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Q: Can I copy an image from another paper (that I am citing)? I am in the process of writing a paper on the results I have obtained recently. One of the steps where I have innovated is extracted from a paper published some years ago. My idea for the paper was to compare the original method with my modifications and thus present the different results. Is it generally accepted practice to simply copy the "results" image from the original paper (that I am extensively citing and discussing in mine)? Or should I somehow recreate it? (this last option is presenting some difficulties, as some implementation details* are not explicitely stated in the original paper and thus I cannot be 100% sure that my reproduction would be actually representative of what the authors originally did) *: yes, we are speaking (also) about code A: You have two different questions: one in your title, regarding coping an image, and another regarding the results. Copying a figure: It depends on the license of the paper. If it is appropriately licensed (as with a Creative Commons Attribution license), you generally can, as long as you indicate it. If it is copyrighted, you are in the grey area of possible fair use. In these cases, the safest option is to contact the copyright holders (usually the publisher) and ask for permission. Another option is to contact the authors and ask them for the raw data itself, so you can plot it yourself (so you keep a constant style across the paper), or ask them to regenerate it for you. Using results: The results are not copyrightable, so you can freely use them. If Smith et al, 2007 report an accuracy of 91%, and you get a 97%, you can freely put the numbers next to each other.

Q: List of publications for funding applications What does a "List of publications" mean? I'm applying for a scholarship and it says I have to add that file, so I need to know what this file should contain and if it's necessary. A: I would assume they mean the list of your published work as in journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters etc. A: You need to be very careful when preparing grant and funding applications to prepare the list of publications according to the specifications provided. Failing to do so can lead to your proposal being rejected, often without going to reviewers first. For instance, the National Science Foundation expects each researcher to provide no more than 10 publications in her CV for a given proposal: five publications that are "most relevant" to the proposed work, plus five others deemed "important in the researchers' career." The German Research Foundation, however, simply says no more than 10 publications per researcher, but doesn't break down the categories. Other funding agencies have similar but slightly different rules.

Q: What do researchers mean by the "priority" of an idea? I have heard the term "priority" used in regards to research ideas. For example, How does one determine priority, prominence, and impact with regard to books, rather than articles? asks about priority (and other things) in regards to books. From the usage I have seen in this community, priority appears to be established when you submit a manuscript (e.g., to a publisher or arXiv). This seems very weird to me, so I am worried that I am missing something. The time at which an idea is submitted for publication can be years after the idea was had, so it seems priority is not giving credit to the first individual who had the idea. Since the review process is confidential and it can take years for an idea to get published, priority is not being given to the person who first disseminated the idea either. What exactly is priority and why does it matter? A: The way I use this term, "priority" means "who had this idea first". Of course, everyone can come up and say "hey, I totally had this idea to determine graph isomorphism in quasipolynomial time in 1990", so it is difficult to validate a priority claim unless there is some written material to back it up. But intellectual priority is the former concept; publication dates are just an imperfect way to measure it. In fields where research is routinely disseminated before formal publication (using arXiv, preprints, or conferences), such as mathematics, there are (in my opinion) fewer possibilities for issues such as "X had the idea one year before Y, but Y's paper was published earlier" or "Y was a peer reviewer and scooped X's idea". A: Part of the work in a scientific opus is to trace back the origin of the ideas the authors convey. This can be a difficult work, as many sources are barely available, and not always in a known language. Sometimes the original ideas were only eludated to, given away in private communications. It often takes armies of historians to recover the whole story. Think for instance about: the origin of relativity: Einstein, Poincaré, Lorenz, Young? the history of the Fast Fourier transform, credited to Cooley and Tuckey, traced back to Gau{ss}, Good, Danielson, Lanczos least-square regression, based on Cotes, Gauss (again), Laplace Generally, a date of submission and a date of publication are public information that may stamp a priority, at least a prior date. For clear concepts, it is already complicated, see for instance in this chirplet (a type of of harmonic analysis for radar signals) debate around the first pair of inventors (Mann and Haykin or Mihovilovic and Bracewell). But in many cases, honesty and deep referencing are guides, as ideas are often unconsciously borrowed and blended. Even a sentence like: If You Steal From One Author, It’s Plagiarism; If You Steal From Many, It’s Research has a debated origin (quote investigator).

Q: First impressions: CV or research statement? When hiring PhD students, what document is used most frequently for a 'first impression': the CV or the research statement/statement of purpose? Context: I am currently in the process of applying to several PhD positions. A constant factor seems to be the necessity to submit both a CV and a research statement-like letter. As I can imagine professors who get a lot of submissions cannot read all submitted documents entirely, I was wondering which document would be used more as a first impression, and which one as a more detailed insight into the candidate? A: The first impression is, ideally, when you first talked with a prospective adviser and/or researchers in the department or lab before applying. Some people have small interviews (such as by phone or Skype) before application time, and it varies by person whether or not anyone will have even seen a statement or CV before/during this process. This naturally varies by region and field, but this is not uncommon in the US. Naturally this is not always possible, in which case you'll just have submitted an entire application packet and have no control of the first impression - so literally anything you submit with the package could be the first thing a member of the admissions committee sees. The typical routine is that an administrative department (generally "admissions" or a "graduate studies" coordinator) collects all the materials and puts all the information into files. Admissions committees then generally split up the applicants into sets and distribute them to individuals on the committee, with usually 2-3 people reviewing each applicant. It seems this particular handling of the process is very common (I've heard it from dozens of people in different fields throughout the US). The first read varies by committee member, and it seems that absolutely everyone has their own weightings and order in which they review packets. Some professors say they think the personal/research statement is silly and the first thing they look at is the reference letters. Meanwhile some say they look at the reference letters last, as they want to see what the candidates own words are and then only see if the reference letters agree with that image. Some people think the CV tells the true story, while others think the CV is little more than a laundry list and nutshell reminder of what's listed in the other materials. Some professors have been reported as saying "I only accept people I've already worked with in the past" so the application materials are really just there to make the bureaucrats complain less, and pre-selected candidates need to just not screw up too badly on anything. So in the end, in writing your materials you cannot assume any proper ordering whatsoever - everything has to be suitable if encountered first, last, only, or not at all!

Q: Deadline For PhD offer while waiting for other results I have been offered a PhD position with full funding from my backup university, however they gave me a deadline of April 5th to either accept or decline their offer. I am still waiting for replies from other more prestigious universities. What should I do? A: There are generally two things you can do - and you can and should do both at once. 1) Try to extend the deadline. Contact the people who've offered you the position and ask for extra time. They aren't going to give you an infinite amount of time, but ask for ideally how long you'd like - say, an extra two weeks? - with the expectation that they might be willing to give you less time than that. They might say, "Sorry, we can't extend the deadline" or "we can only extend the deadline X days" - but hey, that little bit of extra time could be very important! If you are polite it can't really endanger your offer at any place you'd want to dare attend, and they could always say yes. Just be 'reasonable' in your request - asking for an extension until days before the academic year starts won't be granted and might encourage them to give you no extension at all. 2) Contact the programs you haven't heard from and let them know you've received other offers, and that you'd really like to still consider their program - but you are on a deadline. Inquire if you'll be able to get an answer from them before your deadline. Everyone in the process understand that candidates who get in anywhere often get multiple offers, and deadlines don't always sync up. If you've had contact with a prospective adviser at the institution, consider CC'ing them as well (on the chance that they have already made a decision but the institution is being slow). There's not really anything to lose if you act professionally, and potentially a great deal to gain. You could get an extension, you could get an early response from other programs, you could find out responses were sent but did not reach you - or worst case scenario you end up in exactly the same position as you are in right now.

