the professor has decided that having you work with this code, although it has issues, will be a better educational experience than an alternative. That's a matter of his professional judgment, and we here on this site are in no position to second-guess it. We have no way of knowing what alternatives exist, what their pros and cons might be, and what other constraints the professor has. On the basis of what we know from your post, I think it would be irresponsible of any academic to judge someone "lazy". If you think you can improve the code, or know of alternatives that would be better, this could be a great opportunity for you to contribute. You might be able to earn independent study credit, or money, by working on the code or helping adapt the curriculum to some alternative software. At a minimum, you can write useful bug reports for the professor, which should make it easier for him to fix them, and save some hassle for future students. A: I have been that instructor. When I was a TA in graduate school, we were trying some innovations to improve a class that I was teaching. Overall, they worked, but the reality of the situation was that the first time around there were a lot of bugs because: We didn't have time enough to get everything perfect before the semester began, and were in fact racing against the clock trying to improve the code for each problem set before we hit the point in the semester where it was released. Being academics rather than a professional software QA team, our imagination in testing was much more limited than the range of interesting problems and abuses of the codebase that the students invented, particularly those who were shaky programmers or poorly understood the course material. The second time around, things were a lot better, thanks to the discovery of problems the first time, but there were still bugs --- either because they were low-triage issues that we hadn't been able to fix or because the students were quite inventive in finding new ways to work with our codebase. Interestingly, this whole situation was in fact partially created by an attempt to improve away from another buggy code base, which had been created by a former instructor and which nobody teaching the course at the time could improve because it was a large and poorly documented codebase that we were all too scared to touch in case everything broke. In short: sometimes it might be laziness, but, as @ff524 notes, other times its simply the realities and constraints of development with limited resources.

Q: Admission offer deadline extension I received an admit (tuition fee waiver + TA) from a university for PhD in Physics. I was offered in the last month, and I replied the graduate admission director that I will inform him regarding 'accepting or declining' the offer around end of the march. (the deadline for accepting the offer on April 15) I thought I will get maximum decisions in March but few of the universities have put me on their waiting lists and probably they will decide by April 15. Should I email the graduate admission director to extend the days? I mean, I will ask him that I inform him by April 15. OR, as the deadline is 15th April, it is not necessary to email him to extend the date? A: I think a very short email saying you are going to wait until the deadline for accepting the offer, with no further explanation, would be enough. You are not doing anything wrong and April 15th is the original deadline. Perhaps it wouldn't even be necessary to explain anything. However my suggestion is that it is always better to be wrong on the well-mannered/ cautious side, than thinking "it is not necessary" and then find out it actually was.

Q: Head of department questionable comprehensive test decision I took the comprehensive test recently for my PhD and the head of the department sent me an email stating I didn't answer one of his questions the right way. Now I answered the question exactly how it is written in the book he advised me to read and two of my fellow class mates answered the question exactly how it was written in the book and he had no problem with their answers, just mine. In his email he stated to let him know if I wanted to meet with him to go over the question so I emailed him and his response was that he told me in the email what he wanted so there was no reason to meet. I then responded and asked to meet with him anyway. I have not received a response yet. The thing is that this is a scientific textbook answer that is very precise and therefore cannot be misconstrued in any way so if he is the department head and he says it is wrong but it is black and white, what can I do with that? What recourse do I have? He could ruin my academic career just because he is the department head and he says it is wrong. A: If this is really such an unambiguous straightforward textbook-level question, how could two people disagree on the answer? The most likely explanation is that one of them is making a mistake (e.g. confused about the definition of one of the terms), and it's much more likely to be you than your professor, who has decades of experience in the field. These subtleties can be difficult to detect as a beginner, but often will be clear once one has some more experience. I would first approach this situation from the assumption that your professor is correct, and try from that perspective to figure out how you could be wrong, even though you think your answer was directly from the textbook (and that it was the same as your classmates' answers). If you find your mistake, great. If after devoting a good bit of effort to this, you can't find your mistake, I would write to the professor outlining what you've tried, and asking if they can explain in another way where your answer went wrong. If you can understand the issue at that point, great. (If not, you might try an older grad student. But I doubt it will get this far.) To be clear: if the situation were actually exactly as you describe it, my response would be very different. But in my experience, 99% of such situations arise because the student has misunderstood the issue (just from inexperience, no fault of their own). In particular, filing any sort of academic grievance would likely be a huge over-reaction. I would never make such a move unless I had independent confirmation from a faculty member that I was correct.

Q: Can professors hire assistants from their own salary? Usually teaching assistants or research assistants will be hired by money from the department or grants, but can they be hired by a direct pay from a professor's salary? A: Probably not, though professorial funding can get tricky. In the US, most departments or colleges handle the funding of TAs directly. They are normal employees and are (more and more) entitled to benefits. If a prof just took money literally out of their own pocket and paid a TA, this would circumvent tax withholding, the purchase of insurance benefits, etc. TAs need to be employees of the university. At the same time, since they interact with students and appear in the classroom, TAs need to have official status with the university. Since direct payment by a professor would bypass this, I doubt very seriously that it would be allowed. However, once a professor has a grant, money becomes more flexible. It's entirely possible for a professor to be paid 9 months by the university and end up funding more than 3 summer months through grants. NSF has its 2 month rule to try to prevent this, but through multiple agencies, a lot is possible. Agencies allow Principle Investigators the flexibility to move salary money between personnel within a grant almost at will, so it could be that a prof could take one of those months of their own salary from the grant, and spread it across several (at half time) for a student. This is pretty common. It wouldn't be direct, the student would be paid by the university and have official GRA status, but it would, sort of, come out of the prof's pocket, depending on your point of view.

Q: One student grading other students' assignments in the same course? In the US, can a student who is already enrolled in a course grade homework assignments of all other students in the same course (but not actually accessing and changing academic records)? Is it legal and compatible with academic integrity? Two of several issues that I'm concerned about are: 1. He has not actually done his own homework (because homework submissions are not recorded). 2. By comparing my paper with other students I wasn't able to observer a consistency in grading. Actually initially I found who has graded our homeworks based on a pattern of inconsistency in grading and also inappropriate comments on my paper. However the professor rejects my concerns by stating that he has overseen and reviewed everything himself. In this page from USC.edu it is stated that "Please note that it is not possible for you to be both a student and a TA within the same course. Federal law [FERPA] and University policy both specifically prohibit students enrolled in a class from being able to modify their own grades or to view or modify the grades of other students enrolled in that same class." However as pointed out by Bob Brown, Supreme Court allowed in-class peer-grading. A: A student grading other students in the same course is unusual, but certainly not illegal. As to whether it is inappropriate, I would consider two cases: Sometimes professors ask all students to do part of the "teaching" responsibilities for a course, whether that be lecturing, grading, creating course notes, etc. The theory of this is that it forces a deeper engagement with the material, and may help prepare further skills. When grading or similar is done by a student or other students for a pedagogical reason like this, I see no problem, as long as the professor takes into account the potential for quality variation. If an individual student is simultaneously a class member and a TA/grader, that is much more unusual, and generally a bad idea. In this case, the pedagogical value of having all students engaged with the process is not there to balance the expected decrease in grading accuracy and quality. There may be certain unusual circumstances where it is appropriate, and a professor can, in fact, organize things to compensate for the issues that you raise, but in general I would be highly dubious about this practice.

Q: Should numeration of a list of axioms be continued? I have a definition like the following: Definition System of sides is ... conforming to axioms: ... ... ... Definition Monotone system of sides is a system of sides conforming to additional axiom: ... Definition Distributive system of sides is a system of sides conforming to additional axiom: ... My question: Should I continue numbering of axioms as above, or should the additional axioms be numbered from one (not from four or five as above)? Also note, that every distributive system of sides is a monotone system of sides. A: I would recommend thinking about this presentation problem in the following way: if you were inclined to be verbose, it would be perfectly correct to say: Definition Monotone system of sides is a system of sides conforming to the axioms: ... ... ... ... As such, it is not so much that you wish to continue a list of axioms, as it is that you wish to take advantage of the similarity of the two lists of axioms to present this information in a way that is more streamlined and easier to understand. As such, I would recommend making the elision explicit, as in: Definition A monotone system of sides conforms to the same axioms 1-3 for a system of sides, plus an additional axiom: ... Definition A distributive system of sides conforms to the same axioms 1-4 for a monotone system of sides, plus an additional axiom: ... Notice also that I have extended the italics to the whole statement "X system of sides," rather than just the adjective, since you are not defining e.g., "monotone" but rather "monotone system of sides."

Q: How to ask professor to let me audit lectures at university I am not enrolled in? There is a professor in the city I am currently living in who does some interesting work. I would like to sit in on his lectures, but I do not know how to ask him. What is the best way for me to ask him to attend or audit his lectures or seminar? I don't want to come across as rude or imposing myself on him, esp. when its about seminars which are maybe not so big. Also, relatedly: I am not sure if I would be able to attend every single lecture because I will have a lot of work to do the upcoming weeks. So I am not sure how to best ask with this in mind. If he says yes and I am not coming to one of the lectures -although I would love to- will it maybe look very bad? A: First I would check if the school has a formal procedure for auditing. For example, my school wants auditors to pay as if they were attending the class, and they also have insurance concerns if, e.g., a student is hurt in a chem lab and it turns out that they weren't enrolled. You can get this info from the school's web site or catalog. If that's not an issue, then I would just send a brief email and ask permission. There are unlikely to be any objections, but it would be polite to ask. Some conceivable problems: There might be a shortage of seating. In certain subjects (e.g., languages) or in classes using certain teaching methods, it might be expected that students will participate actively. The quality of the discussion or activities might be worse if there is an auditor who isn't taking the course seriously. The professor might want to talk to you for your benefit to see if you have enough of a background to get anything out of the class. Personally it doesn't bother me if an auditor's attendance is irregular. A: If it's not too inconvenient, I would suggest asking in person. Send an email first to set up an appointment to drop by to discuss the possibility of attending his class. Then at the meeting you can easily explain your interest and situation. An in-person meeting will make it easier for the professor to get a sense of how appropriate it would be for you to attend the course. As Ben indicates, universities generally want auditors to pay, and different departments may have different policies about auditing, but many professors don't mind someone "learning for free." A: If someone not associated with my university wants to sit in on one of my classes, I have no objection to that. It would be nice if the person asked first, but my answer would be yes unless the manner of asking convinced me that he or she would be a problem in the classroom. So far (my first 46 years on the faculty) I have never said no to such a request. This presupposes that the student just wants to learn the material and doesn't need any sort of official record of having been in my class. For an official record, you'd have to go via the university administration. It's also relevant that I'm in mathematics, where I don't have to worry about things like having enough space and supplies in a lab for an extra student.

Q: Reflecting bad experience with previous graduate program in statement of purpose I am applying to master program in computer engineering, but I have some concerns and not sure how to present them in my statement of purpose. First, my undergrad was in computer engineering but after moving to US I pursued biology in graduate school. I had bad experience with my adviser. He moved to another university right when I started my research, but since I had a fellowship that came from a school in our university, I was forced to stay. He promised to help me, but didn't do anything after he moved. That being said, since I just started my research and we had a small department in which no one else worked on the same area, I couldn't make progress on my own. But, then I started taking some online courses and became really interested in some new areas and also coauthored a paper in computer architecture. Now I want to apply to computer engineering for masters. I also had to extend my graduate program in Biology due to some immigration related stuff, so now my graduate degree took more than five years, while I don't have any result in it. I was wondering how can I represent these stuff in my statement of purpose without hurting my chance of getting admission. I should also mention that I took almost all the PhD courses in Biology and have a very good GPA in graduate school. A: It's tough to explain this, but here are a couple of things to note: Explain the situation without being disrespectful to your adviser. If it were me I would not even blame him for anything, I would just make sure my writing leads the reader to that conclusion without me explicitly stating it. I don't think that your immigration status issue would sit well with the committee as a reason for you staying in the program for five years. If you had the intention of finishing your degree despite your new-found interest you should mention it. I'm getting the understanding that you will not be receiving any degree for your efforts over five years. I'm guessing that the school does not award M.S. degrees to PhD students who have not been able to conclude their research. However, if this is not the case, I highly recommend you try to get a master's degree. You mentioned that you completed most of the PhD coursework. You may be able to get a course-based master's degree even if your research has not progressed enough for a master's thesis. An SOP stating that you had difficulty with your research and ended up getting a course-based degree reads a lot better, especially since you seem to have a valid excuse for it. Completing your PhD would disqualify you for being admitted to EE PhD programs at many universities (many schools do not award PhD's to people who already have one). I would assume if getting a PhD (in your new area of interest) became your goal at some point during these five years, this would be a good reason for you not to complete your current PhD, so you may want to mention this to justify not completing your degree. Again, if you are able to get a course-based degree, this will sound a lot more convincing. Don't lie in your letter. Not that I'm implying that you meant to do this; however, it is usually pretty easy to detect an untruthful SOP. Good Luck!

Q: Providing syllabi far in advance A student from another university is planning on taking a class I'll be teaching this fall and will be doing it as a transient student. Apparently, in order to have their transient status approved, they need a copy of the course syllabus, and so requested it from me by email. I don't normally finalize my syllabi until a few days before classes start — certainly not five months in advance —, and the course itself is not one that is identical each semester so I don't feel comfortable just sending an old syllabus. (And even that wouldn't exist if it were a new class or a special topics class) It seems odd to need the syllabi so early — AFAIK the normal process is for his home institution to review the syllabi after taking the classes to determine credit given. So two parter: Is this a normal request that somehow has just never come by me before? If it is, how do you handle for courses that don't have syllabus ready to go? A: It's not so unusual in the U.S., for example when the student is coming from abroad, with their own funding, for one semester or so. I've had to do this a handful of times in 30+ years. I approximate a syllabus, and in a cover-note say that it is approximate. There's no real loss in doing some part of that work months in advance, hopefully. A: Is this a normal request that somehow has just never come by me before? I've never heard of such a request either, and I've being writing syllabi at American universities for a good while now. So...not too normal, anyway. If it is, how do you handle for courses that don't have syllabus ready to go? In my local academic culture, a course syllabus is a good faith effort to inform students of key course procedures and requirements. It does not absolutely bind the instructor to do what the syllabus says; I would say only that an instructor has an ethical requirement to make changes in the course syllabus for good reasons. In fact, at my university it is a standard practice to include the following sentence in course syllabi: The course syllabus is a general plan for the course; deviations announced to the class by the instructor may be necessary. Thus I would say that the most helpful thing you could do would be to make a tentative syllabus for the course, which includes language at least as strong as the above. You should be clear to the student that this syllabus need not be the same as the one you'll give out on the first day of class. However, if the student needs a syllabus in order to take the class (no, not a practice I recognize, but there is a lot of academic bureaucracy out there), this seems to be the best way to accommodate the request. By the way, I think you are certainly within your rights to say, "Course syllabi are simply not available five months in advance. Based on the conditions you mention, it seems that you will not be able to enroll in the course." That is, you are certainly not obligated to hack together a tentative or pseudo-syllabus in order to accommodate someone else's bureaucratic requirement. Whether it is worth your time to do so is really up to you. A: When I was a graduate student representative, we tried to get the faculty in our department to publish something course descriptions, including very rough syllabi, for a year or two in advance, with the understanding they are not necessarily committing to actually giving those courses. This was intended to help people plan which courses they intend to take - as with undergraduate courses you could know with relative certainty which courses would be given about when - but also because some Professors knew for certain they were going to teach a course on some subject but nobody would publish that information anywhere so you had to guess. So, regardless of whether it's a common thing to ask, it's certainly a reasonable request - and the student obviously realizes that syllabi given far in advance are subject to change. Of course, as @PeteLClark suggest it's better to make that explicit. PS - The dean and department management promised to do this, but never actually lifted a finger to get the faculty to submit such prospective plans.

Q: Cite something I overheard as personal communation A couple of years ago, I was at a conference and there was the typical Q&A after someone gave a talk. I can't even remember what is was about, however in the audience was one of the big-shot researchers in my field (papers, citations, grantmoney). She made a comment, that kept stuck in my mind, and now I would like to borrow that information for my thesis. Can I cite this as a personal communication? Note, I have not talked personally to her, just was in the audience and "overheard" the comment. Note also, what she said was related to some government research contract, and is not published. Edit: some clarifications: It was a public comment on the talk, made to the whole audience. She mentioned that they are using a certain instrument in their research (the government thing), which I like to mention in order to point out the relevance of that instrument even in other areas than what my own reserach is covering. A: The problem with citing an off-the-cuff comment of this type is that there is no way to know whether you are even remembering the statement correctly, let alone whether the statement is truly reliable. I recently had the experience of discovering that a "factual" belief that I had held for a long time was actually based on an incorrect interpretation of the trusted source that I had learned the "fact" from. Nobody was intending to deceive, but they had misremembered their own original source, and therefore passed on subtly incorrect information. Other times, a person may simply misspeak, particularly in a conference situation: for example, I said an incorrect fact during a Q&A of a large talk last year, and did not realize that I had said the wrong thing until later, when somebody asked me a question about what I had said. I thus strongly advise against citing as "personal communication" anything that wasn't the result of a careful discussion. Instead, you can get in touch with the original source (or somebody else likely to have the information) and ask them if there is a better citation you can use, or even just your memory as the inspiration for some Google Scholar sleuthing of your own. After all, if people were using the instrument in area X a few years ago and it was useful, there will almost certainly be some sort of documentation of the fact by now, even if only in technical reports rather than published journals---and if not, you have to wonder how useful it really was.

Q: Can I still try to publish my work if my algorithm's results are not as good as other algorithms'? I've written a classification algorithm that does a pretty good job at classifying some datasets. However, I compared my algorithm to other classification methods, and their results exceed my results by a little. For instance, when classifying a dataset from a repository, my algorithm is getting 95% correct while another algorithm usually gets 99% correct. Should I continue to publish my results although 1) my algorithm is a little slower, and 2) my algorithm's results are not as good as the other results. I'm a little torn. I'm excited as my paper and results are a contribution to the classification field as the algorithm is novel. Also, I'm of the stance that you can't beat EVERY algorithm. If we only published algorithms that could (loosely) beat other algorithms either A.) we'd never have new innovations, or B.) eventually every dataset would be 100% classified each time, or C.) every algorithm could instantaneously classify a dataset (speed). I hope that my algorithm will continue to grow and others will pick it up and extend it. I hope that one day -- with tweaks -- my algorithm can reach 99% too. I'm afraid of being rejected by the journal again. Yes, my first submission was rejected. One of the reasons for the rejection was that my dataset was small. However, when the dataset was small I was beating the other algorithms. Now, as the dataset has grown, the other algorithms are now beating me. I'd like not to be rejected again. A: If you want to get technical, in general no learning algorithm performs any better than any other. The question then, is what can be learned from your algorithm. In your question, you speak of it as a fond intellectual child that you wish to grow and nurture, and you speak of your personal concerns about acceptance and rejection. Here is the thing, though: none of that matters for a publication. What matters is this: what new knowledge or capability is brought into the world with your work on your algorithm, and how can this be objectively evaluated? Here are some possibilities that I can see: Your algorithm may perform better on an interesting and useful class of problems, and thus be of practical interest. Your algorithm may perform worse, but have some other desirable property, such as executing very quickly or using very little memory, in which case the performance comparison just needs to show that it is sufficient, and you can show much better performance with regards to those other properties. Your algorithm may perform worse, but do so in a way that is enlightening, e.g., taking a more human-like approach, or showing how something can be accomplished by a very unusual and unexpected route. In this case, the performance comparison is simply showing that your algorithm does not perform too badly to be interesting, and the narrative should focus on the path taken to achieve your results and why that is interesting. Your algorithm may only have taught you personally some interesting things about classification and scientific research, in which case you should mourn the passing of a fine research idea and move on with your life. Only you and those who know your work well will be able to tell which category it truly fits into. A: Simon Richter wrote in a comment: I'd say the paper is interesting nonetheless, because it contributes a new insight on the performance of algorithms. Also, if you don't publish it, the next person who has the same idea will need to investigate it fully, probably with similar results. If "this idea doesn't work as well as one might hope" is the main conclusion then I also see value in publishing it, but you need to consider carefully the venue. Is there something like a Journal of Negative Results in your field? A: Let's take a look at a very common and studied problem: sorting. There are lots of algorithms, starting from very inefficient ones, such as bubble sort up to more efficient ones such as quick sort or merge sort. Of course, in practice, I would like to use the most efficient one, but there are some reasons for which I might choose another one. For example, merge sort might be more appropriate for a machine with sequential access memory. Also, even if I would never use it in practice, there was a point in my life when I studied bubble sort, since it created a softer learning curve for me. Also, I studied merge sort initially not for the actual problem that it solves, but for the method it uses. Bottom line is, there are many reasons why an algorithm is interesting for somebody, even if it has a lower average performance in practice. Moreover, somebody might find some application for your algorithm where it is better than others (for example, bubble sort is quicker than quicksort on sorted lists).

Q: Citing own image based on others work Let's say I create an image which illustrates the ideas of others as part of a paper I write for university class work (so it's not about anything I want to publish). A simple example: Foo Bar says in their paper: We have a state machine with states A, B, and C. I want to summarize their idea in my paper, but they do not have a graphic to illustrate it, so I create a graphic for my paper looking like this: A --> B --> C Do I need to cite it? My text makes it clear that this is not my idea (and it properly cites Foo Bar), but just looking at the graphic, this isn't clear. If so, how would I cite it? Would "Graphic Title (based on [Foo Bar, 2016])" work? Is "based on" strong enough to indicate that this is not a graphic created by Foo Bar or a graphic based on a graphic by Foo Bar? Would "based on work by [Foo Bar]" be better? Or is there some standard for this situation that I'm not aware of? This question is similar to How to cite a rebuilt graphic, but not a duplicate, as I did not rebuild a graphic, but build a graphic based on a description. A: You could add a note to the figure caption as follows: Figure X: [figure_caption ...] (This figure is based on work by Foo Bar 2016). In addition to the citation in your text, you can also add a proper citation in this note (using your citation style of choice).

Q: Could a second masters hurt my PhD application because expectations will be higher? I would like to do a second masters, because I would like to change focus to a certain subfield within my field (not changing fields) and have the best shot of getting into my favourite program. I also had some personal problems both during my BA and my first MA, and think I could do much better. I am worried though that having 2 masters will set the bars slightly higher for me in the application process. Is this true? Phrased differently: are admissions people more likely to look at the my CV in a 'absolute' way, or do they judge it 'relative' to the amount of time spent in academia maybe? A: In the parts of academia I'm most familiar with (mathematics, US), even one master's degree is not a necessary prerequisite for a PhD program. Some students do improve their application and chances by doing a separate master's degree, but (when a master's degree is not a necessary prerequisite) I would advise any student to also apply for PhD programs and see what they get into. In your case, having completed one master's degree in your field and having the desire to go on to a PhD program, I think you should certainly apply to PhD programs. If there is a second master's program that you are extremely excited about -- in particular that you think is prestigious, would improve your academic record and offer you critical new skills that you would not necessarily pick up in the PhD program -- then you should apply to it as well. If you get into a solid PhD program with funding, I advise you to take that over any master's program. This is your life, and at some point you will want to have your student days behind you while you are still somewhat spry. However, if you get in only to PhD programs that are substandard and you get into a very good master's program, then yes, taking that is probably a good investment for the future. All this is definitely something to discuss with your current thesis advisor, by the way.

Q: What is the backup strategy of online-only journals/repositories on the very long term? Disseminating printed documents in many places on the planet is a very robust "backup" strategy for scientific literature. Printed documents (and other forms of ink-on-paper documents), or fragments of them, are known to last for millennia and with a high redundancy (many copies spread in many geographic locations), the chances of being able to reconstruct the original content is high. All current electronic data storage require continuous catering (electrical power and servers maintenance) or frequent re-copying (i.e. of laser discs, magnetic hard drives, etc.) to last more than a few decades. How do online-only journals and articles repositories intend to ensure very long-term archival of their content? A: Most publishers use a preservation network such as Portico or LOCKSS. The principle is that numerous electronic copies are saved, and released in case of certain events (e.g. the publisher stops permanently giving access to the works).

Q: How to review a paper that is not related to my field, when my advisor has asked me to review it for him and I can't refuse? I am an M.Sc. student in computer science, working on machine learning. Recently my supervisor assigned me a paper on biomedical signals field to review. The review task is assigned to my advisor who is a referee of a journal and he assigned it to me to do it for him (I am sure he will not check my review and will submit it directly). However, the paper is weakly (if not at all) related to my field; I don't even have an idea about its title. What should be my approach? Particularly in judging if the paper has properly covered background works and if it's novelty when I am not familiar with the field at all? The best option is to decline but I have not that opportunity. That is a "must" to do work for me if I don't want to ruin my relation with my advisor. I should mention that this is the first time I was assigned to review a paper. A: I agree with all of @Nate Eldredge's comments. If you have a good relationship with your advisor, you should be able to say "This paper lies outside of my field of expertise. I don't feel qualified to review it; in fact, even to understand it at a basic level would require me to spend substantial time familiarizing myself with the terminology of a different academic field." According to your comments, you do not feel comfortable saying this to your advisor. So here is what I would suggest instead: do the reviewing together with your advisor, in person. So for instance you could begin by saying "I started reading the paper you assigned me, and I have some questions I'd like to discuss with you. When can we meet to talk about it?" Then when you meet you can begin to engage with all the unfamiliar stuff and see for yourself how far away it really is from your interests and those of your advisor. If it turns out that your advisor doesn't understand the paper either, I would try to subtly lead him to the conclusion that neither of you should be reviewing it. If he tries to shove it onto you, reiterate that you are doing it but that you want to get his input. If necessary, ask a question of the form "How would you handle this review job if you were in my place?" The point being that the advisor is in your place since he is the one who has been asked to do the reviewing. To pull this off properly may require some verbal aikido. The worst case scenario is that after all this your advisor makes clear to you that he doesn't care that neither of your have the expertise to review this paper; he wants you to do it anyway. At that point he is asking you to commit academic dishonesty, and you will be in a tough spot: you will have to decide whether turning in a noncommittal review of a paper that you don't understand is the least evil.

Q: No word on papers in IEEEXplore from IEEE conference in Sep, 2015? We submitted and presented a set of papers in a IEEE conference last September in 2015. However, we still can't find ours or any other papers present in this conference accessible via IEEEXplore (papers for 2014 and prior are available). Since the next 2016 conference deadline is coming up in two months, I don't know if I should submit our next submission, or not due to this incident from 2015. What do I do? Do I just need to wait longer for papers to appear in IEEEXplore? Or can I contract someone from the conference organizers? I need to decide if I should submit something for 2016 conference or find another venue. A: You could contact the program chair or publication chair for an update regarding the publication on IEEExplore. Delays like this are not too uncommon, however. A conference I attended in August last year had its proceedings published only in March of this year. I think you can safely submit to this conference again this year.

Q: Prerequisites for Master's Degree in Pure Mathematics (and eventually PhD) This will be my first post on the Academia SE so apologies if there are some conventions I break! I am an undergraduate student of mathematics at a university in the UK whose emphasis lies a lot more in statistics and applied mathematics than it does in pure mathematics, there being only 2 modules in the entire degree program that focus only partially on higher algebra, and only 4 weeks of the entire 3 year program that have anything to do with number theory. I am in this position because my A-Levels did not go as well as I had expected as I had a few issues and did not achieve the grades needed to go to a more "pure based" university. I am deeply interested in the area of Algebraic Number Theory and intend to go on to study a master's degree in pure mathematics and eventually/hopefully a PhD. My question is this; what should I/can I do to "boost" my application to a master's degree in pure mathematics if my undergraduate degree has a relatively low pure mathematics content? I will be applying for an undergraduate research bursary from the London Mathematical Society to fund an 8 week research project, be it expository or otherwise, in the field of Algebraic Number Theory. Thank you in advance for any information you can give me. A: Although I am doing a PhD in the field of Computer Science, I of course cannot give specific advise on what you should do about mathematics MSc, but here are some of my observations on the general case. In the last two years, I have applied a lot of PhD programmes across Europe. I have been accepted to one recently. And that is probably one out of fifty if not more. As far as I have observed, the priority is not a student with "a lot of knowledge", but a student "who can study hard on the given task." This observation is based on the profiles of accepted students instead of me (stalker alert). Some of them have lower GPA, and almost none of them have publications. I think what they somehow proved that they can study harder and be more productive. The interesting part that matches with your question is, both their theses and their stated area of interests were less related to the research area. Surprisingly, someone who took his degree from mathematics was accepted to a research group that focuses primarily on application rather than theory. If we switch from PhD to master's degree, I don't really believe having a relative background should have more weight than being a hard-worker (of course I am not talking about another discipline like psychology) in the process of decision. If I were you, I would direct the exactly same question to a professor from the department you want to apply. Questions like How can I convince you that I am good enough to pursue a master's degree? or Are there any specific criteria you are seeking such as having a relatively strong background on pure mathematics? would do no harm. I think being deeply interested as a master applicant in a research topic puts you one or two steps further. Of course you somehow have to show that you are actually deeply interested (this is the hard part that I could not figure out how). In short, do not over-try to "boost" your application and do not hesitate to contact one of the faculty members.