Q: How does a PhD student go about doing a meta analysis of a research question? I just thought that I would put this question out here because I am currently working on a meta analysis of a particular research question in my field (HCI/information science). Moreover, this question is new and has not been answered in very detail so far. I have done most of the usual ways described in other resources as follows: I have done a comprehensive review of the relevant literature pertaining to this particular research question. This is a new area and the number of directly relevant papers are ~<50. I have also compiled an exhaustive bibliography of the indirectly relevant papers in this area. That number is ~<150. Out of this set of directly relevant literature, I have identified 23 quantitative empirical studies, 14 qualitative empirical studies and the rest are theoretical pieces/position pieces/framework papers. The challenge I am currently facing is how to meta-analyze the data. In HCI, it is not common to freely distribute empirical datasets (although signs of change are imminent in the atmosphere. :)) and I have sent out polite emails to the relevant researchers inquiring if I could have some manner of access to these datasets. The rate of response is ~50% so far in responding to my email but only about ~5% want to actively share their datasets. Therefore, the only other option (that I can see right now) is to compile, summarize and make sense of data and results already reported in the qualitative and quantitative papers. I was wondering if any of you experienced (and also not-so-experienced :)) academicians/researchers had any insights into how to actually go about doing a meta analysis from the bottom up. The main online resources which I have been using so far to tackle this problem is given www.statistical-solutions-software.com/what-is-meta-analysis, www.wilderdom.com/research/meta-analysis.html, www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Meta-analysis and echo.edres.org:8080/meta/. Please do note that I am not expecting any detailed step-by-step "spoonfeeding" response. Pointing me to some helpful resources is fine. In addition, personal anecdotes or valuable experiences will be really appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read this question. A: Good luck to you. I'm trying to do something similar and found that few HCI papers publish enough summary statistics to conduct a proper meta-analysis. Indeed, a lot of the time, their stats seem quite sloppy. I've styled my analysis similar to two review papers I found. One from the HCI area as well (Dehn & Van Mulken, 2000) and one from a bit more outfield (Jones & Gosling, 2005). Neither is a true meta-analysis, but they get as close to formal as I think it's reasonable to get when an actual meta-analysis is simply not an option. Dehn & Van Mulken (2000) The impact of animated interface agents: a review of empirical research Jones & Gosling (2005) Temperament and personality in dogs (Canis familiaris): A review and evaluation of past research

Q: Is there a difference between a (under)graduate and honours studies - also concerning thesis? Is there a difference between an undergraduate and an honours thesis? I came across the latter during some online research on US colleges and it seems to me that honours are only known in those institutions. Is this correct? Moreover, it seems that some colleges offer normal undergraduate as well as undergraduate honours studies/classes/degrees. I heard that the difference is that the latter have to write a thesis while the former seemingly don't. Is this correct and are there other differences? Does this separation also exist on the Master's level and graduate schools? A: Just about every possibility exists somewhere in the United States. There is no one answer. Some colleges or universities do not require any type of thesis for an undergraduate degree. Others may require students in an honors program only to complete a thesis or project. Yet others may require all students to complete a thesis or project for an undergraduate degree. At the graduate level, there are research master's degrees and non-thesis/course-only master's degrees. The latter may still have a project or paper. A research master's degree is usually for those who are going on to a Ph.D.

Q: Why are academic institutions now looking to judge their students in multiple choice questions tests? Multiple choice questions are nowadays very common in many of the world's institutes. Particularly in entrance tests, they use multiple choice testing. Why are these academic institutions now looking to judge their students using multiple choice tests? A: Because they are graded easily and fast, and there is no room for subjectivity. The answer to question 1 is option b). If you marked b), you get points, if you didn't, you are wrong. The grader doesn't even need to know what the question is about, just that the right answer is b). Also, there is no middle ground, no partial credit, and no subjectivity involved. Of course, there are a whole lot of problems with this system: poorly phrased questions, the student doesn't show the process, just the final result... A: Multiple Choice Questions are nowadays very common in many of the world's institutes, particularly in entrance tests they conduct MCQs for the students. Why are these academic institution now looking to judge their students in MCQ tests? In my experience (graduate admission to mathematics departments in the U.S.), multiple choice tests are not particularly valued or respected. People use them because of a lack of better options, not because these tests are considered a suitable measure of student accomplishments. The problem is that course content and grading standards vary substantially between institutions. This makes it difficult to compare applicants to graduate school: how does an A- in a beginning graduate course at the University of the Middle of Nowhere compare with a B+ in an advanced undergraduate course at Caltech? Is it better to be the 4th strongest math major in your class at Princeton, or the best student in 25 years at Middle of Nowhere? For applicants from prestigious universities, letters of recommendation and comparisons with applicants in past years can provide plenty of information, but this doesn't work so well for applicants from less prestigious universities. Standardized tests help provide an objective measure that can level the playing field. (Of course they don't level it completely, but an applicant from the middle of nowhere who gets outstanding GRE scores attracts a lot more attention than one with mediocre GRE scores.) Keep in mind there are a lot of colleges and universities out there, roughly 2500 in the U.S. alone. This means in a typical year, about a hundred students in the U.S. will be the best mathematics major to graduate from their department in the last 25 years. Some of these students are amazing, but in some cases it's not so impressive, since the department just doesn't get strong students. There has to be some measure beyond comparison with unknown classmates. The reason why multiple choice tests are used (as opposed to essay questions) is because they are what's out there. If the GRE subject exam involved essay questions, that would be objectively better, but it would be nightmare to grade. For comparison, grading the Putnam exam takes a tremendous amount of work, and I'd estimate that an essay-based GRE would take at least ten times as many person-hours to grade, maybe more. I don't think anyone cares enough to want to develop the test, organize the test administration and grading, and pay for everything (with a combination of high test fees or outside funding). It's just not clear that it would be worthwhile. A: Benefits Administration is efficient. Grading with large numbers of test takers can be automated either by using computer administration or by scannable answer sheets. Once the scoring system is determined, there is no subjectivity in the application of the scoring system. This increases the reliability and predictive validity of the test. It also increases efficiency in that test takers are less likely to query the scoring. There are tools to evaluate the internal properties of the test. These in turn allow for a principled assessment of reliability and also options for refining the test. Using classical test theory or item response theory, you have a range of tools to identify problematic items or response options. You can also evaluate the overall reliability of the test. Simple steps include looking at the proportion of people answering the item correctly (good items are approximately in the 50 to 70% correct region) and the correlation between answering the item correctly and the total score on the test (good items have item-total correlations above say .20 or so). You can administer more items. A general principle of reliability of measurement is that if you can get more observations of behaviour, you will get more reliable measurement. If you write concise items, people can often do one item every minute or so. This is much more than what you get with open response items. You can maintain comparability across alternate forms. There are tools particularly based on item response theory, which allow you to draw on a test bank. As long as you have a certain number of common items, you can change a test over time while still being able to compare scores from different versions of the test (e.g., to compare scores from year to year). Or alternatively, you may be concerned about test security, so different people get exposed to different items. Either way, it's easier to ensure equivalence of scores using multiple choice items. Problems Of course there are many problems with multiple choice tests. They do a poor job of measuring certain skills and abilities. For example, they are poor at measuring written skills and interpersonal skills. Writing a large number of good items takes time and skill. In particular, designing multiple choice questions that require deeper analysis rather than surface level recall is often challenging and requires some skill. Given all of the above, it is understandable why universities might use multiple choice tests to make admission decisions. For certain skills and abilities, they are an efficient means of getting a pretty good predictor of academic performance, especially compared to alternatives (e.g., grades that mean different things from past institutions). That said, I'm aware of quite a few institutions at least in Australia that would combine a multiple choice section with a written component in an attempt to get a more complete picture of academic ability.

Q: Do graduate schools increase assistantship stipends if the student is accompanied by a spouse or dependent? Usually a TA stipend is only given to cover the expenses of a single student. I have received a stipend of about $19000 for 2 semesters (9 months) and a summer fellowship ($4000). Is it appropriate to ask for an increase even before I go to graduate school as I have to fund my spouse (I am an international student)? Or is it better to work for a semester or two, perform well, build a case and then ask for an increase? A: No, the stipends are set according to uniform rules for the department. You will not get extra if you have to support a family, although there are probably other, non-financial, supports that the university will offer your dependents (such as married student housing). Moreover, TA pay is not typically subject to merit-based raises either. You will not get a raise by asking for one; your stipend may go up slightly when you reach a major milestone (such as qualifying for the Ph.D. program), but mostly it will rise at the same rate as all the other TA's.

Q: How should I prepare my first PhD interview when I do not know about the research topic? I'm going to have my first Skype interview with the PhD committee, and I have not yet been told about the research topic. How long should the presentation be? Given that I have not been told about the research topic, how should I incline my presentation? Should I include my CV? A: If you've not been told about the topic yet (though that's quite unusual - perhaps you can clarify why) then I would suggest examining the research interests of the department you are applying for. If you know the names of the interviewers, look up their research interest and their most recent papers. Are there any research groups within the department? Check for recent publications and recent (successful) grant applications. In addition, think about which of these research topics you could most effectively contribute to. If you had to match your expertise and knowledge so far against any of the departmental research interests, where would you fit best and where could you contribute most effectively? In your presentation I would suggest to demonstrate that you are aware of the research profile of the institution and how you could see yourself contribute to it. Demonstrate and describe your expertise and experience backed up with evidence, and this includes summarising or presenting your CV.