Q: How to be persistent in a polite way? Recently I contacted an important researcher in my field, and he offered me a collaboration with his group. He told me to email him a proposal. Moreover, he recognized that he was usually very busy and received a lot of email, so I should be persistent. He even gave me his personal phone number. I sent him the proposal, and alerted him by an SMS. He replied that he would look at it. It's been a couple of weeks, so I SMS him again, and he replied that he hadn't had the time yet to look at the proposal, but that he would soon. This is a very important and unique opportunity for me. In view of his advice to be persistent, and the fact that he is very busy, I want to do what I can to remind him of this, until he acts on it. What is the most polite way to insist? What time window should I wait before reminding him again? A: Having worked in sales and academia, I have often come across the "how often do I contact this person" question. The answer heavily depends on the situation and the person whom you wish to contact. You have contacted him twice thus far, and he encouraged your being persistent. I would think he would have no problem in you checking back with him every two weeks. Going to his office may even be suggested after several attempts had been made. Try to approach the professor in your emails with courtesy, but also with urgency. Always thank him for his time, but also stress that you would like to get your research plans finalized, so if he could respond by such and such date it would be helpful.

Q: How can I get the most out of conferences? I recently attended a very large conference in my field (SfN, ~30,000 attendees), and after I got back I was thinking about what I had gained from the trip, and I realized not that much. I listened to a few different talks, and I saw a whole bunch of relevant posters, but on reflection I don't think anything I did progressed my knowledge/career that much. What should I do in the future to ensure that I make the most out of conferences? A: Read this and this. My professor put forth 3 simple rules for networking: Talk to the guy beside you Talk to top 3 (sort by relevance or whatever you prefer) presenters Mail them 5 days after the conference with some follow up content (questions/comments/invites for talks etc.) Just to make this post "dead-link" proof, I present a gist of the content in the above links. Start Early. You should begin preparing before the conference starts. Start reading on who will be there, emailing people you want to meet, and determining which events you will attend. You may want to contact the speakers whose talks you will be attending before the conference; try to set up a meeting, or if they are too busy, at least meet them and give them your business card. Bring Business Cards. Make sure they're up-to-date and details your preferred mode of communication. Research people and get involved in their networks. If a certain professor is giving a talk; read his previous research papers, frame interesting questions and get an excuse to meet him. If you do meet him, exploit the opportunity to interact with his peers and try to enter their network. Sometimes, this is the only way of getting to network with someone. I know of professors who refuse to take students for PhD or internships or Postdocs without a recommendation from someone in his network. A good impression might just get you that recommendation. Note people with similar interests to yours. These people will be attending all the same presentations as you, talking to the same people, discussing similar topics. They are the potential spots for networking. Prepare the elevator speech. A common question will be "So, what is your research about?" Make sure you have an answer for every audience. For e.g. If you are in Computational Science, the answer may vary depending on who you are talking with. Plus, make it interesting and digestible. Organize an event of your own. This is especially useful is forming "lower" networks i.e. networks of people who lag in terms of age or experience such as graduate students. If not more, they could notify you of openings or interesting papers or whatever. They could be useful. (Plus it helps us :P ) Read "Never Eat Alone". Follow Up. Prepare for this even before you leave for the conference. Have different modes of follow up ready. Will you have anything to say that is worth writing an email for? If not, think of something which will. If nothing works, make sure you click a photo of yourself with him and send it to him a few days after the conference. A: Know why you're going in the first place: only go to conferences where you can get something useful out of it. You can usually get access to the proceedings (and at lower cost) without going to the conference. So just access to the proceedings is usually not enough. You're there to present your stuff and get feedback on it, and/or for networking, and/or to hear specific speakers talk insightfully on a subject important to you, whre you've got an opportunity to ask clarifying questions directly of them, and to participate in a discussion with others, afterwards, on the content. Be the first after a presentation to ask an insightful, relevant, informed question. Catch the speaker's eye as you ask the question. Go up to them after the session ends, thank them in person, exchange business cards Network like crazy Have a big stack of business cards. Give them away liberally to anyone vaguely connected to your field. Get some more printed. Repeat. Collect business cards of anyone vaguely connected, voraciously. Add their email addresses to your database of interesting contacts. Follow them on your networking sites of choice. (Twitter, CiteULike, Academia.edu, etc). And when one of your papers gets published, email them a link to it, and let them know that it may be of use to them. A: From my own experience I get the most out of conferences which are not organized as conference expos. There's a big difference between conferences created for income (yes, even in academia) and those created to promote new discoveries and knowledge. Of the latter type I find the presenters are generally excited by their opportunity to meet others in their field. It's more of a grassroots type of experience and you find that you naturally start to share in the discussions. No networking is needed. What should I do in the future to ensure that I make the most out of conferences? Choose a conference that's in your field. Prepare a paper or two of your own on a subject that really interests you. Discuss it with colleagues. Get it published. Present it at a conference. The critical thought you put into this process will help you to pick conferences more suited to you and stimulate your interaction with others.

Q: Do conferences accept entry of those who didn't register before the deadline? A relatively big conference will take place in my neighborhood, but I haven't noticed of it until now. I'd like to attend some lectures done by young researchers who recently made a breakthrough. Unfortunately, the deadline of registration is over. Thus, I have this question: do conferences accept entry of those who didn't register before the deadline? A: Most large scientific conferences will allow you to register at any time, even while the conference is running. In this case the "deadline" is instead one or more deadlines for getting reduced rate registrations: they charge you more, the later that you register in order to get most to register early and have a good estimate of attendee numbers. Some conferences, however, have size limits or require advance planning of other sorts, and so actually do have a strict deadline. This is more often the case with small meetings than large ones, but the only way to know for certain for a particular conference is to check their website and, if it doesn't have information, contact the organizers.

Q: How to deal with dramatic drop in grade due to strict attendance policy I'm currently taking a required class where attendance is counted at 15% of the grade. The policy is that if a student misses more than 2 lectures, they lose all 15% of those points. The class itself takes place 5 days a week, and attendance is taken daily and uniformly. I currently hold a 91% in this class, but I missed my third class today and I'm trying to decide how to proceed from here. I feel like all of the time and effort I've put into the class has been totally discounted for a reason that has nothing to do with my knowledge of the course material. Am I wrong to feel as though this is an unfair mark? On one hand, I knew that this policy existed and the consequences for missing 3 classes. On the other hand, dropping a grade from an A to a C for such a small reason feels absolutely unacceptable to me. How should I approach this situation to help repair my grade? A: You do not currently hold a 91%. You may have held a 91% percent yesterday, but now you hold a 76%. Am I wrong to feel as though this is an unfair mark? Given that you knew the policy in advance and the teacher seems to have been consistent in taking attendance, you seem to have no logical reason to feel the mark is unfair. You state that attendance is a "small reason", but for whatever reason the teacher feels is is a big reason (15% to be exact). If you felt that the grading policy was unfair, you should have discussed this at the beginning of the semester, not after missing 3 classes. Realistically, the only thing you can do now is beg (aka grade grub). Your mileage may vary, but most professors do not look kindly on grade grubbing. It is important to realize that to an outside, the policy seems fair. For example, in a typical US semesters of around 17 weeks each class accounts for between 1-2% of the taught material. Further, missing a class likely means you are not at the right point in further classes so each absence is like missing 2-4% of taught material. That sets a minimum of 6-12% of missed material for 3 absences. Multiple absences probably means you have missed even more material. In other words, without knowing the specifics of the class, a penalty of 15% for 3 absences seems reasonable. A: Am I wrong to feel as though this is an unfair mark? Yes. You only concluded it was unfair once it applied to you. Prior to this moment, you accepted it as reasonable. Since the "fairness" never changed, then only your perception of it has changed, and only that once your circumstances did. How should I approach this situation to help repair my grade? First, focus on getting exceptional grades for the rest of the class. You apparently already lost 9% (over one third of your total loss so far). You may or may not be able to affect the lost 15%, but you still have the rest of the semester and a lot more to lose if you don't renew your focus on your work. Second, discuss this with the teacher. I advise you to 1) not suggest that it's unfair and 2) don't ask for a reprieve. Instead ask it as though you accept the penalty, but would like to see if there's anything you can do - extra credit, an additional paper covering the subject discussed on the days missed, etc - which the teacher could take into account when finalizing grades. By accepting the penalty and not suggesting it's unfair, you are showing that you are responsible, and that you don't want to erase the penalty, you want to prove to the teacher that you are interested, engaged, and willing to work harder to show your effort. This should allow the teacher to avoid being put on the defensive, and they may open up paths for you to take that will help you recover some of the loss the penalty cost you. Humility and patience will often work better than accusations and whining. A: Am I wrong to feel as though this is an unfair mark? In my opinion, no, you are not wrong. Furthermore, the arguments that "since you knew about the policy to begin with you don't have a leg to stand on", and that "since the policy applies equally to all students it cannot be claimed to be unfair", are simply invalid and miss a key point (which I'll address at the end) about where the unfairness comes from. Let's examine these two superficially compelling arguments more closely. "You knew about the policy" You yourself say: On one hand, I knew that this policy existed and the consequences for missing 3 classes and StrongBad in his/her answer says Given that you knew the policy in advance and the teacher seems to have been consistent in taking attendance, you seem to have no logical reason to feel the mark is unfair. a sentiment that is also echoed in some of the comments. To this I would reply: if the policy was unfair at the beginning of the semester, it is still unfair now. Conversely, if it was in fact fair to begin with, it would still be fair now. Why on earth should it matter when you come forward to complain about the unfairness? It actually makes a lot of sense to me that you, being a busy student with many things to worry about, would not devote much time and energy to thinking about (or even noticing) this unfairness and thinking what to do about it until you found yourself in a situation where you saw yourself personally harmed by it. So yes, perhaps it would be more commendable if you had the foresight to step forward at the beginning of the semester and complain about what seemed like an unfair policy, either out of concern that it would hurt you personally, or out of an altruistic concern that some other student might be hurt. So what? That does not change the fact that the logical question regarding the fairness or unfairness of the policy has nothing whatsoever to do with the timing of the complaint. Note that I do agree with the that from a practical point of view, complaining now certainly stands less of a chance of achieving anything, but the point is that that's not because the policy has stopped being unfair (if indeed it was unfair to begin with). "The policy applies equally to all students" This argument was raised by @user37208, who says in a highly upvoted comment: Unreasonable? Maybe. Unfair? Certainly not, as long as it's the same attendance policy for everyone. But this argument compares you to the reference group of the other students in your class. What about all the other students all around the world who have more reasonable instructors who do not penalize their students so severely for missing three lectures in a semester? If we assume the premise that such a grading policy is simply a poor way to evaluate someone's knowledge of the material the course is designed to teach, then by comparing yourself to this much larger reference group (or even focusing on a smaller group of students in your country or region who would be competing with you for jobs, or even just students in your university who took the same course but with different instructors who had more sensible grading policies), clearly you would have pretty good cause to find yourself discriminated against based on what you see as an irrelevant grading criterion. We can further illustrate the falseness of the "applies equally" argument by taking the same argument to an absurd extreme. What if the grading policy said that 15% of the grade would be given for the ability to recite the first 10000 digits of pi? (Let's assume that memorizing those digits was not one of the goals of the class, which seems like a fair assumption.) And let's assume that all the students except the OP managed to perform this feat and got the 15%, and he alone failed. Well, the policy was the same for everyone, so it is "maybe unreasonable" but "certainly not unfair" - right? Clearly that's nonsense, because the point is that (as I explained above) such a policy is grading based on completely irrelevant information, and hence discriminates against the OP compared to all other students everywhere who are evaluated on their knowledge of the same material as covered by the course. Now, I still need to explain why the policy is unfair (I only explained so far why two specific arguments saying it is not unfair are incorrect). In fact, that is somewhat more debatable, since grading for attendance is clearly more commonplace and at least slightly more logical than grading for one's ability to memorize digits of pi. Nonetheless, I think ultimately it comes down to the question of whether the grading policy, however well-intentioned it may be, is evaluating you for the right things, or for anything valuable at all, so that the grade will contain at least some minimally informative value about you to future employers or decision-makers. I argue that it simply doesn't, and hence is just as silly as the digits-of-pi policy in my example. The bottom line is that you have missed three of the course lectures. I don't know why you missed them, but one would be hard-pressed to convincingly argue that that says anything negative about you whatsoever. When I was a student there were many courses in which I missed such a number of lectures, and I did just great and am now a successful academic (and am probably considered an expert on some of the subjects those courses I missed lectures in were about...). Many of my students today are making equally reasonable and good decisions about when they want to come to class and when not to. They are grown-ups, and are using their time at university to acquire not just concrete knowledge but also to learn productivity and work skills, which include developing the judgment and self-knowledge to be able to make those sorts of decisions. Occasionally they make mistakes and learn from them. This is precisely as it should be. On my part, I give them exams and other assignments to learn whether they learned the material. Again, this is precisely as it should be. Nowhere in the process does it make sense for me to abuse my grading authority by requiring them to learn in a specific way, whether it be to do their homework between 8:17 p.m. and 9:44 p.m. every night (which I'm sure everyone reading this would agree would be outrageous and unreasonable) or to sit on a chair in a specific room in specific hours of specific weekdays. Finally, this answer is already too long, but let me briefly address your other, more practical question: How should I approach this situation to help repair my grade? The other answers already addressed this. I share their somewhat pessimistic view that in practice there's not a whole lot you can or should do. In any case, since the main part of your question was about the principle of whether you're reasonable to feel that you are being treated unfairly, I thought it would at least make you feel a bit better to have someone agree with you and give a reasoned answer. My recommendation is to treat this as a learning experience and hopefully show your instructor through your excellent performance (and even more importantly, show yourself) that you indeed mastered the material, which is the main thing that counts.

Q: 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. A: 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. A: Captain Emacs already gave a great answer, I'd like to address this point specifically: I'm cautious to answer back to the 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 suggest the following strategy: If he criticizes you personally: Ignore it. If he criticizes your work: Answer back, but use questions. Don't defend your work, try to find out why we criticizes it and what alternatives he suggests. If he is right, you get valuable feedback. If he is wrong (and others are present, like at your continuation), he will make himself look bad rather than you. Example: "And you call yourself a scientist? This section is rubbish." Bad answer: (Get angry) "Of course I am a scientist! And this section is great because..." Good answer: (Take out a pen and paper to take notes) "Why do you think it is rubbish? How can it be improved?" 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? Sure, mention it! Your advisor's job is not only to help you write a great thesis, but also to help you find your way in academia and guide you through the process. A: Kelly, if you have had a chance to meet with your supervisor since you asked this question, you may not need any further advice. I'm male, so maybe not qualified to speak to this topic. You call yourself Kelly, which where I am (geographically) is usually but not exclusively female. A male professor is criticizing you personally and telling you that you are not suitable for academia, so it's even more likely that you are female. If I've guessed right on that, then since I see you also used a male pronoun for your supervisor, you should discuss this with women on the faculty in your department. My other comments are gender neutral. I'm worried because you said you prepared for three weeks and the exam went badly. If that's just because an assistant professor asked inappropriate questions, that doesn't reflect badly on you. But your supervisor is supposed to intervene for you if something inappropriate happens in an exam, and it sounds like he didn't. If the rudeness was coming from an assistant professor, then your supervisor should be at least of equal rank and it isn't obvious what power dynamic would keep him silent when you were being mistreated. If the exam did go badly, your supervisor should bring it up without prompting, I think, but I wouldn't count on it. I think you need to know if your supervisor thinks it went badly, and if he shares your view on why it went badly. If you agree that this one assistant professor is the problem, then you supervisor should agree to keep him off your committee in the future, and all is good. You say you view your PhD progress as very good and "as far as you know" your supervisor shares the same sentiment. I wish you were more confident in that. Maybe you and your supervisor need to agree on milestones and deadlines to reach the milestones so you can judge that you are making good progress. It's 99.9% likely the other professor is wrong in his assessment of you. But you're probably not the next Feynman or the next Marie Curie, because they wouldn't need to ask the question you've asked. They succeeded no matter what anyone else said. The rest of us might be suitable for academia but still slip through the cracks without support from mentors and colleagues. In your question I see red flags that say your supervisor isn't supporting you.

Q: Performing minor corrections in a paper after camera-ready deadline I have an accepted paper at a computer science conference. Before the camera-ready deadline was over, I submitted an updated version addressing some issues. Now, I got some other minor suggestions from an advisor, which could be worked into the paper. However, the camera-ready deadline is already over. What should I do? Please note, that in the email, which the authors received from the conference's organizers, the following was stated regarding what happens after the camera-ready deadline: Our publisher has recently introduced an extra control loop: once data processing is finished, they will contact all corresponding authors and ask them to check their papers. We expect this to happen shortly before the printing of the proceedings. So I see two options: Contact the conference organizers now and ask if I can still update the camera-ready version despite the deadline already being expired Just wait and use the above described extra control loop to adapt the paper. However, I think this extra control loop is not really there to modify the paper's content, but rather it should be used to double-check the layouting. Do you see any other options? What would you suggest to do? A: First, make the changes in any case. That way, you'll have the updated version that makes you most happy ready to instantly go, whichever route it might take. As for which route it might take, there's no way to tell for certain except for the particulars of the conference. However, I would recommend the following: Sometimes a camera-ready deadline is "soft," and an automated online system will still be open for updates. Try updating your camera-ready version and see if it takes it. Whether or not the automated system allows you to update your camera-ready, email the contact point for the camera-ready (this might be the organizers or it might be the publishing society, e.g., IEEE has you send the camera-ready through their system rather than the organizers); if you uploaded an updated version, tell them; if not, email them the updated version. There is a good chance that it will simply be able to be added to the pipeline at this point. If that fails, then send the corrections at the "final check" stage: it is better to do it before this, though, because "shortly before the printing" makes me thing this is more supposed to be just about "Did we accidentally totally corrupt your embedded vector graphics?" Finally, if all of that fails, you can always request a correction to the archival proceedings, though for minor changes this might not be granted.

Q: How to recruit strong REU (undergrad research) students from other institutions? Occasionally we find ourselves with some REU (research experience for undergraduates) money in hand for summer research on a particular project. This funding is allocated for undergraduate students who are US citizens or permanent residents to gain research experience. Sometimes we can not find eligible students at our own institution who are both qualified and interested in working on the project, and we would like to recruit some strong candidates from other institutions. (Or, even if we do have qualified students locally, we want to give opportunities to qualified students at other institutions.) However, we are not an "REU site" with a regular program in place for recruiting undergrads, handling applications, etc. Rather, we sometimes apply for and receive "REU supplement" funding for a particular project. Then we are left with a recruiting problem. How does one go about finding and recruiting strong undergraduate students from other institutions, when there's no pipeline in place? A: Take the HPC REU as a good example (obviously you won't be able to do everything that they can do as an REU Site, but there are many things you can try to do). It was my top choice for REUs when I was a junior undergrad even though I never heard of the school. When undergraduates read the website they know exactly what they're going to do. For a student who doesn't know much about the subjects, showing a list of projects makes them interested even if they do not understand all of the details. Also, invest some time in training. You are saying that you cannot find "eligible students at our own institution who are both qualified and interested". Do a bootcamp in what they need to know. Most of the students who attended the HPC REU knew how to program but didn't know anything about high-performance computing, so the detailed schedule showed us that we would learn this (and get credit). Most of the time undergraduates take "standard" classes so they will never learn these research skills even if that's what they want to be researching, so showing them that your REU is the jumpstart to their research career in the particular field generates the interest. Also, if you can show that this is applicable to them even if they are not into research, then you have a large crowd. If you look at other REUs they also have a few training weeks in some useful subjects as well. Another thing is to try and make it a group project. Undergraduates haven't had enough time to learn subjects to "research-level" yet, and if it's an interdisciplinary project, it's almost impossible. Many mathematical biology projects take a group of students where one knows math, one can program well, and another may just be a straight biologist. They work together to solve the problem (or get as far as possible) and learn from each other. Although I found my REUs via their websites, I know others that found out about their REUs via departmental emails. Send emails out to friends/administrators at other institutions to forward to their administrators. Some of the best places for recruitment can be liberal arts colleges because sometimes the department may not have every subfield. In a liberal arts college there are close ties between students and faculty and so many times the faculty will know about subfields that students are wanting to try out. Then the faculty may even forward the email to some of their students saying "I know you're interested in ______, check this out!". Also, be ready to adapt what you're doing to the undergraduates. Most REU projects don't result in a publication, so if you're looking for undergraduates who will help you on your current project, it's probably a waste of time. Of course you don't want to go too far out of your expertise, but play around with ideas and try some new things. For example, if you're an experimental scientist who's interested in trying machine learning for your type of data, pair up with a new faculty member who does machine learning and get a group of undergraduates to try doing some machine learning on your data under joint supervision. Again, it's most likely not going to end up with results, but this new collaboration can turn out to be an exciting result itself. Lastly, think about being the undergraduate. What is the undergraduate looking for? First and foremost, the best undergraduates are looking for what will look good on a graduate school application. Cater to that. Make the summer bootcamp worth credit. Guarantee that at least a technical report will be online. Teach them a few programming languages. Give access to GRE classes. Etc.

Q: Citing old or new papers of same work? Often researchers publish their work incrementally. Abstractly speaking, let's say, in 2010 the researcher publishes version 1.0 of his algorithm/system/framework. Two years later, he publishes an improved version 2.0 of the same algorithm/system/framework. If I want to cite his work, should I a) cite his oldest work (advantage: typically, older works have more citations), b) cite his newest work (advantage: my readers will be directed to the most uptodate version of the author's work), or c) cite both? A: You might cite both by saying "Idea X, originally developed in [1] and extended in [2], shows that ..." A: If you know why do you need a citation, it is usually easy to determine which papers to cite. If you want to give credit for a contribution, you cite the original paper. In computer science, journal papers usually supersede earlier conference versions of the same paper. If a journal version of the paper exists, you cite it instead of the conference version, because it is now the original paper. Subsequent papers by the same authors often contain new contributions to the topic. If the contributions are relevant to your paper, you cite those papers for the contributions. If you want to tell the reader what the state of the art is, you cite the most comprehensive papers on the topic. This may include survey articles or papers describing version 2.0 of the result, even if the specific contributions in 2.0 are not relevant to your paper. There are obviously other reasons for citing a paper. For example, you may want to cite historically important papers in a literature survey, even if the results are no longer relevant. So, in general, you cite (the journal version of) the original paper for the contribution, and give the reader some relevant pointers to the state of the art. If the topic is central to your paper, you may also want to cite the intermediate papers for their specific contributions.

Q: What are the benefits and drawbacks of rotating professors to teach subjects not in their areas? It seems that many universities are rotating professors who teach a subject. I was talking with a friend and he mentioned that as a result of this, he is struggling with a professor who is teaching a subject outside his area and is still learning the materials. My question, is why do schools apply such strategy? Wouldn't it be better to focus on few related topics, instead of assigning professors to some random courses? A: Most programs I've ever heard of don't randomly assign professors - but the typical system in the US I'm aware of has each professor required to teach X number of credits. The department has requirements for what class must be taught (like standard intro classes, courses required for the major, etc), as well as the opening for a variety of specialty courses (often called "electives") - but the core courses have to be taken up first. While departments differ, it seems the most common system is one where professors pick the classes they will teach (sometimes by seniority or department rank getting their first pick, sometimes by some other method). The natural order of things is that it's easier to teach a class the second time than it is to teach it the first time (since you already have so much material prepared and you have had some practice now), so professors naturally end up teaching many of the same classes year after year. However, most departments have comings and goings nearly every semester - retirements, people leaving, sabbaticals, medical leave, changing course load amounts (buying out of teaching, becoming a department chair, not being the chair anymore, winning a big grant, having a big grant run out). Thus things are constantly in flux, so even if you really, really wanted the same courses taught by the same professors every semester - you can't have it, it isn't possible. There is a downside to having things static, even when you somehow manage to have so much stability that it's possible. Some examples: Many professors get comfortable with the material enough that they don't make large updates, and it can get stale and out of date over time (both materially and in method used). Professors, being human beings, get bored of saying the same thing over and over and their excitement, passion, and patience can begin to wear thin even with classes they once enjoyed. Some students aren't a good fit with some professors, and if a required class is always taught by a professor they don't get along with this may interfere with academic progress. Professors can lose sight - or just not have a good idea to begin with - what the goal of teaching some material actually is. Most programs have courses that build on each other, like Introduction -> Research Methods -> Stats -> Advanced Research Methods. If you only teach stats and don't ever run an advanced class, are you sure you are teaching the stats students will need - and are you emphasizing applications that best prepare them for the advanced material? If you teach a Calculus I class, are you making sure students get all the groundwork they need for Calculus II? I've had students tell me "the Professor assumed we all had JavaScript in the previous class and designed the whole class around it, but half of us had never seen it before!" - with not very encouraging results. However, there are downsides to moving people around a lot too: The first time is always the hardest. No one knows what to expect, every question asked will be one you might not have answered before, the teacher's idea of pacing and time required to complete assignments will basically be wild guesses, etc. Sometimes someone is asked to teach a class because no one else is available. I talked with a visiting academic who was a statistician, and he said in his first semester they came to him and said, "Hey, have you ever used C++ before?" He said, "Well, I guess a little bit in undergrad..." And so they said, "Great, don't have anyone else to teach this required class - will you teach a C++ class for us?" So he just had to figure it out as he went. It isn't ideal, but the alternative: no class offered that semester, which may mean students can't take required key classes or they will just miss out on learning important material entirely. Sometimes everyone just has the make the best of a non-ideal situation - come to think of it, that's what most of us have to do most of the time! In the end, there is a first time for everyone. Experienced professors had to teach a class for the first time too. Sometimes this can even be a positive experience for everyone, if the professor and the student choose to handle it that way. One of the hardest things about teaching people is when you've forgotten what it was like to not know. You can all learn together, and it can be easier to have empathize with students confusion and anticipate their questions when you are confused and have questions too! The job of a teacher isn't always to be an expert bestowing their grand accumulated wisdom, but instead sometimes they are just a guide and skilled companion to help you through difficult territory. ...and sometimes neither of you want to be there, but it's a required course and the department is making them teach it so you suck it up and move on. :) A: It seems that many universities are rotating professors who teach a subject. Why do schools apply such strategy? One instance why this may happen is for core courses that need to be taught, and for which no clearly matching faculty is available. My department, for instance, has a very clear focus on applied and practical computer science. For some fundamental courses, we simply do not have obviously matching faculty, and no plans to hire people for this profile either. This leaves us with the options of either finding external people to teach the course (preferred if said people exist and funding for paying the external person is available), or making one of our faculty from a different field teach the course, fully knowing that (a) the faculty will not be happy and (b) that (s)he will probably not do an outstanding job either. Part of convincing said faculty is usually also a promise that (s)he needs to teach this "foster" course only one or two times, before passing the token on to somebody else. An alternative reason for rotating teachers is that there is more than one faculty that can teach a course, but the course is highly disliked and an agreement was established that multiple people take turns teaching it. I have seen this happen for courses such as "Introduction to Programming", that many people are in principle qualified to teach, but few really want to teach. Finally, it may be that the school (correctly or incorrectly) assumes that rotating a course will indeed improve the quality of the course or add in some way to it. For instance, in my old alma mater, we had the concept of "AK courses" ("selected topics in SOMETHING"). These courses were advanced courses with no fixed content, only a sort of framework or direction. Every year, a different professor would be teaching it, and give it a completely different spin depending on his own current research interests. You could do the same AK multiple times, assuming that the professors agreed that those years were indeed sufficiently different. A: Your question suggests that you are viewing a professor's teaching as "just a job" they have to do. However, this picture is missing a key aspect of our jobs and why we do what we do. For many professors, teaching is a deep source of personal satisfaction, learning and growth. Many if not most of us love to learn new things and expand our knowledge, and teaching a class on a topic we are somewhat familiar with but haven't taught before is a great opportunity to brush up old skills or sometimes master an entirely new area, including on occasion an area that we would like to expand our research to touch upon in the future. This opportunity to learn through teaching and later apply what one has learned to one's own work is one of the great synergies that makes the research+teaching combination such a successful model for academics. To summarize, it may be helpful (and not entirely inaccurate) to think of professors as "professional students" or "students who never grew up"; that is, students who never got tired of being in university and have made learning more and more about their discipline (and sometimes about other disciplines) a lifelong goal, and were eventually able to turn this passion into a source of employment as well. When you look at it this way, it makes perfect sense that professors would not be very happy teaching the same old basic courses about their main subjects of expertise over and over again.