Q: Breaking off a collaboration/project in science I discussed with two fellow PhD students about working together. I have been working on my project for about 8 months, and we started working together around 3 weeks ago. In the beginning we agreed I would be the first author, since I have been doing most of the work and the project is mostly done. After starting the work, however, one of the PhD students has been continuously promoting his work in the project as having more contribution (e.g. he always mentions his work first and mentions mine in a side sentence), even though I have been working on the project for a lot longer than he has. Recently, we had a visitor that could potentially help with our project. So we decided to give our work in three separate presentations. I said that I could give the introduction for our larger project and we agreed on that (after some very small unspoken disagreement on the mentioned person's part). During the actual presentation, however, my fellow student friend announced that he'll give the introduction (to which I agreed since we were in front of an audience). So, after this I have a bad taste in the collaboration and would like to break it off without causing trouble. My supervisor and a lot of other people know we are supposed to work together now. Any suggestions on what I could do? They did some initial work so I am ok with putting their names on my paper if it comes down to it, but I do not want to continue with the collaboration. A: I assume that the two other students were not "forced" on your project by some higher authority, so the call on whether or not to collaborate is yours to make. If that is the case, you should as soon as possible sit down with the other two students and tell them that you are not going to work with them any longer. The major point here is be civil and professional. If their contribution is large enough, you can put them as co-authors or in the acknowledgements section. I say as soon as possible, because 3 weeks is not that much of time for them to get too seriously involved. For the purpose of other people, all three of you should assume a neutral stand point, i.e. something along the lines of "things didn't work out" without going into extensive details. Although, you should definitely bring your adviser up-to-date the real reasons for stopping the collaboration. It is never good to wash your dirty laundry in public, so badmouthing on either side just hurts all the involved parties (one reason more to keep the adviser in the loop). Be adamant about your decision, as I guess that your colleagues and the adviser will try to smooth things out one way or the other (asking you to reconsider, for some more time, increasing their contribution, etc).

Q: Are masters programs generally easier to get into than PhD? I'm doing my bachelors degree in mathematics right now at a state school. I know I'm not a top student and have made just pretty good grades in my undergrad career, but fell behind in others (a D in a conceptual physics course) due to numerous reason like 18 hr semesters while working, got married, had some health and family issues, (not to mention my freshman and sophomore years in which I didn't even want to be in school, and even went on academic probation). After retaking a couple core courses, I have a 3.2 GPA out of 4.0. Also, I will have done undergrad research (starting next semester). However things are calming down too little too late, and I've got about 2 semesters left. I've really come to love the study of math, and I would really like to study at the master's degree level. Most of the 'poor GPA blah blah' questions around here have to do with getting into a doctoral program. I'm curious though if it may be easier for me to get into a decent masters program than if I were attempting a PhD? I'm not looking to get into some Ivy or otherwise 'prestigious' school, but I would like to get into something good. I would be doing it part time (2 courses per semester) so I can focus and make good grades. Is there hope? A: Not every STEM Master's program is going to be easier to get into than every PhD program, but on the whole they are easier. Universities are much more likely to take you if you're paying your own way (aka. a Masters) than if they have to fund you. In the US it's common for students who didn't do so well in undergrad or are from a lesser known international school to pay their way through a Masters first and then go on to a PhD after proving their worth. That being said, do not discount how helpful research can be. A published paper or a good letter of recommendation from a known professor can go a long way to erasing some bad grades. What counts in a PhD program is your ability to do research. A: Generally, a master program is easier to get into than a PhD because: You pay for yourself You don't have to find a supervisor The university can deliver the same program to many students That being said, from what I can see, you're very concerned about your academic grades. This is not a good indicator being a good phd student. Nobody cares how many A you have as a phd student, it's your ability to do research matters. Your grades won't matter ("look good" in your words), because every other phd student has the same grades. Unless you are truly interested in research, you should just focus on master degrees.

Q: Is being an honors student really worth it? This is a something I'm really concerned about. I am an undergraduate physics major, and I've been in the honors program at my university for a little while now, and that means certain things. I must take at least 1-2 honors courses (or do an honors-contract in a normal course) every semester, I must make a yearly update to a personal portfolio/e-portfolio, I must obtain a sufficient amount of research-group credit hours before I graduate, and I must defend an undergraduate thesis. I do like all of this, but what starts to bother me is one other requirement, as well as a few things within the program. We must attend at least one 'Honors Student Council' event per semester (not a big deal, but these are ridiculous/stupid most of the time). Also, most of the other students in the program are snobs and stuck-up compared to other non-honors students. I do like the chance to learn a lot more about the material presented in my classes through honors and course-contracted classes, but I'm starting to think that I could just do that on my own - that is, set that up with professors on my own. However, I don't really know how useful having an 'honors' distinction on a degree will be. Is it very useful? I've been thinking of quiting the honors program, but I wouldn't want to do it if it will drastically hurt me later on. For example, how much of an impact does having an honors distinction have on graduate school/job applications? A: Being an Honors student is a prime example of signaling: you could just as well learn the content by yourself, but having that distinction on your degree signals something to potential employers or grad school admission committees. And those people hope that this signal correlates with something useful, e.g., flexibility in thinking, openness to new ideas, conscientiousness etc. (Yes, being able to sit through boring meetings can be a survival skill in many bureaucratic settings.) It has been seriously suggested that much of higher education is explained by a signaling model. So you will need to weigh the current pain of boring meetings and uninteresting people against potential future benefits. Your trade-off will depend on what else you could be doing in the time you could free up by de-Honoring. I personally have profited from being a member of a similar German institution. When I applied for a job in a (mature) startup, one of the founders, who happened to be a university professor, saw this in my CV, and he explicitly said that this helped me get an interview. A: It depends on your reasons for being in the Honors program. Are you in it for the extra line or two you have on your CV or diploma, or the learning experience, or the potential opportunities that arise from your undergraduate institution? Look carefully at how you've "sold" the Honors College to us. A list of requirements, a mention of a waste of time, and pointing out that you can do everything the HC provides to you without assistance. You come across as dissatisfied with the system. I am going to try and be as objective as possible, given how I also feel dissatisfied with my time in the Honors program, and be as fair as I can about the situation's pro/cons. In it for the Learning Experience If you're in for the learning experience, by all means, it is certainly a learning experience. One of my courses in my Honors program, I learned a significant amount about leadership, and drastically improved my writing skills. I certainly would still have been a terrible writer if not for that class, and that's a plus in my book for how Honors helped me. That being said, not all of the Honors courses are that great. I assume that your program may require you to take classes outside your major to fulfill enrichment requirements. I would recommend you find something that isn't only useful, but interesting. I took a class about the Beatles because it fit my schedule, and that probably could have been replaced with something much better. For the Resume/CV If you're looking for stuff to put on your resume, there's probably far more time-efficient and cost-efficient methods. Assuming 1 hour a semester for 8 12-week semesters, plus perhaps 4 hours of other Honors-related stuff per semester, that's about 130 hours of time spent to just add the Honors distinction to your degree. May not seem like many hours, but that's equivalent to 10 credits in a 120 credit degree. Add in the possibility of unrelated Honors courses, and it starts turning into 15-20 credits that could have been spent on other courses. I do not believe you have to be in the Honors program to qualify for Honors-related work, and in fact, I would assume non-Honors students can take your classes anyways. Potential Opportunities in Research The thesis/capstone projects provided by the Honors program do provide the ability to perform research projects at the undergraduate level and are likely the most high-yield activities you can get as an Honors student. If you capitalize on this, you should be able to do research in a lab at your university and write, present, and possibly even publish a paper. This is probably one of the few things you can benefit from. If you don't use this, it's a wasted opportunity for sure. The question becomes whether or not the time spent in the Honors program is worth the additional benefits. After finishing the Honors program, no one asked me "Oh, did you go to the Honors program? Tell me about it." They did, however, ask me about stuff I learned through Honors courses. It's nice to see that I have a certificate for it, but apart from that, once you graduate, whether or not you attended the Honors College matters less than how you capitalized on it. In case it wasn't apparent, I attended an Honors program in college to completion. A: Let me add to other answers (this may be a little too long for a comment): depending on what you want to do, you can potentially do things a lot better for your career outside of the honors college. I was in a similar position, and got "kicked out" of my honors college my sophomore or junior year because I refused to take so many honors courses. Instead I spent my time taking a lot of advanced math/CS classes (many graduate level), and the honors college director wouldn't let them more than a couple count as honors credit. (I actually enjoyed most of my honors classes till then, and was friends with a lot of the honors college, including the director.) I ended up finishing with a dual math/cs degree and a masters in math in 4 years, which I wouldn't have done if I had to spend more of my time taking honors classes. This was much better preparation for grad school (or many industry jobs). So I would say it depends on your situation (other answers mention pros of being in the honors college), but if it prevents you from doing other things you want to do, it's not worth it.