Q: Do students needs to be specifically mentioned on grant proposals for projects funded by government agencies in the US? Let me start by giving some background. I joined a research group about 3 years ago and at the time the PI (who became my advisor) told me that he would not be able to support me until either one of his PhD students graduated or he landed a new project from the agency that funds the research group. He told me that the wait wouldn't be too long because two students would graduate within the next six month (however he did say that it was not guaranteed) and I would be next in line to receive funding. Well, it took those two students another two years to graduate. However, before they graduated the PI told me that their contract with the funding agency was being restructured and all current projects were being abandoned. He was proposing new projects instead of them however that meant that I was pushed back 3 or 4 places in the line to receive funding (which was based on seniority). About a year later now, I am first in line again and the next project was suppose to be mine. However, my advisor just told me that they forgot to put my name on the project proposal and that although the project was approved I would not receive any funding. There are several staff members in our research group who are part of each project and he tells me that they are the only ones that were named on the proposal. Does this sound plausible? I don't know much about how project proposals are structured and how funding is awarded. I'm getting a feeling that my advisor isn't being completely honest with me. I get the feeling that because I haven't complained much about funding to him in the past three years he is assuming that I can afford to go without it. I've actually had to hunt for a TA position every single quarter which would pay my tuition but provided a very small stipend (not enough to cover expenses). P.S. these "projects" are separate from our thesis related research and are really just a means for supporting the students in our research group. A: My experience is that students are not put in NSF proposals by name, but a slot is put in the narrative and budget with the name listed as TBD, "To Be Determined". It's possible that the PI failed to count all the heads correctly and was off by one. I would be surprised for this to happen in a small group, but if there were 10-12 students in the group, it could be easy to miss one. Edited to add: It's worth noting that a particularly excellent student with lead or primary authorship on the papers that constitute the prior work for the grant might be highlighted in the grant text and budget, especially if the student has won some awards for the work

Q: How to acknowledge copyright for figure reproduced from arXiv preprint? I am coauthor of a review article, in which we reuse a figure from another article that is, so far, available only on the arXiv. In such a case, one would usually obtain the copyright from the publisher and acknowledge the copyright holder with a statement similar to Reproduced with permission [reference]. Copyright [year], [publisher]. What is an appropriate analogous phrase for an article published on the arXiv? From what I understand of arXiv's help on licenses, the default option only grants arXiv the right to distribute the article, while the copyright remains with the authors. However, including all authors of an article in the copyright statement can make the statement very long. Perhaps one should restrict it to the author that submitted the article to the arXiv? Reproduced with permission [reference]. Copyright [year], [submitting author]. P.S. In this particular case, the arXiv article was authored within our group as well, i.e. we are free to choose the copyright statement. In general I assume it would be up to the authors to choose how they would like to be acknowledged. A: The crucial points to remember here are that you have an ethical duty to cite your source, and a legal duty to comply with the terms of the license under which the article was uploaded to arXiv. Those are your obligations, nothing less or (in my opinion) more. Considering this, after looking at the arXiv license information you linked to, it seems to me that the following language would be appropriate for at least one of the license options (I didn't look at all the options, the answer may vary slightly for the others): Figure 1. This is a very interesting figure. (Image source: [ABC15]; use permitted under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0.) where "Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0" is hyperlinked to this page, and where [ABC15] refers to the bibliographic entry for the article in the references section of your paper. Note that (as far as I'm aware) there is no need in this case to refer specifically to copyright. I also disagree with your assertion that "In general I assume it would be up to the authors to choose how they would like to be acknowledged." As I said, you have a duty to acknowledge the source of the work and its authors, and satisfy whatever legal requirements may exist pertaining to copyright or other licensing restrictions, but no other obligations that I'm aware of to use specific language that the authors or anyone else wants you to use. See here for a somewhat related discussion. A: As Dan mentioned, you have both an ethical, academic obligation to cite your source, and a legal duty to comply with whatever licence the image was made available under. However, in general, the possibilities of that licence are somewhat broader than the CC-BY licence explained in Dan's answer. In general, a paper found on the arXiv can be licensed in five different ways, which are explained in the arXiv License Information page. Authors can do the following: grant arXiv.org a non-exclusive and irrevocable license to distribute the article, and certify that he/she has the right to grant this license; certify that the work is available under one of the following Creative Commons licenses and that he/she has the right to assign this license: Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 4.0) Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0); or dedicate the work to the public domain by associating the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0) with the submission. In addition to this is the question of whether the authors have retained copyright for the material after the arXiv posting. If the paper has since been published, chances are that they have ceded copyright to the publisher and you will need to go through the proper channels to get it. Since the question is specifically about the preprint, I will assume that the copyright of the material remains with the author. (Nevertheless, you still need to check that this is the case.) The easiest case is if the arXiv posting has been put in the public domain (CC0 licence), in which case you do not need to acknowledge any copyright, much as if you were reproducing, say, a passage of Alice in Wonderland. (You still need to attribute it, though, the same as if you were reproducing Alice in Wonderland.) If the paper has been shared via any of the Creative Commons licences, then you can simply reproduce it, with the proper attribution and a link to the relevant licence. If the licence is CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC-SA, then you also need to make sure that you abide by the terms of the licence: that you're publishing under a compatible licence, in both cases, and that your use is non-commercial in the latter. The most common case, however, in many fields, is the first one: the authors granted arXiv.org (not you) a license to distribute the article, and that's that. This means that, barring any fair-use arguments you wish to make, you do not have permission to redistribute the work either in part or in its entirety. In this case, what you need to do is contact the authors and ask for permission to republish the image. In your specific case, however, your group is itself the owner of the copyright, and you do not need to do anything. It is not even a question of you having the freedom of choosing how the initial work is licensed: you're simply publishing the same material in different venues, which is perfectly fine. Of course, if you want to go further and license that material under a CC licence, then all the better! (Just be aware, of course, that doing so could impair your ability to publish it in some venues down the line.)

Q: How to publish algorithm I have a new algorithm which I would like to publish. I'm not a student, so I wanted to know a few things: 1) What should I publish? Just the algorithm with explanation? an academic paper? What are the principals of writing such one? 2) Where to publish? 3) What are the outcomes of publishing the algorithm? Legally or any other aspects I should be aware of. Any other tips and helpful things I should know will be welcomed A: Making an algorithm public is easy: you can put it on your webpage. By having it published as an academic paper (either conference or journal), you can get reviews, which is interesting. Reviewers may help you evaluate the novelty of your approach. I thus suggest a paper, with at least: a motivation for your algorithm, a review of the related approaches and the explanation for its novelty, the algorithm with explanations. It is always a plus if you implement it also in a common computer language, so that others can check its efficiency, find bugs, allow improved versions. A working version of your algorithm in the shape of a code (compilable with instructions) can be put on GitHub for instance, for better versioning. There are several algorithm related journals and conferences, for instance at the ACM Society: ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software ACM Transactions on Algorithms and you can easily find many more, depending on the subfield your algorithm belong (combinatorics, optimization, real-time computing, etc.). Some are listed at the List of computer science conferences: Algorithms and theory.

Q: Is this ethical: "I like your paper and if you submit it to Journal X, I will be the reviewer" Researcher A asks Researcher B, "Where should I submit my paper?" Researcher B says, "If you submit it to Journal X, I will almost certainly be the reviewer and I think highly of your paper." All journals in the field have single-blind review policy. That is, the reviewer knows who the author is, but the author does not know who the reviewer is. If it is unethical, is it only unethical if researcher B actually submits to Journal X and gets researcher A as a reviewer? Or does the ethical problem disappear if researcher B submits to a different journal, or submits to Journal X but gets a different reviewer? A: If we replace the word "reviewer" with "editor", this would typically be seen as normal behaviour. I.e., editors often have pre-submission discussions with authors about the suitability of a manuscript for their journal. In the case of editors, it is a standard part of their role to have discussions with authors about submissions and in some cases encourage authors to submit their work to their journal. In addition to "editor in chief", many journals have associate editors and the like who act as editors for submissions related to particular topics. They also often have some scope, although typically less than the editor in chief, to encourage submissions. Finally, the person you mention sounds like they might be a very active reviewer for a journal and quite often get asked to review submissions on a topic related to your paper. I think the ethical issues relate mostly to whether everyone is acting honestly and in good faith, and that conflicts of interest are not perceived. Editors are allowed to solicit submissions, and they almost always know the identity of the submitting authors. They are meant to be well-regarded members of the academic community and are trusted to make publication decisions based on academic merits and not based on friendship or other bases. Reviewers are a little different. Reviewers are meant to review in good faith and base their decision based on academic merits. For journals that expect double blind review, I think that encouraging authors to submit to a journal where they are likely to be a reviewer is problematic. For journals that only have single blind review, the issue is more one of honesty. Specifically, the reviewer should generally inform the editor if they encouraged the authors to submit the paper. That way, the editor can integrate that information into the assessment of that reviewer's review and assess it for bias. More generally, the implications of the reviewers comments are problematic. A more appropriate comment would be "I think your paper is good and it would be a good fit for journal X." or "I know that the editor of journal X would be interested in your paper." By focusing on the idea that they might be a reviewer, it implies that they might give a more favourable review than a random reviewer, which from some perspectives implies a biased review process. If you are submitting the paper to that journal, you could remove most ethical issues by acknowledging in your cover letter that your colleague and potential reviewer recommended that you submit the manuscript to this journal. This would allow the editor to consider whether they want to let your colleague be a reviewer, and if so, how their review should be treated.

Q: Is it appropriate to give your supervisor an early thesis draft that has informal self-addressed notes? I will have to show my supervisor a thesis draft soon. It is an early draft, just to see where I am standing. It obviously misses full chapters and some areas contain personal self-addressed notes like, "make a fancy diagram about process A". Should I go through the work of removing these notes, written in an obvious informal style, before handing in the draft? On one hand, I would like my supervisor to know that I will include a diagram there, but should I at least formalize the notes like in, "process A diagram will be added"? Edit: I will give a few more examples so that my question is clearer: My question is more about having an informal approach to the notes than their existence. For example is it fine if I have notes like: "I should spiff this diagram, too ugly", or if I use as a placeholder for the subtitle "Fancy subtitle" instead of "< Subtitle placeholder >", or if instead of a figure that I know I am about to add, I have a placeholder image that says "here comes the really nice and cool image that shows the A-B relation" instead of saying "A-B relation figure placeholder"? I also feel the need to mention that I would never use such informal writing style in the actual text, nevertheless in a final version. A: I would suggest that yes, you should feel comfortable doing that, particularly if this is an early draft. My rationale is simply that, with large documents like this one, the more feedback you can get, the better. The notes show that you've given thought to what should be where and recognize that it's not complete, and will demonstrate that you're thinking that sort of thing through. To that extent point, your own recommendation is spot on; add as many "diagram X should be here" notes as you can, simply to save him from having to add that comment himself. That said, if your advisor is a very finicky person who wants the drafts to be picture-perfect (yes, those people definitely exist), then don't do this, as you'll just make him annoyed. Post-edit addition: I would suggest this is entirely dependent on the temperament of your advisor. Personally, I love humor, so as long as you mentioned in your email that the comments are tongue-in-cheek, I would find that entertaining. If he's a stick-in-the-mud, he won't like it. Its really just dependent on his sense of humor.

Q: How to react when professor wrongly corrects you in public? I recently defended my master thesis. One thing only went wrong: I said a certain method was rather new (which it was!) and the most senior professor in the room (my supervisor was not there, he had an unexpected meeting) contradicted me, telling me that it was old and had been done in the lab for ages. Honestly, I just gave in. He seemed so sure and I did not dare contradict him. However I was sure before and of course I have since checked, the method is indeed new, the professor was just plain wrong. What should I have done in the situation? A: Did you pass your thesis defense? If so, it's all water under the bridge. If it is eating you up inside, you could send a polite note to the senior professor (cc:ing your advisor) thanking them for the question and that now that you've had a chance to re-check things, that you are ever more certain that your method is different from the suggested prior method because of x, y, and z; but perhaps you misunderstood his question and there was another earlier method he was referring to, and if so -- could he please send the reference? (tip of the hat to @gnometorule) If you go this route, I would frame it as a letter of thanks, appreciation, scholarly inquiry, and to keep the tone as non-accusatory as possible. As @guifa notes, some jerks professors view thesis defenses as a type of hazing -- a no-holds-barred opportunity to test your mettle; and what happens in defense should stay in defense. You do not want to drag this out. It can easily blow back in your face or the face of your advisor if the senior faculty member has a thin skin (which unfortunately many academics seem to have). Again, if you have your Masters, then I would just be happy with that and just make rude gestures towards that senior faculty member from the safety and privacy of your own home. And don't ever do this when you become that person in a position of power. You changed the question slightly from the initial posting from [what to do after the fact] to [what you should have done at the moment]. As note above, all questions at thesis defenses are fair -- even ones that are built on false or falsified premises. It is, after all, a "defense" and as a scientist you should be able to defend yourself from both truthful and false/falsified statements without having to resort to ad hominem counter-attacks. You respond based on your training and experience what you believe to be correct. And obviously given that you passed the defense, the examiners thought that you gave satisfactory responses on the whole. As Queen Elsa teaches us, let it go. A: Forget about it and go on with your day. A: Generally, when faced with questions or comments like this one, you need to respond in a way that is open to the possibility that the professor is right, but that nonetheless demonstrates your belief in your own position. Don't give ground too easily, but don't get too entrenched either, since you need to be open to new information. How you do this depends on how specific the professor's comment is: If it was just a vague contradiction - "That's not new, it's been around for ages" - then you need to probe for more information. "That's interesting, I've not come across any previous use of this method - could you tell me more about where it's been used?". If prof responds in detail ("It was done by Professor X in paper Y") and paper Y is not one you've come across, then your response is similar. "That's really interesting, I will look into that. Perhaps we can discuss this further after the talk." Or you might be able to second-guess the method used even if you don't know paper Y. "If they used method Z, then it's related, but our is different because..." If paper Y is one that you are familiar with, then you have something concrete you can discuss. "That's certainly an important method, and provided inspiration for our work [if it did], but I referred to our method as new because it has these important advances/differences..." However rude the professor is with their comment, it may still be a valid point, so try not to take it personally. Ignore the tone and just respond to the substance as politely and scientifically as you can. Finally, it's easy to say all this in hindsight, but when it's early in your career and you're faced with an imposing figure contradicting you, it is only natural to give ground under pressure, and the fact that you successfully defended your thesis shows that you coped well with the overall situation!

Q: How important is the writing sample for PhD application in Political Economy I'm planning to apply for US's PhD program in Political Economy, and a writing sample of maximum 20 pages is part of the application requirements. The problem is I don't think that I have any recent high-quality writing to submit. I didn't write a thesis for the B.S. as my university didn't have that kind of requirement. I've been working for an international research center, but most of my works are mostly applied econometrics and I didn't really get to do any writing. Bottom line is my writing sample will most likely be the weakest link in my application. If so, how bad will it hurt my chance? Is there anyway to get around this? A: Of course this can vary from one department to the next, but in the humanities, the writing sample is generally considered very important. According to the Department of Politics at Virginia Tech, Your writing sample is the most important part of your application. Political science types are likely to weigh the writing sample more heavily than economics types, at least according to this political economist. If you do not have a thesis, you should at least have a relevant term paper or similar paper from your coursework that you can use as a starting point. Your writing sample should demonstrate critical and analytical writing (not merely descriptive).

Q: Can my undergraduate research thesis be published in a scientific paper? If so, how should I go? I'm starting my bachelor's degree thesis and i will do some research work. If I achieve good results can my work be published? If so , who should get the credits? I'm afraid that my prof or his research lab can publish/include my work in some their future papers without my name. A: If your work is good enough, it deserves to be published. It doesn't matter if it is the result of a hobby, undergraduate studies, or your main job as a researcher. Summarizing it to make it fit into the space allotted in a journal or conference proceedings will be a daunting task, ask your advisor for guidance and help. A: As vonbrand has said, it is the quality of work, rather than the degrees behind the person who wrote it, that should determine whether or not something can be published. There are very few journals who have standing bans on publishing undergraduate research, though be aware that preparing a paper for publication is a fairly daunting task. My advice would be to talk to your advisor about whether or not your work is in the position to be published as a stand-alone paper, or if it's going to be incorporated into a larger paper. In the first case, the next step is to talk to them about what still needs to be done, what journal to target, and the steps you need to take to get going on that path. In the second case, it's largely a matter of asking if you'll be included as an author on that paper, or end up in the acknowledgements section. Having a clear and direct conversation up from will help things in the long run. For reference, my undergraduate thesis was published with me as the first author on it.

Q: Do the top journals actually read papers? Let's say there is a physicist who is merely 21 years old, has no relation with academia and is only beginning, but has came up with a contradiction/refutation in the theory of relativity. His 25-page and extremely complex paper has no grammar/mathematical mistakes, is written in LaTeX. However, it is 25 pages and extremely complex, and its title is modest, not cranky. Q: Just how well are the editors of Nature at reading and understanding papers? Would it be possible to describe the accuracy of their decisions? Assuming Nature receives more than 10,000 papers each year. And surely, one may say that they would first look at the name and if it is unknown and the paper itself is concluding revolutionary matters, they could say to themselves, "Ah! Another crackpot! I received 25,000 of these already. Time to throw it in the bin." But since they are professional, I assume that they would read it. But how much? Even if the author was to submit the paper double-blinded, considering the amount of papers they receive and the realization that since it's double-blinded it is surely from a newcomer, can doubt be casted upon Nature's consideration of such a paper? Planck said that revolutionary paradigm-shifts are not immediately accepted but are rather brutally opposed and rejected in the beginning, and as time passes little and little, only then the world bows down to them. Academia today is too complex, there are too many people, too many papers and too much "drama" (many things going on). Would people really consider such a paper in the future, would they really not forget? Who knows, there could very well be such a paradigm-shifting paper out there published, but nobody ever cared about it! P.S: Such a physicist, I would say, is expected to be a great nonconformist. Einstein himself ridiculed academia in saying that they kill curiosity. (Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/117028/carl-sagan-albert-einstein) A: I can't say for Nature in particular (being from Computer Science myself), but no "top-journal" editor would reject a paper for being too complicated. The editor normally takes a first read to filter out spam, very badly written papers, or out-of-topic submissions, and the rest goes through peer-reviews. So in your example, the paper would be reviewed by several physicists who can understand what is being told in there. Their experience will tell them that most papers breaking down a well-established theory contain a flaw (this is statistics, not prejudice), so they will probably go through the paper once looking for said flaw. If the paper has one, then it will be pointed out to the editor and the paper is rejected. If the paper has none, then the reviewers will make the effort of understanding every little detail of the paper until they are convinced it is correct. Then the paper will be accepted. As an addition, in physics, I assume that any paper claiming an accepted theory is false must come with a reproducible experiment showing the flaw in the original theory. If anyone can come up with such an experiment without the support of a research lab, then most probably it's simple enough to be reproduced by the reviewers, so that they directly see the flaw by themselves. A: Let's ignore for a fact the length. A paper must communicate, or there is no recipient. So, if there is some message in the paper and the message reaches editor or reviewer, it has a chance of being read (not necessarily agreed with, but read). Nature/Science are probably the wrong journals for this, as they are more interested in compactly to describe results, but there are good journals for that purpose. "Extremely complex"? Well, the problem is not complexity (see Perelman's work), as long as there are people who are experts in the general language you use. The question is, is there a community that is able to connect with what you aim to say? You argue about revolutionary discoveries, but often, the revolution isn't realised until after the fact. I am not sure how much Einstein was intending/expecting to upset the existing framework in 1905. Things could have gone: "Oh, yes, dispensing with the ether is a good idea, why didn't we realise it ourselves?" and return to daily business with a new framework. Or consider Galilei: he wrote in Italian, precisely to avoid his language being a hurdle to understanding. If you look for real revolutionaries of the kind you seem to think about, your best bet is probably Galois. The good news: he was not a crackpot. The not so good news: it took some decades for his stuff to be understood (basically, because he never bothered to explain so that others could follow). The bad news: he was killed (not because of being a scientific revolutionary, probably not even because of being a political revolutionary, but because of a woman).

Q: Politely asking a teacher I don't get along with to "hurry up" I'm starting an internship as part of my bachelor in Bioinformatics study (in the Netherlands bachelors and masters are sometimes separate) and I have some trouble communicating with my teacher. Besides his teaching position he also coördinates all the internships of every student. He checks if a student meets the criteria and determines if somebody can start an internship (or not). In order to meet some of these criteria, I must hand in documents he has to review and sign. I'm sure he is very busy but I get the feeling he simply just forgets me or that he doesn't care about me that much and puts approving of my internship on a side-track. He takes quite some time to review things and I realy need to start at the hospital I got a great position at. A month ago we had an incident that put some strain on our student-teacher relationship. I'm already working in the hospital to define an interesting assignment but did not do any work for the internship itself. Defining an assignment is fine but working on it is not since I do not yet qualify. My teacher has yet to approve of some documents before I can officially start. But due to a miscommunication he thought I already did and got quite upset. Although this issue had been resolved, I still sense some hostility. This also has to do with me being a lazy student in the past. I'm realy turning things around now and found new motivation but I think he is still holding my former self against me. To be fair, he hasn't been able to see my current work ethic yet. Right now, everybody (myself and the hospital) are waiting for him to sign the final documents and approve of the internship. How do I ask him about the status of my approval without being "pushy"? I realy don't want to strain the relationship any further. A: Go talk to him. Honestly, go to his office hour to sit down and tell him how important it is for you to start the internship soon and how much you look forward to it. This might also help to alleviate his feeling that you are lazy and let him see that you are now back on track and eager to get involved. Make a point to make it not about him being slow (he might be really busy), but you being eager.

Q: Professor only teaches what is already in textbook. Should I quit going to the lectures? I've become quite upset with how lectures for my courses are conducted. Everyday, I attend lectures where the teacher simply writes definitions and theorems on the board straight from one of our textbooks (or another professor's published lecture notes). They then prove a handful of the theorems, or part of them, and leave more than half as an exercise. They do little to motivate the material or provide insight based on their professional experiences, and are often scribbling material onto the board as fast as possible to cover some predetermined amount. And sometimes the professor writes proofs straight from their notes and, when questioned, has a hard time explaining the gaps between steps (as they are simply regurgitating and not really even attentive to what they are explaining). Ultimately, I feel like these lectures are a waste of my time. To be blunt, I can read a book and I can do exercises. I don't need someone to paraphrase a book for me and then tell me to fill in the rest myself. Moreover, since I cannot afford to live on/near campus, I have to commute an hour each way to sit through such lectures, which hardly seems validated. I would like to attend lectures where the professor engages the students. Often, my professors are so rushed to scribble things on the board that they take few questions and relegate them to exercises (yes, I had a professor answer a simple question about his proof by assigning it as an exercise). If an instructor wants to cover some predetermined amount of material, I would prefer they assign this as reading beforehand and then take questions on that material in class. It'd also be nice if they presented us with hard problems in class and then we all worked through them together (with students presenting them, everyone critiquing, etc.). Should I approach my professors about my feelings? How should I go about this? To be honest, I am becoming quite bored (and frustrated) and starting to skip lectures in favor of office hours (which are far more engaging), reading the book on my own, and working extra problems. I do not like that I am not enjoying my educational experience (since I love to learn math!). Or should I quit going to lectures and move on to doing what I am tending towards now, anyways? A: This is a common frustration faced by college students, especially in lecture-oriented STEM majors. Unfortunately, the truth is that the lectures may be a waste of time and there is little you can do to change that. If you can cover the material more efficiently on your own time (especially since you're commuting), you shouldn't necessarily feel guilty in doing so. You can see similar sentiments expressed on ratemyprofessor where students often question the value of lectures and simply go to the library as opposed to lecture. Yes you're paying for the lecture, but if it doesn't help/contribute to your understanding, there is no point in going. I knew students who went every time out of habit, but it was an absolute waste of time. I've had physics professors who wrote starting problems on the board and then the solution only to say that if we were at his level, we should 'see' the dozen steps in between. Needless to say, lectures were fairly empty after that. He was very well versed in the material and many students would come to office hours, it's just that he couldn't lecture. Depending on the age/tenure of the professor, they may be receptive to making the lectures more engaging, or they may "brush" you off. Simply express your interest in the subject to the professor and ask them to make the lecture more engaging/be better prepared. Depending on the college/class, the professor may be unable to accommodate you because your peers may not be at your level. Be aware that some professors cannot lecture effectively, or have had unwanted courses foisted upon them. No matter your school ranking or major, you will encounter lousy enthusiasm-killing professors whom you'll have to endure. For many professors, your best shot for a more engaging experience would be to visit them during office hours. In a certain sense, to quote Mark Twain, "Don't let schooling interfere with your education." You won't have this professor forever, though you may unfortunately have them or those like them again. Don't let them dampen your passion for the subject. A: I would like to attend lectures where the professor engages the students. Well, isn't that what we all want? Some professors are very good at this, and, unfortunately, others are not. I would recommend attending the lectures, even if you're finding little benefit. Why? I think skipping lectures altogether is a bad idea. You never know when a professor will offer some tidbit of information that will help you on an exam, or help clarify an assignment. It's one thing to miss a lesson every now and then, but habitually missing class doesn't seem like a good way obtain an education. After class, I would talk to fellow classmates, and see if your feelings are isolated or universal. If your opinions are shared by a majority of your classmates, perhaps you could get a groundswell of support for being very blunt in your end-of-course surveys. That feedback should be candid but constructive. In other words, don't just say, "His lectures sucked," say, "His lectures would have been a lot better if..." If enough students voice a consistant message about the low-quality lectures, perhaps the professor will try to take some of your suggestions to heart, or perhaps the department head will pressure him to do so. That may not help you this term, but it might help other students in the future. As for the long commute, I feel your pain, but the way I'd handle that is to plan to do other things while you're on campus. Maybe you could start working out at the campus gym, or start writing for your campus newspaper. Driving an hour each way to just sit through a crappy lecture does seem like a waste of time – and gas. Driving an hour each way to become engaged on your campus – even if that time happens to include a lecture from a professor who may not be so gifted in teaching in lecture halls – may not seem so bad. I think it's rare for a professor to drastically change tactics midway through a course, so this is a matter of you making the best of a bad situation. Sometimes, that's part of getting an education, too, even though you won't get credit for it on your transcript. Just remember, many employees like to hire students with degrees, not just because of what was learned in the classroom, but for things that were inevitiably learned in the process of obtaining the education: time management, teamwork, dedication, extra curriculars – and making the most of bad situations. A: It is difficult to know the reason why the lectures are not working for you without more information about you, the professor, and the course, but there are a few possibilities: The professor is not doing a good job of engaging the students because of a lack of interest or competence. The professor does not have the the flexibility to alter the way the course is taught due to institutional limitations. The professor should not alter the way the course is taught because overall it is working for the majority of the students in the class. The professor is unaware that the lectures are not working and would change the approach if he/she knew. Of these only #4 will result in a change if you provide feedback but you should go talk to the professor because you are struggling with the class. Struggles do not have to be only low grades, if you are disengaging from the class that is a problem. Your approach should be one of requesting help understanding how the lectures are supposed to fit into the overall learning goals of the class, not one of offering lecture style critique. For the reasons listed above, I can't promise it will change anything but it may offer insights. That being said, you should still go to the lectures. Lectures are only one part of a course and unless the professor stipulates otherwise, you should consider them non-optional. Your full participation in all aspects of the class is your responsibility as a student. There are lots of things that we have to do professionally that are inefficient (e.g., all my faculty meetings) but participation is a requirement of being part of a professional community and is a prerequisite of gaining the other benefits of that community. For example, I would be very reluctant to invest a lot of time in a student (however promising) who regularly came to my office hours but skipped all my lectures.