Q: In which regions of the world do graduate programs typically require a GRE score? I know that in most U.S. universities, most programs for graduate studies require a GRE score. 1- Are there any graduate programs in the U.S. which does not require this? 2- Is it required for graduate programs in Europe, Australia or other parts of the world? A: Besides the United States, I have not heard of any country and any topic requiring it. A: ETS, which develops and administers the GREs, maintains a publicly available list of all of the institutions that are officially licensed to receive GREs. If you look through, you will notice that almost all of these institutions are in the United States. Now, there are a bunch of other universities around the world that at least are willing to receive a GRE. As noted in the other answers, however, the fact that an institution is willing to receive a GRE does not mean that it is required or even particularly helpful. It is primarily a US test, and even within the US it is not used by many departments and given little weight (unless one does horribly) in many others.

Q: Affiliation on the papers extracted from the thesis I graduated from PhD almost 2 years ago and I am a full time assistant professor in another country. A paper of mine was accepted recently (main paper of the thesis). 1- Now my supervisor asks me to use my old affiliation (i.e. the university I studied) because she thinks I have completed the thesis while I was there. I received financial help for my PhD which I have acknowledged in the paper. I responded that I am legally bound to my new university and I could not do that. Am I supposed to do that? Btw. both my supervisors are included as co-authors (with their affiliation which matches my old university). 2- Now again she asks me to at least put my old university's name first. I am the main author (and honestly have done all of the work. My two supervisors read my work, gave comments and possibly corrected English mistakes). If I am the main author, the correct format requires me to mention my own university first. If I just change the order of affiliations list (a. old university, b. my university) and still keep my name as first author (my name *b), is that acceptable? 3- What is your suggestion for the remaining papers that come out of the thesis? A: Your advisor is correct that papers published as a result of your thesis work should include the institution at which the thesis was done as at least one of the affiliations. The role of your present institution depends on whether or not you did substantial work on the paper there. If so, then you need to include that as an affiliation as well; if not, then it should be listed as a "Present Address." What you cannot do is list just your new affiliation, with no recognition of your graduate institution.

Q: How to format a large diagram with many formulas that does not easily fit on an A4 page? I have a large diagram that does not fit into horizontal space of my A4 book manuscript (see below). What to do to make the diagram easier to read? Should I replace big formulas with numbers or letters to label the arrows with numbers or letters and describe the corresponding formulas below (or above) the diagram (so called, "legend")? If yes, what to use as arrow labels: numbers or letters? A: First, I do not consider your diagram is too big unless your layout has ridiculously big margins. That does not mean that you cannot improve its layout such that the type is bigger and thus easier to read. What to do to make the diagram easier to read? Your biggest problem is that the individual formulas are all horizontal and very close together, which forces you to make them rather small. Thus, I suggest to replace most of your straight lines by curved ones and rotate your formulas appropriately. Also, use more vertical space (which you should have). Finally, you can make your texts narrower by using more line breaks: A quick sketch to illustrate this: Note that I increased the size of all formulas while maintaining the width. Should I replace big formulas with numbers or letters to label the arrows with numbers or letters and describe the corresponding formulas below (or above) the diagram (so called, "legend")? That sounds like a very bad idea to me. This way the reader would have to jump between diagram and legend all the time. The whole point of your diagram (as I understand it) is to have all these relation in one place. If you use a legend, you might as well skip the entire diagram and use text instead. A: My final solution is this (I labeled the arrows of diagrams with short labels, so that I can easily refer to a particular arrow in my proof.)

Q: Why do educators use curve to adjust the performance? It bothers me when I tries to remember how many highschools or universities use curve to adjust the final grade for their student based on the class average. I know failing the entire class would be unacceptable for the faculty that taught the class but watering down the materials or curving the grades to fit the standard was it necessary? What if there are few outstanding students that are ahead of the curve? wouldn't it be unfair to them if the curve was adjusted to the class average? Sometimes, I started to question education standard for grading. What are the standard? Knowing the materials and able to apply them? Putting all relevant summary on one test paper? Giving homework that count towards grade? Quizzes to remind student how well they do for that subject? If above are all taken into consideration. Why are instructors still applying the curve to adjust the class average. A: Instructors often use some kind of curve to adjust for the varying difficulty of exams from one year to the next. The general idea is that if (for example) the class average on an exam is lower than it has been for the same course in previous years but the quality of the students' work is the same, then the exam given this year might have been more difficult than the exam in previous years. It would be unfair to students (and also reduces the signaling power of grades) if their grade is strongly dependent on the year in which they happened to take the course. An instructor might choose to adjust the students' grades to account for this. It's generally unwise to assign grades in a way that is strictly norm-referenced, without taking into account the students' demonstrated mastery of the course material, for reasons described in this answer. For example, if the class average on an exam is lower than it has been in previous years, but the average quality of work submitted by students is also worse than usual, then the average grade of the class should be lower (to preserve "fairness" and also the signaling power of grades.) Some instructors might use a curve for other reasons, e.g. if their department has a policy about the maximum number of "A" grades an instructor can give out. (Like this example.) A: Almost all classes (in the US) are "curved" in the sense that, at some point, a numerical score on tests and homeworks has to be converted into a letter grade. The distinction is between classes that are curved a priori—in which the function mapping numbers to letters is fixed in advance—and those which are curved a posteriori—where the function is picked after looking at the numbers. ff524's answer explains why many professors prefer an a posteriori curve. Many professors guarantee a certain minimum in advance: say, f(90) is guaranteed to be at least an A-. This is mostly customary, and students seem to like it. Furthermore, in many (maybe most) cases this promise is meaningless, because the metrics are written to guarantee that this would happen anyway. (Indeed, one advantage is that it reminds the professor that grades shouldn't "clump" too tightly: it's a bad thing if f(90) is a C+ and f(92) is a B.)

Q: Why do some instructors care so much about attendance? It seems that in higher education, some instructors either do not care at all whether students attend, and others care minimally (often resulting in a 1-5% attendance grade or tie-breaker rule). However there are also many instructors who seem to feel very, very strongly about attendance, and take it upon themselves to enforce this in various ways. For instance, I was shocked by a recent question claiming that 15% of the grade would be lost for missing 2 lectures - according to the question author, the class meets so frequently that this would constitute missing less than 3% of the lectures! While this seems like an extreme case, it seems like it's not uncommon to find professors who may deduct 10% or so for missing a small fraction of lectures. Why are these professors so preoccupied with making students attend? If attendance is so crucial to doing well in the class, wouldn't the students who don't attend do poorly in the exams anyway? Why additionally punish those students who did not attend, but did well regardless? A: Let me start off by saying that it is very unlikely that attendance requirement is purely to protect the professor's ego, as one comment suggested. Any serious educator would understand that the goal of education is not so that the students become increasingly reliant upon the education system. Rather, the goal is to produce students that are increasingly independent, critical, and confident in their own reasoning. If I were a professor, I would be glad that the student can succeed without my help, rather than the other way around. To punish a student for being able to succeed without the help of lectures is simply contradictory to the goal of education. With that being said, here are some more plausible reasons: The class is discussion based. This is quite straightforward: if you don't attend the class, then you do not learn. The in-class learning experience cannot be compensated by self-study, and exams may not be an ideal measure of such experience. The class meets very infrequently. There are certain classes that meet only once per week. Missing one class means missing a significant amount of work. A related example is science lab requirement. In my undergrad institute missing one lab (without advanced notice) means that you automatically fail the class. The lectures contain information not otherwise (easily) available. This is more relevant for higher-level classes, where there are no standard textbook and the way the professor teaches the material may be unique. The professor may want to make sure that students attend lectures to get the information they need. Culture. In some culture regular attendance is associated with deference to the system and/or the lecturer. One finally note: contrary to what OP stated in the question, it is my personal experience (in the US) that very few professors would deduct a significant amount of points due to a lack of attendance. Instead the focus, if there is any, is usually on participation of class activity (which, of course, can only be fulfilled if you attend the class). What OP have described seems like rare exceptions rather than the rule. A: One theory is that it serves as additional motivation for students to attend class, which in turn helps increase their success in the course. It gives them a short-term incentive to do something which is hopefully also in their long-term best interest. If attendance is so crucial to doing well in the class, wouldn't the students who don't attend do poorly in the exams anyway? In many cases the instructor has found from experience that this is true. But the student (who has less experience) may not be as convinced. Consider a student who wakes up in the morning and doesn't feel like going to class. In a class with no explicit attendance requirement, the student may rationalize: "I will just study harder tomorrow to learn the material that I missed, and I'll still be able to do well on the exam, so skipping class will have no consequences." But they overestimate their ability to do that, and end up not learning it as well. Or tomorrow they put off the studying until the next day, and so on, and fall behind. As an eventual result, they do not do well on the exam. In a class with an attendance requirement, the student knows for sure that not attending class will have negative consequences. The biggest consequence (failing the exam) is very likely but not guaranteed, and the student may not be able to impartially evaluate just how likely it is. But loss of attendance points is guaranteed. So the student cannot pretend that skipping class is harmless. Thus the student is more likely to actually attend, which is in their long-term best interest anyway. Hopefully, the ultimate result is that a higher percentage of students are able to meet the standards of the class. The flip side is that some students who have good attendance but poor performance otherwise may get better grades than they "deserve", but the instructor may feel that this tradeoff is justified. A: So here are some observations from my perspective: I teach at a large, urban, community college. We are open admissions (no starting prerequisites) and the students have many challenges (graduation rate 15-20% in the university at large; ~25% for our own college). I'm very much an outlier in that I'm one of the few faculty who don't want to be tracking attendance closely. I'm constantly trying to understand why other faculty are so adamant about this; and frankly I have yet to receive a super-coherent account of it. But some bits and pieces that I get at times: Students may be so weak that they are subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect; they have no idea how in trouble they are, or what it takes to remediate their weaknesses. Perhaps they are not in a position to make a rational choice about their academics, and at this point need some enforced guidance in that regard, esp. in a linked-knowledge STEM discipline. (To me, this is the strongest argument, the one that allows me to at least entertain the thought once in a while.) There may be a legacy/cultural aspect; for example, at our school we are given paper rosters with calendars marked out on them for each class, with the direction to mark it a certain way for attendance every day. I've never seen a contractual/handbook requirement that we do this, but the paperwork says so, and they are required documents to be filed at the end of the semester. There may be institutional reporting metrics at stake. For example, if a student misses 4 classes (course meets twice a week), then the college lets us drop them from the course, and my department quasi-mandates that we do so. I think part of the reason is that the student then counts as an "unannounced withdrawal", which makes our "failure" statistics look better (to very high-pressure stakeholders higher up in the university administration). Some instructors may do this to make the course easier. I've heard at least once that an instructor in another department had, say, a 70% grade component based on attendance. That is: a student is not required to perform any work whatsoever; as long as they are physically present, they can pass the class (and thus relieve some amount of pressure on the instructor, I presume). "Remember, the attendance rosters are legal documents. Years ago there was a student accused of a crime. They were proven innocent because of their being marked in class that day, which counted as an alibi." (I've heard this lore multiple times.) "Attendance is important to reporting for financial aid; we must confirm that students are attending for certain financial aid requirements." (About 75% of our students get federal/state grants?) "Don't you think attendance is important? Don't you want students to succeed?"