Q: Poster author added me as coauthor after abstract was submitted. Can I include it on CV? Poster author added me as coauthor after its abstract has been submitted to a conference. As a result, on the conference website I'm not listed as an coauthor, but my name is on the actual poster. Assuming that it's not possible to update poster authorship info on the conference website, should I still list this poster on my CV, or would it just create confusion or misunderstanding? A: A poster of which you're not the first author is such a minor thing I wouldn't worry about it (even if it is listed on the conference website). I don't have a huge publication list but still only include posters I presented (aand only at major conferences). They don't have anything like the CV impact of a peer-reviewed paper. Either: You were accidentally omitted and should be included. In this case the author should contact the conference organisers (but it's probably too late). Or your contribution was rather minor -- perhaps it only became apparent that your work made it onto the poster at all at the last minute. In this case while you're named as an author it's closer to an acknowledgement in practice. Listing it as a publication, if the title can be searched for but you're not named, doesn't seem like a good idea. Realistically no one is ever going to look. But if you just happen to come up against someone who's interested in something very specific about the poster that you don't normally do, it isn't going to help you.

Q: Should one put poster presentations on their CV in maths? I have presented posters at poster sessions at a few large conferences in pure mathematics. Is it worth putting these down on one's CV? For context, I am a PhD student and have also given talks at several seminars and (smaller) conferences, so my CV is not especially in need of bulking up. Currently I do not have them on my CV. Moreover, my feeling is that posters in pure maths are not peer reviewed at all (in contrast to my impression of other areas), though I do not know this for definite. A: Given that you are a PhD student (in math; I am also in math), I think you probably should put this on your CV. Going to conferences shows some professionalism and interest, and giving poster presentations does too. I don't want to suggest that this will be a key piece of information for your job search and/or early career, but...it certainly can't hurt. You may want to take them out later when your CV has filled out in other ways. The fact that they are not peer reviewed does not seem directly relevant to me, as long as you don't lump them together with publications (why would you?) or suggest in some way that they are something they were not.

Q: Can I ask the author of the research paper to use his program in my research? I am doing a research in a field of psychology and I would like to do almost the same research (just with different groups) as one other published research. I can make similar research but actually I want to compare my results with already existing ones. The thing is, that researchers made one simple application, more like a game. In their article they put a link for that game but if I want to use their game in my research I need to have theirs other application for recording each test session. I know for sure that I will ask them to use one part of application but if it's rational, I would like to ask them and use the whole game and the other application for the data collecting. I know that this is more individual question, but I would like to know what is the common practice in computer science. Do people usually/ rarely ask someones applications/ programs for they own research? Unfortunately, I don't have a time to collaborate with someone in computer science to make other similar game. And even if I had a time I wouldn't be able to exactly compare the results with that published research which I would like to do. Anyway, I don't know the researchers but I thought to send them an e-mail to ask them. A: I am a researcher in the computer science field, and I'd say it's not unusual to ask authors of published papers for their code/applications. Sometimes, however, people might be reluctant to give you the software, because research code is often unstable and badly documented, and they might be ashamed (or worried that you will find bugs that could invalidate their previous publications!). You should surely contact the authors, explain the situation, and stress that you are (of course) going to cite their paper. There's no harm in asking. In my experience, the worst-case scenarios are: a) they will not reply; b) they will reply, and ask you to be included among the authors of your future paper, in exchange for the software. You could try to prepare for these two outcomes, while hoping for a positive answer :-)

Q: What is the proposed penalty for students that paid an essaywriting service to complete their papers for them? I had noticed a sudden change in the quality of the essays submitted two of my students. When I confronted them, they were quite frank and admitted that due to lack of time, they had assigned their papers to be written by an outside source, an essaywriting service (a booming business that must be). What is the proposed penalty? If I take this on an administrative level, they face a pause of educational activities for 6 months to 1 year. But since this is the first incident, I do want them to learn their lesson, but at the same time taking into account that they were honest with me, not being punished too hard. What do you propose? Is there something I can do to keep this from an administrative level and at the same time punish them? A: The official punishment already has a fork, being the first time and honest can help them to get a suspension closer to 6 months than to a full year. Also, you can help them get a speedy process, so the penalty starts counting as soon as possible. It is important that there is an official record of this event, so they can't pull the "it is the first time, I promise" again. They now have a record, and they know it. This said, I can't believe they didn't know they were doing something wrong, so I don't think one should be very forgiving.

Q: Average age to start a PhD and correlation to future career Which is the average age in which persons start their PhD? Is this age in some way related to the post PhD plans a person does? In my (European) experience I have 3 groups of people, with the relative distributions: (70% of the total) Those who started right after graduation (let's say when they were 24) without any job experience. Most of them (with exceptions, of course) are a bit fed up with research and willing to try a "real world job experience" (25% of the total) Those who started 2,3,4 years later (so between 24 and 29), taking a full time phd. Generally people belonging to this group seem to be more motivated for academic career, even if starting a phd when one is 29 years old might be a bit late (or not?) (5%) Those who start in their 40ties with the idea of taking a part time PhD as an out of job activity, and don't plan to leave their job. Clearly there are all the possible shades between the above categories. A: There are many confounding variables (field of study, country, citizenship status, sex, race/ethnicity, probably many others) that correlate with both age at doctorate (as seen below) and post-PhD plans. This makes it difficult to directly measure the relationship between age and post-PhD plans. The median age at doctorate varies by country and by field. Here's some OECD data: It also varies over time. In the US, from 1978-2003, in the science and engineering fields: And in the non-science and engineering fields: See this report for more details. For the US, we have data on the distribution of students' age, not just the median, and it's also broken down by sex, citizenship status, and ethnicity and race. From 2014:

Q: What should I do if I'm on the waitlist for a PhD program? I'm on the waitlist of a top 2 program in my field which has a good track record of accepting waitlisted applicants. They told me to wait until April 15 and then I would hear from them. Interestingly, I got rejected by every other program I applied to, so I have no other place to go to. This is my second admissions season - I applied to PhD programs last year as well, got waitlisted from a couple top programs but it didn't work out. I'm going to give up after this season if this waitlist doesn't work out. Is there anything I can do to maximize my chances of being admitted off the waitlist? I don't want to seem obnoxious when I email the director of graduate studies at the university, so I don't want to talk about how I don't have any other plans or something like that, but what else can I do? A: @Davidmh's advice is spot on, but I will definitely add that now is time to review your backup plan. (Of COURSE you have a backup plan, right?) There's always the possibility that you won't get into any of the schools you applied to; it sucks, but it happens. You should have a solid plan in place to make sure that your resume doesn't go stale in the interim. This could involve working as a lab tech/research assistant for a lab in your field, applying for internships in industry, taking on academic teaching positions, or even just finding any job to ensure you have income. Whatever your plan is, now is a good time to start making sure it's feasible, and if it involves applying to jobs or the like, you should probably start doing that as well. You can always state that you cannot start working until after whatever the last date you can expect to hear from the university happens to be. The worst thing that can happen is that you have too many options. That is far better than the alternative. A: Being in the waiting list means you haven't been selected, but you came close. If some of the selected applicants declines the offer (because they got somewhere else), they start going down the waiting list. At this point, there is nothing you can do to change the outcome. The ranking has already been set by Admissions, and the offers have been sent out to the lucky candidates. Just sit tight. A: There is a special case where it may be worth contacting the graduate department - more on that in a moment. First, by being informed that you have been put on the waitlist for admission, they are saying that you have not been admitted at this time - but they aren't saying you are officially rejected yet. So you should indeed keep your options open to the extent that you can, but most of the time you cannot rely on admittance. The reason they stated the date of April 15th is because in the US this is a special national date, where the vast majority of institutions have agreed (or been required by federal funding agencies) to allow anyone admitted with a funding offer to respond by April 15th without fear of losing their spot/funding by not responding right away. It's probably the nicest part of the application process for applicants, as if you receive multiple offers you can wait until you receive responses from all your preferred institutions before making a decision by the shared deadline. The downside, of course, is what you experience with the waitlist - institutions are often in the position of not having heard back from all the offers they've made until very near the deadline, so they can't let waitlisted people know of their final status until past such a date. Generally there is not said to be an advantage to contacting the programs to re-affirm your interest, especially at very popular/highly ranked/prestigious programs, because just saying "I'm still interested" doesn't change anything. When You Should Consider Contacting Waitlisted Programs The big exceptions to the general case is when something new has happened that isn't properly reflected in your application. The most common such case is when you have received an offer of a fellowship offering significant funding, such as the NSF graduate fellowship (or any non-trivial funding source of the kind). In such a case if you receive such a recognition, I'd encourage you to notify any programs where you are still in the waitlist. While there is no general rule about how programs handle such a situation, some seem to care and many people claim they were moved from the waitlist to acceptance after receiving such a major award. However, given the extreme competitiveness of such major awards and the fact that they are often more competitive than PhD programs are themselves, this can't be relied on and there is absolutely no guarantee the program will decide to accept you with outside funding. You could potentially also want to contact them if other major improvements have happened to your profile, such as receiving other national recognition, major important/prestigious publications, etc. This may be of limited usefulness as I don't know any departments that will reconvene an admission committee to discuss your new achievement, and I don't know that any department will just adhoc re-arrange the waitlist order based on such a thing. If you aren't super annoying about it I suppose it couldn't hurt. The potential here is further limited because anything that could result in such a situation should have already been talked about in your application materials (including in submission/preparation papers, the experience that led to such papers, etc). Regardless, if you choose to contact the department I'd personally advise you not mention the "if it doesn't work out this time I'm giving up on the whole thing". I don't think mentioning that will help your situation any, even if it's how you feel. YMMV. Above all, any contact you make should be respectful and professional. Repeated calling (hour after hour, day after day), email after email, or anything similarly negative could actually zero out your chances entirely. Reasonable timely correspondence will not carry any such danger.

Q: Can a PhD student publish a paper outside PhD topic without supervisor approval only by its own? I am a theoretical PhD student. Is it possible to submit and to publish papers in journals without supervisor approval? I am asking also from legal point of view, as well. I have talked to many people in my university and some of them don't have a good opinion regarding single author papers since such a single author paper might have sufficient errors in it. However, the subject is not studied by anyone in the university. A: There is no general reason why this should not be possible/allowed. You will have to check the regulations of your department/university for PhD students: They may require you to seek approval of your advisor prior to submission of papers. Potentially a journal could have a similar rule in place, but I have never encountered this. That said, I do not believe this to be advisable: If your relationship with your PhD advisor is so bad that do you not feel you can ask them about your intention to submit this paper, you should probably seek a new advisor. If you are so close to graduating that your prefer sitting it out, then rocking the boat is probably a bad idea.

Q: How can an author get assurance that his work will not be stolen by journal staff or reviewers? Suppose some author provides his original research article to a journal for publication. In this way, he is disclosing or revealing his confidential research work to that journal. Now, consider the case that his article gets rejected. So, is it not possible that whoever reviews that article can publish that kind of work and say that it's theirs? Since the original author's work has not been published and he is disclosing his confidential work to somebody, how could the author get assurance that if his article is rejected, his work will not be leaked by the journal staff in any form? What happens if this kind of thing happens? A: It is unlikely that a reviewer or other participant in the peer review process will outright steal the work he/she is reviewing and publish it as original work, because it is easy to get caught. If the "real" author of the work accuses the thief of plagiarism, the editor of the journal can verify that the work was originally submitted by the "real" author before it was published by the rogue reviewer. (Also see: What to do if a referee plagiarises the result after rejecting a paper?) If the rogue reviewer is caught, the paper will be retracted (which is damaging to his professional reputation) and there may also be other consequences for the reviewer. See e.g. this recent example. A: Let me add to @ff524's excellent answer. If you are paranoid, one way to add an additional safeguard would be to post a preprint on arxiv.org or a similar site. Then you have a public version with a verifiable timestamp, so even if all the journal's staff colluded to steal your idea, you could prove to the community that it was originally yours. A: Here is the advise I got in a creative writing course a while ago: Print out your article, book draft or whatever. Put it in an envelope and send it to yourself by registered mail (yes good old paper mail). Of course you keep all receipts and administrative documents you get at the post office. Don't open the letter when you receive it. That gives you a formal and legally binding proof that your text existed at the time you posted it. In case of a formal dispute you have it opened in the presence of notary or whatever legal person can formally confirm the content of the document and the date.

Q: How to turn down a MSc supervisor after we had already agreed to work together? I applied to a university in Canada for a MSc. As part of their requirements, I needed to have a supervisor in order to be granted admission to the program. So I did contact a supervisor and he took me in as his student with the condition that I brought my own funding. I said yes. However, the university has not yet offered me admission, I am still waiting for their decision. This was not my only option of course and last week I got accepted to a MSc/PhD program in a Max Planck university in Germany. Because it is much better ranked and students are given a monthly stipend, I took the offer because I thought it was a better option for me. How do I reject now the professor who accepted me on Canada? Should I tell him the truth? Is this a very bad move on my side? A: Skip the "better-ranked" part (don't be petty); say you couldn't hold up your end of the bargain - to find your own funding -, and Max Planck offered a fully-funded position. I don't foresee any issues or grievances after a short, to the point mail to this sort. A: Do inform the professor as soon as possible. I have had students sign on with me, and then disappear on extremely short notice. Since I only advise a set number of students a term, I had already rejected other students because of workload. I'm not mad when people let me know what is up as timely as possible.