Q: Is it okay that my supervisor insists for me to work from my room at night? I am a female PhD student in the end of my second year, and my supervisor has been acting weird lately. He asks me to run the experiments from my laptop and not from my PC in the lab (it does not affect the test), and he does that when it's 11 or 12 at night. We usually do a voice call to discuss work, but very recently he asked for a video call and it was late at night… and just today he insisted that I work from my room and not from the lab. I just want to know what you guys think. I don't know if it's a culture difference thing or that I should really be careful. I think it's really weird considering that I've been working with him for two years and he wasn't even nice to me. A: This sets off all kind of red flags. In the absence of an extremely good rationale, this is very strange and entirely unacceptable. I would recommend that you make an appointment with your graduate program director and discuss the situation ASAP. That person will have more background about the situation and more perspective, and can offer you better advice than we can here. A: I had a similar experience during my MS. My adviser would call me all the time (multiple times a day even after 10-11 pm) to discuss ideas and check on progress. However, at that time he was an assistant professor and only 7 years older than me (he got his PhD at 28 and was my adviser when he was 31). It was awkward at first but then it turned out that this was his personality! He was and still one of my best friends. Regarding your case, you said that you are in your 2nd year (I assume that you are with the same adviser?), so if he did not act like this before, chances are that that not it his personality (I'm comparing my case to your case). So, this might rise a flag or two. One can assume the worst (to be safe), but let's consider these couple of scenarios first; Did/Does he do that with other students (current of former)? Does he treat you differently? Is there a deadline to your research that you do not know about? (although you said doing the tests late at night won't change anything). Are results from your research needed for a second round of a proposal (from an ongoing funding) that need to be reported soon. What about your adviser, is he an assistant/associate professor who in trying to apply for tenure (maybe need your results asap to write a paper or include it in his portfolio)? Now, if any of the above (or others) do not apply. I would go with your gut feeling. Try to tell him that you can not work at night or you usually sleep early. Try to avoid video calls when he calls, then call him back with a phone call. Come up with excuses i.e., camera broke, lighting is bad, lag in signal, weak network etc. If he keeps on insisting, then discuss it with him. Hopefully you won't have to, as if he is smart enough, he should know that you are avoiding this type of communication. Remember that you can always discuss this manner with an academic adviser or dept. faculty. I understand that this is a very delicate situation for you as a student, and hope things work out fine for you. A: I think there are various possible explanations for his behaviour, from purely innocent (but thoughtless) to really creepy. My advice for you: Do not agonise about it! You cannot look inside his head, but you can take action yourself and gain more control over the situation. About the PC and working from your room instead of the lab Ask him why he does not want you to use the lab PC and why you should work from your room. You could introduce that question by telling him you wonder about the changed rule/policy. Does he have a reasonable answer? Yes > Good, then do so. No > Then tell him, you see no reason in why not to use this PC in the lab and you will continue using it. About unwanted video calls If he wants to video-call you at a time or in a situation you are not comfortable with, just deny it and offer a phone call, a written chat or ask him to delay the video call. There is no need for you to justify! Just say, you prefer another time or a different way of communication now. In contrast to some other posts, I do not recommend making excuses (broken camera or so) and hoping he gets the hint, for several reasons: Some people are really bad in getting subtle messages. They are not mean or stupid, they just lack this skill. If he belongs to that group, your situation does not change. You might feel uncomfortable with lying, even if it is a white lie. So, you would exchange one bad feeling with another. (And if he sees you video-chatting with someone else, you will need to explain things - another unwanted situation.) If he really is creepy, he might realise that his actions affect you and he might enjoy having power over you. That is the opposite of what you would want! Thus, no excuses, but a polite refusal. About working and calling late at night Well, working at night is common within academia. However, make sure you are the one to decide if a night shift is necessary. Furthermore, make sure you get the corresponding rest periods as well. One final remark Since you mentioned possible cultural differences, I assume you have a different cultural background than your adviser. If this is the case, you could try to talk to someone from his culture and ask how to bring up the above mentioned issues to him in a way that is both clear and polite in his culture.

Q: How many papers are expected a PhD student to write in order to be accepted on postdoc programs? I am a PhD student now in theoretical physics with applications to nuclear physics, astrophysics and chemistry and I am asking about how many papers are expected a PhD student to write in order to be accepted on postdoc program. I know that this varies from field to field. I know one PhD student who didn't write any papers during his PhD, but this didn't stop hip being a CERN collaborate postdoc. I also know that quality papers are not so easy to be written so it may take some time for a student to write good papers and to work independently on papers without his supervisor. Also, some people don't have a good opinion regarding a sole author papers because "they" think it may lead to some erroneous results, although many scientists have written sole author papers even when they were teenagers. I also asking if such sole author papers would weight more than the papers with the research group. It would be nice if people from different fields would answer since this question would be of interest for scholars in different fields. A: A post-doctoral position is not usually part of a "program." It is not like graduate school, leading some kind of higher certification. It is a job, doing research in a specific area. Hiring is done individually by the senior researcher overseeing a position, and what they may be looking for is highly variable. Some people may hire based primarily on people's publication output as graduate students; however, in most cases I am familiar with, hiring is done based on a holistic view of the candidate. For example, when I applied for a post-doc in theoretical particle physics, I had only one publication out (and another one submitted), based on my graduate work. However, I came from a top graduate program, and I had a very strong letter from my advisor. I had to apply for a lot of jobs, but the one I eventually got was with somebody who had research interests very close to my advisor's. (The two had collaborated once, briefly, some years in the past.) I had a very broad background (having taken a lot more classes than most graduate students at my institution), and based on this and my advisors strong recommendation, I got a job. One of my professors in graduate school had told me explicitly that it was much more important to learn a lot in graduate school than to publish a lot of papers. You are not going to get the opportunity again to broaden your base of knowledge in the same way, and how many papers you publish is probably less important than learning and networking and making a good impression on senior people. Once you have a post-doc, that is the time to really crank up your research output (to four or five papers a year in theoretical physics or applied mathematics, if you want to get a good faculty job). A: "It would be nice if people from different fields would answer since this question would be of interest for scholars in different fields." In civil engineering, it really varies on the sub-field, but I would say at the PhD level, 5-7 journal articles (and few conference proceedings) will help boost your chances. In some sub-fields thu, having 2-3 articles is considered great! For post-doc, (still in civil engineering), your PhD adviser, research topic, funding (availability/ability to write proposals) and list of publications is what really matters. But, I did not hear of any minimum number of publications (in my field, not sure about other fields). A: I have a PhD in theoretical physics obtained in Germany and my department had as a compulsory statement in order to obtain the PhD to have submitted one paper to a journal. It was the only department I have come across with that rule, though. Most graduate students in theoretical physics manage to write 1-2 papers during their programme, but even no paper is very common. I have not heard of any having published decent papers, from a decent university with more than 3-4 (unless you are unbelievably gifted and lucky). To directly answer the question: PostDoc applications are usually decided on the base of a strong recommendation letter from your supervisor and, secondly, by the quality of your publications. Obviously the better the two above are, the more the chances to get a position; yet, there is no minimum statement required. Also notice that, especially in physics and mathematics, publishing too much and too often is usually seen as a sign of low quality research, as it feasibly takes a decent amount of time to actually find "new" results in those fields.

Q: How to explain to letter writers that I want to apply to completely different PhD programs? I am not entirely sure yet what I will want to do: It will either by subject A or subject B. Those to subject have very little to do with each other though. (Say one is history of art, the other one political science) I have decided to apply to programs in both fields and decide later where I would like to go to, depending also on where I would get in. I am worried, however, what my letter writers are going to think? Is it possible that I will look less determined because of this and consequently get weaker letters? Any advice on how to go about such a situation? Shall I just be completely open about this and tell them that i am unsure? A: TALK. TO. THEM. These are presumably former professors and advisors that you know well. Sit with them, skype with them, or buy them a coffee. You might learn a lot about what you actually want to do from the discussions, and they'll surely be happy to help tailor your letters.

Q: Pros and cons of booking a hotel through the conference website versus finding your own hotel I am going to an overseas conference this year. The conference organizer provided two hotels that we can book from. But after a round of Internet search, I found generally better prices at other hotels that are closer to the conference venue. Obviously, I do not want to book so far away from everyone else that I cannot join any activities. What are other pros and cons of booking a hotel through the conference or on your own that I may have missed? A: When I attend conferences, I rarely use the "official" hotels. Frequently there are better, closer, and less expensive alternatives nearby that are perfectly fine. The only reason to book at the conference-approved hotels is if your travel funding requires it as a condition for reimbursement. Otherwise, save some money and book elsewhere so long as it's within walking distance. A: Sometimes it's worth booking one of the conference-suggested hotels because the conference itself is in the hotel and you won't have to traipse around the city to get to conference events. This doesn't appear to be relevant to you. When this happens, it's likely that the conference has signed a contract with the hotel to fill a certain number of rooms at a certain rate, and if they don't, then the conference is liable to make up the difference to the hotel. If you like the conference or its parent organization, you can be a good friend to them by booking in the conference hotel. This saves future costs for everyone, since next year's conference rate may be increased to help cover these losses or anticipated future losses. I doubt this is applicable to you either, so you're almost certainly better off booking one of the closer, cheaper hotels. A: Sometimes you can find one of the "official" hotels for a better price booking direct. This will give you some of the benefits of staying there but note that if they're laying on transport from the hotel, you may not be counted and there may not be room for you. When I've booked a recommended hotel direct, it's always been within walking distance.

Q: What should I do when I would like to move to a new lab because my current PI is abusive? I started to work in a Lab as a Researcher 4 months ago, with the prospect of being a PhD student. This Lab carries out research topics I am interested and passionate about but when I started there was only one PhD student working, so most of the research projects were stuck. I am a very proactive and energetic person and I always try to give suggestions or ways to optimise experiments but my PI never listens (that's another issue, he does not like to optimise any new experiment, he thinks it is a waste of time and resources, and we actually end up wasting more resources in repeating experiments that are not working). He gets easily angry and just wants us to do exactly as he says (even though he usually forgets what he said). I am not sure how to proceed. Should I just wait a little longer to see how things continue? should I enrol in a School before switching? or something else? I feel depressed and no longer feel like the happy and passionate student anymore. I have a deep love for research and I don't want someone to interfere negatively on this. A: A PI who is known to kick out some students, and graduate others after 10 (!!!!!) years, is not one you are likely well-placed with. I would certainly look into other labs. Leaving after such few months, when the period additionally was not officially grad school, might not be very hard. Just talk to other PIs, and, if possible, just profess greater interest in their topics as opposed to fleeing a colleague of theirs; it's better to leave on officially good terms, even if they weren't so good. However, you cannot expect to always have a thesis topic served on a plate, and for sure not right when you start your Ph.D. - at least judging this from the U.S. perspective (if you are elsewhere, ignore the first half of this paragraph as all my experience is with the U.S. system). In many fields, finding your topic is an important part of writing your Ph.D. You might want to ask around in other groups or labs how things are there. Some advisers (I call them 'drawer advisers' - "What should I work on?", and the adviser opens a figurative drawer with topics they could not pursue yet) will do this for you; others won't. You also should listen to suggestions, and it's a bit early to expect your "optimizations" to be really, and always of use. If you genuinely dislike the PI's approach, you should see this as another reason to consider another lab (and try to be reasonably patient there). The first version of this answer was wondering what exactly the adviser says or does which is upsetting. After your clarification, he seems unduly harsh, and I can see how that makes you feel depressed about your situation. I'm not convinced (yet) that this is because of sexism, but he sounds rude in ways that are simply not constructive for the close work necessary in a lab. Whatever the reason, it sounds bad, and I wouldn't take it. Some reasons (sexism for sure) could allow you to officially complain using your university's grievances procedures, but that's not a great start 4 months in. Really, ask around, and see what else is out there. If nothing works at your current school, consider a gentler Ph.D. program approach with a period of coursework first, at another university, maybe in another country, a larger program size, and the almost inevitable student bonding which can be your support network.

Q: Papers written with the sole purpose of finding flaws in someone else's paper This question is based on a paper I came across a couple of years ago written by a famous professor who had developed a method to solve a certain problem. His method was not the first or the only method but it has some advantages and it is widely used in industry. The paper I came across was written with sole purpose of finding flaws in a method for solving the same problem that someone else had published 15 years later. Regardless of who was right, is this the proper way to deal with a flawed paper? This seems a bit weird to me. Do journals even normally publish such papers? Aside from citing the (presumably) flawed method, he also specifically named the authors in the abstract. This worries me a bit because I plan to publish another method of solving the same problem soon, and although I have confidence in my work I don't think it's bullet-proof. I feel that if such a paper was written about my research it could have a significant negative impact on my future career if that was what popped up when you googled my name. A: Whether papers like this will be published depends on the journal and the editor. It usually is preferable to show how a problem can be solved correctly. However, it might be well justified to solely point out weaknesses in existing work. Keep in mind that very few things are actually "bullet-proof". The more you know about a method (new or old) the more this will become obvious. Most methods have their limitations. Newton's laws are still "pretty good" although Einstein and others have shown their limitations. If you have confidence in your new method, you will probably highlight the advantages it has over existing methods in your paper. However, you should also be open about the limitations of your own contribution. Be clear about what your method can and cannot do and where and when it is applicable. In being honest about your own work you are making a true contribution to science. However, if you’re starting to have severe second thoughts about your method, it might be better to double check what you're doing. Talk to other people in your field and openly discuss your concerns before publishing. As long as you don't over-egg your own contribution you will be close to bullet-proof. It won't be bad for your reputation or career if somebody were to find a weakness in your work and improve your method or the knowledge of the field. That's part of how science works. You can only make contributions to the best of your current knowledge and move on when you have new information. The only thing negative for your career would be to ignore new evidence and trying to hide past mistakes. A: It depends. If a method is well-known, but flawed (be it widely used in industry or not), then someone should point out its flaws. Not only is this the right way to progress science, but - depending on the applications - not doing so can be downright dangerous - let's say the method is used in clinical trials, or to hedge risk. A paper that dismantles an old one strikes me as the right approach, naming authors necessary as the method is associated with them. If the new method might replace the old one, the proper rebuttal would be publication - ideally in the same journal. Where is the 'It depends?' The new paper should be civil, fact-based, and not personal, of course. It's about using a method properly, not about disparaging competing researchers. Additionally, if a new paper - like yours, say - is only an alternative method, not one that corrects errors, then the old paper should be part of the literature review, and the merits and dis-merits of the new paper highlighted, as well as situations where one or the other performs better, should this apply. Papers like this certainly exist, and can be famous. Here is an example by David Kreps (Stanford GSB), which cast doubt not on a particular paper, but on an entire then-popular sub-discipline. It was certainly not written for any purpose other than academic curiosity, and a desire to question the current state of the art. While this is not exactly the same situation, I think it compares in spirit. A: That someone tries to find flaws in your work does not mean they are trying to be "mean" or to belittle your work. It means you did something that seemed to be good and important enough for someone else to bother trying to investigate and improve it. Then the rational reaction is you should feel honored instead of sad.