Q: Is it normal for the manuscript submission date to change from the original submission date to the revisions submission date? I submitted a paper to an ISI journal almost a year ago. The submission date of the manuscript was May 20, 2015. I received a referee report on January 15, 2016. The report was quite positive but asked for some major revision. I made all the required changes and submitted a revised version of the manuscript on March 10, 2016. Ten days afterwards I received from the Editor a message that the manuscript would go into the refereeing process and Date received: March 10, 2016. Is it normal to change the initial submission date of the manuscript? A: In my field, for a time, a very brief time, the time between submission and publication was a factor for people when submitting to journals. Some journals the time between submission and publication was close to two years while for other, equally reputable, journals the time between submission to publication was less than 3 months. When people started complaining about the time to publications, the slower journals began to cheat. The outcomes of the review process used to be Accept, Revise and Resubmit, and Reject. To "speed up" the process they changed "Revise and Resubmit" into "Reject and Resubmit". The resubmission was treated as a new revision, although you got the same reviewers, so the submission clock was reset. While this did nothing to speed up the process for authors, it reduced the time between submission and publication (it also made the journal look more selective). As I said, it is cheating. In regards to if it matters, while it would be nice for authors to have access to meaningful statistics, it is not something the publisher needs to provide. Some might argue that "time stamping", but realistically, in fields where articles are infrequently published in the first journal they are submitted to, time stamping does not exist since I have never seen a time stamp based on the first journal an article is submitted to. One thing to be concerned about when the submission date changes is if the process has gone awry. It is possible that the resubmission is being treated as a new submission and not a "Reject and Resubmit". If that is the case, then you may get a new batch of reviewers (and editor). Unfortunately, the way the automated systems work, sometimes it is difficult to tell what is going on. In these cases, a quick message to the editor is not out of place.

Q: Translating academic CV - translate names of papers/thesis? I have found links on academia-SE pertaining to translation of documents here and here, but those were not for a CV. Please tell me if my question is a duplicate. I have just moved to France from an English-speaking country for a PhD. My French is not amazing currently; this is a work in progress and I'm going half-time on my research to take an intensive language course in May. However, in June I hope to attend a school which will be taught in French, and for this reason I need to translate my CV into French to apply. Question: When translating my CV from one language to another, should I: translate the names of past works e.g. the name of my masters and bachelors dissertations? Or leave them in English, as they were submitted to my past university? translate the names of publications (and leave the name of the journal as-is)? leave the names of the university and the qualification as-is per link 1, or put in parentheses the French name equivalent of my prior qualification? And mostly: Are the rules different between translating a CV and translating a publication/bibliography? A: Things can be different in the humanities, but English is the language of science and, in a STEM field, you can reasonably expect whoever will read your CV to be able to understand the titles of your works (if they are in English). However, if, as a courtesy to the reader, you wish to translate the titles anyway, don't eliminate the original titles, but put the two versions side-by-side. Your last point is more critical: leave the names of the university and the qualification as-is per link 1, or put in parentheses the French name equivalent of my prior qualification? The name of the university should be absolutely left as-is, unless the university itself does not provide an official French translation, which I doubt (on the other side, universities from non-English speaking countries sometimes issue statements about official English translations of their names or department names). It's not always easy to find equivalences among qualifications in different countries, and it's almost impossible for grades. Thus, if you want to provide a translation, leave the original qualifications and grades too, so that the application committee can employ their equivalence rules, if they have any.

Q: Is there an actual, physical event associated with predatory conferences? I occasionally receive emails inviting me to present in a predatory conference. These are usually easy to identify, given that they call me a "Dr" or a "Prof" (only a PhD student at the moment), never heard of them (6th conference on something.. What were the first 5?), weird English, bizarre locations, organised by an organisation outside the field, etc. When you're publishing a predatory journal I guess it's not too hard to actually publish the journal eventually. Just put some PDFs on a website. What about conferences? Organising a conference is harder: you have to arrange a venue, audio/video gear, food and a bunch of other things. Let's say that I do end up submitting and paying the abstract fees. Is there an actual conference happening somewhere? EDIT - let me focus this a bit.. Is it possible that one signs up to such a conference, arrives, and then there is nothing on site? Are the (sometimes famous) keynote speakers aware they they are listed? Do they show up to the conference? If there is an actual conference, and people end up attending it, what is predatory about it? Eventually, it's a meeting of people discussing science about a particular topic. A: So far as I can tell, and have read online, predatory conferences typically are associated with an actual event. To my mind, this seems to be a key difference between "predatory" and "fraudulent." If a conference takes your money and no event is organized, then there is clearly false advertising and grounds for legal action, perhaps even criminal charges. If a conference takes your money and organizes a horrible, worthless, CV-staining joke of an event, on the other hand, there is no regulatory body that you can complain to: scientific quality is considered to be a matter of judgement, and there is no way to easily distinguish between an honest-but-poor-quality conference and a intentionally predatory conference. A: Yes, in these cases the event is organized but the quality is poor, since no one important in the field goes to that conference. An example from this website with scam conferences to be avoided. From here: "waset are a known predatory publisher, run by a former science teacher in Turkey (and his family). Readers have complained to this site about their fradulent behaviour, inclduing Kim Guan Saw, who wrote: "I would also like to alert you that this particular organization has been using my name as their conference committee member. I am not involved at all with this organization and their conferences and have not consented for my name to be used. My university legal office has been informed and is looking into the matter. I hope you will inform your colleagues if they happen to associate me with these conferences."—2 April 2015 See the comments at the end of this post for other experiences; or this warning. Comments from the former include: "In 2012 I organised an international conference ... our list of working group titles has just been copied and pasted for a WASET conference (15–16 May 2013)" "The conference is a complete scam. I know I have been on several hiring committees and if we see someone list a paper published at WASET on their CV we immediately stop evaluating their application." "I went to a WASET conference and it was a complete joke. There were virtually no people there in my field, and the talks were completely unrelated to each other. Basically each person got up and spoke about their work to a completely unrelated audience. For example, the person before me talked about boat design, I talked about quantum mechanics, and the person after talked about Halal meat!"

Q: How to manage relationship with post-doc supervisor when applying for a tenure-track position one year before post-doc ends? I currently hold a post-doctoral position in the UK, which is 3 years long, and I am in my second year. I am wondering how bad would it look for my employer if I apply for a lectureship post that I just saw announced and caught my interest? They ask for my current employer as a reference, so there is a slight chance they will contact them. I am not sure how it would look, considering that I supposedly signed up for a 3 years job, and would be leaving a year earlier. I don't want them to think that I don't like my current place or anything like that. If I do get that other job, it wouldn't be too terrible even if they don't like it. But there is also a great chance that I won't get the job and will stay in my current position for another year. EDIT: this is my second post-doc position. A: In my experience supervising post-docs the goal has been to get the post-doc into a tenure-track position. I've seen post-docs apply for tenure track positions and get them before the end of our funding for the post-doc, and I've considered that to be a success, even though we had go out and find a replacement for the post-doc. I would encourage you to discuss this with your current supervisor. If they're not supportive then you probably won't get the kind of recommendation you would need, and there might not be any point in applying for the position. If they are supportive then you can apply with some confidence. Even if you don't get the job, you'll have some experience with the application (and perhaps interview) process.

Q: Relevant math courses for theoretical physics/applied mathematics? I'm finishing my bachelor's in physics and for my masters, where I have a few free choice courses (~5), I'd like to take math courses that would be relevant for a future as a theoretical physicist or applied mathematician. Rigorously (as in taught by mathematicians) I've had Calculus, Calculus in R^n, Complex Analysis, Linear Algebra, Probability and Statistics and just a small overview of differential equations. I've had more math in physics courses but not in a very rigorous way. I'm setting my eyes on the following courses: Ordinary Differential Equations Partial Differential Equations Group Theory Stochastic Processes Functional Analysis Are all of these relevant? Which others could be added to this list? A: Although the name is not explanatory, a course in "Lie theory", or "Lie groups and Lie algebras" would be very helpful: this is about the influence of large-ish (certainly not finite) symmetry groups, such as rotation groups ("orthogonal groups"...), and more. Also, "functional analysis" is very hit-or-miss, depending on what one wants. What a potential physicist would want would be "operator theory", especially "unbounded operators". Also, probably, "distribution theory/generalized functions", to be able to cope gracefully with things like Dirac's delta "function". (E.g., to not be at the mercy of semi-ignoramuses who'll happily rant about the non-existence of such a thing, and/or insist on describing it in ways which horribly obscure its utility and sense...) A: All of the courses that you've mentioned could be quite helpful depending on what area of physics or applied mathematics you end up in. The ordinary and partial differential equations courses would be expected in any reasonable graduate program in applied mathematics. Differential geometry and tensor analysis is very important in many areas of mathematical physics. In my experience, many physics graduate students end up learning a lot of numerical computing and numerical analysis (not quite the same thing.)

Q: How to alleviate tension when interacting with researchers at a conference from enemy countries? In academic conferences, I often meet students and professors from enemy countries, whom I could never have met in normal situations. We both know that we are here for research, and we do talk about research, but there is still tension in the air. Maybe even mutual fear. What can I do to alleviate the tension, so that we can focus on the research? A: There has long been a link between scientific collaboration and diplomacy between countries. During some of the deepest parts of the cold war, for example, the United States and the Soviet Union worked together to stamp out polio, and the echoes of "vaccine diplomacy" continue today, uniting people against their common non-human enemies. Even when there is not an explicit cooperative goal of that sort, contacts in a neutral situation can be valuable for helping to promote peace and understanding between different cultures and countries. I would thus suggest beginning to approach the question not from a perspective of "Who is my enemy?" but from a question of "What are the areas that we can cooperate, even if we are enemies?" and perhaps to read up on ideas in "science diplomacy."

Q: How to cite in APA format for an author who uses only a first name? How do I cite in APA format for an author who uses only a first name? A: When there is only one name, simply use that name. The guiding principal of citation is to give a clear and unambiguous pointer for finding the work in question and related works. Thus, when dealing with a mononym, the general APA dictum of "author's last name" (which is quite culturally narrow in any case) maps cleanly to "author's only name." Examples can easily be found for famous ancient authors such as Plato, e.g.: Plato. (1961). Meno (R. S. Bluck, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published ca. 380 B.C.) The same principles can be applied for modern mononymous authors. A: According to the APA Style Blog you should cite what you see. While it does not specifically cover people/references with one name, it does cover the Dalai Lama (a single title) and Dr Suess (a pseudonym that cannot be separated). Based on the cite what you see principal, just treat the name as a last name.

Q: Am I likely to be perceived as less successful if I start as an assistant professor at age 40? Several professors, including my former advisor and a senior member of my research community, have been encouraging me to apply for a faculty job. I am torn about it mostly because I am 40 years old. Leaving a job in a research lab to start as an assistant professor would in a way seem like a starting all over again. I believe that my pre-PhD experience leading projects would lessen the learning curve that new tenured track faculty goes through. On the other hand, I am not sure if there would a be a stigma associated with my age. I would have gone for an academic position ten years ago in a heartbeat, for the research, freedom, and teaching. But I had personal reasons for not being able to pursue PhD sooner. Is it too late to do it now? Would the low academic rank to age ratio make my job harder, leading to possibly being prejudiced that I must not be successful to still be at the lowest branches? There are several threads here asking about pursing PhD later in life, but I do not recall any of them addressing starting an academic carrier. A: I would say it depends. In the following question, JeffE resoundingly stated that age does not play into the decision whether to appoint somebody for an academic position. Yet, ETH Zurich (one of the world's premiere institutions in the technical sciences) even publicly states that they will rather not hire an assistant professor older than 35 (see the information box on the right). Pragmatically, you may be a bit out of the norm. This may give you a small edge in some cases, and may be a small disadvantage in others. For every academic that is concerned about your age, there will be another one that values your industrial experience. I would say, if age is the only thing holding you back, then go and apply for assistant professor positions. Leaving a job in a research lab to start as an associate professor would in a way seem like a starting all over again. Assistant professor isn't the same as associate professor. Both are not the same as "starting all over". In practice, in most places I have seen, professors on all levels are able to work quite independently, so none should be seen as an entry-level job. Assistant professor may be entry-level in terms of professorships, but it is actually a quite senior position in the wider context of academia. A: As an assistant professor, you would have four constituencies: undergrads, graduate students, your department's tenured and "sure thing" pre-tenured faculty, and the school's administration. Undergrads want to know what's going to be on the test. If your age isn't going to be on the test, they won't notice it. To them, a professor is a professor is an old person. Just be prepared and predictable and they'll be happy. Being 40 might command more respect than being 30, and should mean fewer crushes to fend off. I consider it a plus for this group. Grad students want you not to be insane. "Dear Lord, please allow that my advisor be not changeable like the wind, be not stubborn like the glaciers, and be not crazy, and be not on drugs. Also I would be grateful if you could manage that she not work me like an indentured servant, please, and thank you." They'll judge you by your recent publications, your connections and intelligence. Some or all of the faculty will be writing reviews of you and your research program in three or four years. For that reason, you should talk to them about theirs. For real. They can judge your acuity better on home turf than when adrift in a sea of unfamiliar words and ideas, and they'll be flattered. If you came in as a 23-year-old wiz-kid, there might be some resentment or envy. If you are pleasant and dedicated to your career, irrelevant factors like your age will not undermine your prospects with your new colleagues. Presidents and Deans want to hear only good things about you. The Dean will be told of any difficulties you experience, and could possibly alert the President, so don't have any. They might not even know your age, and I can't think of a reason they'd care about it. Help the department move up the prestige ladder and they wouldn't mind if you were 60. Age could be an issue when you apply for jobs. They'll assume you were 18 when you started undergrad, regardless of when you graduated. If you graduated late, you could put the year you graduated instead of the years of attendance. Your age might be off-putting for the hiring committee before they meet you. If they get over it and invite you to interview with them, you'll have your CV, references, and many chances to make a good impression. You haven't been playing mahjong for the last few years. As long as you "read" like you're of the tribe, your age will not be a negative in academia.

Q: Include Poster Paper in Academic CV I want to know how much does it matter to include poster paper list in an academic CV. I see some researchers and professors put poster list in their CV, however, it is not widely used. Note that, I am talking about the poster papers that are often accepted as a separate track e.g., Demo/Poster Track in top-tier computer science, electronics and communication engineering-based conferences. (I am aware that some flagship conferences put some paper as poster presentation instead of oral presentation due to the huge number of accepted papers, however, all of them are included in the conference proceedings irrespective of oral or poster presentation.) Here is some relevant discussion: How do you include a poster in an academic resume? Poster author added me as coauthor after abstract was submitted. Can I include it on CV? A: If it is included in the conference proceedings then sure, include it. It is important to make it clear that it is not a full paper so people have a separate section for listing things like posters or workshop papers. But how much does it matter? For impressing a hiring committee, not much. It usually isn't very prestigious to present a poster and the acceptance rate is often very high It is still your work though and was published, so I would list it mostly for completeness. If it isn't included in the proceedings, then I probably wouldn't include it. The advice I have been told is that it will reduce the signal-to-noise ratio of my CV. Although, I have seen some of my friends in the humanities include such things so it might depend on your field.