Q: What is the circumstances will the Editor consider rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted? We have a medical paper under revision and we hope to be accepted soon. In submitted version, last author is head of department and who is the one who had the original idea. He proposed to be first author after acceptance. But current first author has done the most work. We are preparing to write a letter to journal. Is there any ethical issue in changing author order as I mentioned above? Under what circumstances will the Editor consider rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted? A: I do not think that the editor will have an issue as long as all other authors (or even corresponding author) have approved the change. To be honest, it is not up to him who to include, omit or lay the order of authors. After all, he is an editor who (most likely) does not know who contributed the most and who did not! To be honest, I have been in a similar situation, and there was not an problem at all. Ethically speaking, why does the dept. head want to make this change now (giving that the 1st author has done most of the work)? And why he agreed to be the last author at the first place? Why is he changing the order after the paper has been accepted? I understand that a lot of politics take place in determining authorship order. Unfortunately, in most cases, the person with the most influence tend to get stuff his/her way! But, I do not think that this is ethically right.

Q: Graduate application: Institutions that I have attended I am applying for a Master's degree program, and in the application I'm asked to list the institutions that I have attended and to attach the transcript for each. I have attended school A for a Bachelor degree in a related discipline to the program I am applying for. But later, I attended another undergraduate School B which is completely irrelevant to my major. It would take me a while to get a transcript from school B. My question is: Must I mention School B in my graduate application? Or should I just mention A since it is the one relevant to my major and the program I'm applying for ? A: Safest stance: mention both. School B may be "irrelevant to my major", but mentioning it is going to add to the application. Though we are talking about an application here, and not about a CV, something related happens in a typical CV too. You assign more significance to stuff that is more relevant to your major, you put a general heading Other relevant information, and include other not-so-relevant bits over there. Over here, you need not put a separate heading. but still, mentioning it (with a clear pronouncement that you've done it though it ain't directly relevant to your major), can only add to the application. What do you lose by mentioning it! As far as the issue of transcript from B is concerned, apply for the same - that would serve the purpose of authentication. If there isn't enough time to get it before the application deadline, write an email to the department saying that you have applied for the same on ( insert date here ), and some delay in receiving it is anticipated. If possible, you can forward the application (for the transcript) too, along with this email, to serve as a direct confirmation. Maybe, you can also add that you will communicate the same as soon as it is received. That would be a correct and safe statement. And I don't think your masters-degree-school will consider it a wrong stance, since the crux of their decision will certainly not be based on this part. This is only going to be a point in your favor (if it does count at all), but certainly isn't the bone of contention for your application.

Q: Mentioning future work, that is now complete I am presenting a paper at a computer science conference. The paper I submitted to the conference mentioned future work that would significantly enhance the utility of the method. This work was work that was always planned to be part of the same "project" as the work in the paper, indeed the conference paper is presented as a part way step towards doing X, and the future work is what takes it all the way. The extension was quite involved (and not quite complete when I submitted the paper for review). They day before I left for the conference that work was "completed", in that a journal article about it was submitted for review. Now when I present at the conference, in the conclusion I want to mention the future work – at least to the extent that it was described in the conference paper. Should I go into more detail? Should I even mention that "This work is now complete, and is under review for publication"? A: The material is highly relevant to your presentation so you don't need to ask people on the internet whether it should be included. You can and should mention it. Your talk should be based on the current best understanding of the subject, whether that comes from your conference paper or from a subsequent journal submission. It would be silly to give a talk about how, for example, your experiments show that gravity causes apples fall from trees and you're planning future experiments about its effect on other fruit, if you'd already done those experiments and, in fact, submitted a journal paper about how gravity causes all massive objects to be attracted to one another. Indeed, I've often been to conference talks where people have presented stronger results than they'd originally submitted. That's just a natural consequence of the submission deadline being some time in advance of the conference. In a comment, you mentioned that you were worried because the originally submitted material has been peer-reviewed but the more recent material hasn't. That's a legitimate concern but not, I think, a serious one. Conference reviewing is very much "PeerReview lite™" and reviews are more at the level of "There's nothing obviously wrong with this and I think it's interesting enough to be in the conference." Journal reviewing aims more towards "As far as I can see, this is correct." Since your original submission was of an appropriate standard, it's very likely that the additional material is of a similar and acceptable standard. Given that you were confident enough to submit that material to a journal, you should be confident enough in its correctness to tell people at the conference about it.

Q: What to do during the first stages of your PhD program? Fresh from undergrad, I will be starting a math PhD program this upcoming fall in the United States. After several conversations with math professors and current PhD students, I noticed that several people advised having a sense of "urgency" right from the very start of your PhD program. Most recommended working to complete preliminary exams as soon as possible, but there was some variance in their opinions about when to jump into your thesis. One professor recommended "courting" potential thesis advisers by doing research projects with a professor or two during the first couple summers. Do you agree with this call for urgency? If so, how do your recommend attacking those first 2-3 years of a (pure) math PhD program? Is it ever too soon to decide on your thesis topic? Recall that I do not have a master's, although I have taken three graduate-level algebra courses. A: I'm a third year, and I have found it immensely helpful to get started with research as quickly as possible. The thing is, a lot of times you get stuck in mathematical research, especially when you're first starting out. Also, you will have a harder time finding a concrete problem then you'd think. Additionally, you could use your research to guide which classes you take (at least after quals). Lastly, making progress is hard and takes time. This means that the best way to do research is to always have a research problem. It may not be your main focus, your main focus may be your exams, but if over your first two years you've spent random times thinking about a specific problem (and have geared your studies towards a problem), you can begin to make a lot of headway. So I highly suggest you start the research process. Talk to some advisers. Find something that interests you. Read some papers in your free time. Use this to find an interesting problem. Talk about this with someone who researches the area and now you have an adviser. And just start thinking about it. This is all pretty leisurely and can be done in your "free time" between classes, after classes, etc. Don't worry about the time consuming parts (actually writing down solid proofs), just get your mind churning. When exams are done, you'll be surprised how ready you are to write what you've come up with. Even if you haven't solved much, you have likely narrowed down a clear path of where you want to go and what you want to prove (and have an intuition as to why you think it's correct). Write down that path as a "homework problem" to yourself, and now you're full-time research. (Some people will tell you to wait until you can understand your project. Honestly, I didn't understand what I was doing (stochastic dynamics) for about half a year. After finally taking the classes on subjects related to the field, I can say that classes wouldn't've helped much. The only way to get into a research project is to just start doing it, and keep trying different books/resources until you understand all the background. Classes help, but less than you'd think.) A: I think the relevant sense of urgency would reasonably be about engagement with serious mathematics, not necessarily keeping a pretense that one has "started research" at a quasi-expert level. Nor do I personally see urgency in "passing exams", since that is a typically very-limited enterprise, but might take long enough that one's original interests, enthusiasm, and motivations are forgotten, which would be a bad thing. And, yes, standard coursework tends to suffer from so much inertia that it is not reliably helpful. But that is not to say that there's little to learn. In principle, sure, one can learn everything needed from papers, books, etc., whether physical or electronic. However, there is so much of this material that some guidance is good. Preferably expert guidance, rather than novices-leading-the-novice. In particular, in terms of "choosing research problems", while it's good to follow up on one's enthusiasms, one should not be surprised to discover that, very likely, an enthusiasm based on just-a-little information inexpertly chosen is ... naive. Of course! Seemingly natural research problems are all too easily accidentally intractable, or perceived as routine exercises by experts, or of no interest to experts, etc. If one is independently wealthy and just doing math for personal satisfaction, none of this matters. However, if a PhD is in part warm-up to making a living as professional mathematician, the expert-standards do matter, however artifactual they may be. (The issue of "understanding" one's "project" is ambiguous! One may doubt on general principles that one understands fully, indeed, or suspect that one understands to-some-extent naively. That's entirely reasonable. I would claim that much of the work done to finish a PhD in mathematics these days amounts to getting up to speed on techniques and viewpoints that experts might declare "standard" or "routine"... since, after all, some facility with such methods does sometimes enable one to do things that would seem amazing or unbelievable from a more low-tech viewpoint. After all, that's most of the point of sophisticated methods and ideas.) So: the urgency is to interact with experts as early as possible, yes. But, again, it is not accurate to say that this excludes coursework, nor includes it, either. It does not exclude or include following one's own curiosity. It is a separate thread.

Q: Journal requests reviewers' comments from previous submission to other journals Someone I know is submitting her work to a scientific journal. As part of the submission process she is requested to include in the cover letter the reviewers' comments, should the manuscript had already been submitted to other journals previously. The journal's rationale for such a request is that this expedites the acceptance process. How is this information used by the journal in the acceptance process? What are the pros and cons of providing this information? A: I haven't encountered this myself, but as an editor, I think it would work in the author's favour if: The review comments were generally positive, but the first submission was to a higher impact journal with a very high bar for acceptance; or The review comments were mixed, but the authors have convincingly addressed all the major criticisms in revision the manuscript before submitting it to the second journal. In this case, the author benefits because the editor and reviewers for the new journal are likely to treat the paper as a revision rather than an initial submission, so the re-review may be faster and requested revisions may be more likely to be minor. It would work against the author if: The review comments were very negative or impossible to address in revisions; or The authors have chosen not to revise the manuscript and respond to reviewers' comments; or The original submission was sent to a journal that the editor of the second journal believes has low standards for acceptance. In this case, as an author, I would be inclined not to comply with the request.

Q: Cannot reproduce what I have learned or memorised I am an Accountancy senior level student. My issue is due to lots of information in the books I tend to forget about every specific topic and heading even if I compile notes and memory aids. Reason being that in these professional studies anything can be asked in exams from anywhere. So how do I remember small details at this stage? A: Your question reminds me of the old joke "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" To which the response is the same, "Practice, man, practice." You will be expected to know this stuff when you graduate. When studying any subject, there will be a wide variety of rules and formulae you must learn. Normally, when a teacher is trying to get the students to learn them, the students are given exercises to practice them, or scenarios to apply them. Learning best works in groups, so if you can find someone with whom to study that should help. You can practice with each other reading your answers to see if you understood correctly. If you do not have an exercises or scenarios to use, ask your teacher. But in the end, it is all about practice. A: Best advice I have ever gotten from my adviser: don't consider reading as work. You can convince yourself that you've learned a lot from reading. However, if you can't close the book and re-write what you just read from memory, you didn't learn it. So only count what you do, not what you read. So go do it. I don't know how you'd just go practice accounting, maybe get an internship? Yes, it will be hard at first, but after banging your head against a wall and re-reading your books, you'll find out how to do it. And once you do it for real, you'll never forget how to do it. A really similar case is learning to program. People ask me which books I read to learn all the programming languages I use and all sorts of questions like that, then they "study up" on the language to remember all of its features, and months later are trying to tackle the problem. I did this at first, but I never really learned how to code until I started freelance web development. When I had a markup due the next day, I was like "how do I do _______ in Javascript?". Google and Stack Exchange helped a lot. I found ways to do things. Now my own code is my source of knowledge on how to do things. All (okay, most) of the time I sat there reading the Javascript book was a waste of time. In total, I think the biggest thing to get over is the anxiety that you don't know how to do it. You learned enough of it to figure it out / remember it as you need it. That's all you need. Start doing it.

Q: Are you supposed to come up with a thesis problem on your own in math? It seems like every other graduate student I know is working on some problem that their advisor has suggested, and I've just been spending a year reading papers and trying to think of a problem for myself. Is something wrong here? Are you supposed to come up with a thesis problem on your own? I am only looking for answers which are specific to pure math. I have friends in compsci and various sciences, and their research lives are not similar to mine at all. Individual background: I am interested in an area of math which has a similar flavor to the one that my advisor works in, but is quite different. My advisor thinks that this area is a good one to work in and knows of some of the major results, but doesn't know any of the details of the proofs or what people are working on now. I am finding it very hard to come up with good problems on my own. I can come up with ideas for problems, but I cannot judge whether they are interesting to other people who work in this area or feasible at all. I also can't tell for sure whether something has been done before, as I have to rely on mathscinet since I am not an expert in my field and do not have experts to talk to. I think these are the things that an advisor should be able to help with, but right now I feel like I'm just all on my own, even though I meet with my advisor frequently to check in. I also feel like I'm getting behind in graduate school because I still haven't found a single problem to work on after two years. A: There's nothing necessarily wrong. There are different ways to a thesis. Many advisors expect students to come up with their own problems and others don't. For certain fields/people this is easier than others, but in general finding good problems is hard and takes time. Choosing good problems to work on is a large part of being a good mathematician. Often experts who give problems to students will consult with other experts before giving a thesis problem or before deciding on whether to work on something themselves. There are many successful mathematicians who wanted to do something in a different area than their advisor. However, it is a bit riskier, as you seem to realize, for several reasons: it may be hard to find a problem, you want to make sure what you do isn't already known, you may want some perspective/guidance, you want to make sure what you do is interesting, ... Here are some things you can consider, in no special order: Look for a secondary advisor. You should of course ask your advisor what he thinks about this, and he may be able to suggest some people. Go to conferences/workshops/etc in this area (also local seminars if possible) and meet people and talk to them about ideas. You shouldn't expect someone to give you a problem, but if you have some general ideas for things to try, they may have valuable specific suggestions. See if you can visit an expert at another institution. Again, talk to your advisor about this and perhaps he can make suggestions. If you know how to do some things, you can just do them and write them up, then send them to experts and ask for feedback (is this known? is it interesting?). Do your thesis in your supervisor's area, and then you can consider doing work in this other area later. At the minimum, talk to your advisor about your concerns about feeling "lost." That's one of the things they're there for.

Q: Doing a math PhD with a great deal of student debt If you have undergrad / master's degree student loans, but are fortunate enough to get into good PhD programs (with funding), how do you practically manage your debt situation? A: A few things to address. First, note that a Ph.D is not a good financial choice. There are plenty of articles you can Google for, I'll link one but there's plenty more. Another thing to note is that the academic job market isn't that great, there is a problem with many people getting stuck in postdoc and adjunct positions, though there is data to show it's not as bad for mathematicians. If you are choosing to do a Ph.D, make sure you understand that it will not help you increase your wealth, but you're choosing this because it's a career path you wish to pursue. Keeping this in mind, you choose to do a Ph.D and it's hard to find money. Financial advice helps, but when your income is low, the best help is to find more income and spend less money. What can you do? One thing to note is that in many ways you have your hands tied. Many times fellowships and departmental funding will have a requirement that you cannot have other sources of income, so having a night job is usually not an option (speaking in terms of the US). Thus you have to make do finding small amounts of help every way possible (always check with the administration that it's okay!). Small savings add up. Here are some things I found: Find free food. Find the seminars which have food, and go. You can also use this to network at the same time, and/or use this as your downtime. Find extra teaching / tutoring jobs. If your funding is a fellowship, they may let you TA as well for a bit extra cash. If you are already a TA, you can tutor local K-12 students in math for quite good pay. Another good place to look is at on-campus workshops that could use your talent. You can tutor / help out with programming workshops and other on-campus initiatives. These normally will pay minimum wage, but it also adds to your CV and again, everything adds up. At my university, there are some paid positions in the graduate student council. It's an interesting experience where you will have to take some time lobbying state governments and other outreach activities. Again, builds the resume and brings in some cash. Live on-campus and don't have a car. Use the fact that you need rides as time to catch-up with people. You'll be doing math so often that it will be nice. Try to get a living wage by doing something applied. This depends on your interests, but one thing that most mathematicians don't know is that salaries in different departments can be vastly different. At my university, students in the School of Biological Sciences get almost double the pay of math students. This is due to differences in salaries set by NIH vs NSF. Could you do the same kind of research in a Mathematical/Computational Biology program? Or find an adviser that could pay for you at a salary closer to bio students? This can make a huge difference. Even if you want to do something "pure", take a good look into this. There are applications for any math if you look hard enough, and so it's a balance between choosing to do what you want to do and what the general public thinks is more valuable (whether they are right or wrong...). It's at least something to think about. Find award money. Many times there are monetary awards for best posters, best presentations, etc. Most of these are more "outreach" types of presentations, i.e. not for mathematicians, but some university-wide project partnered with industry. Look out for these and have a cool "my math for the general public" presentation ready. Eat cheap. Get a big rice cooker and have that be the big part of each meal. It'll help cut down on costs. Don't do it alone. Live with friends / family / significant other. Eat together. Buy in bulk from Costco with others and share the savings. Plan ahead for summers. Plan to do extra teaching, or look into things like GRIPS which can give a supplemental summer income if you have a summer fellowship. You'd have to check with your adviser and the administrators that this is okay with the terms of your fellowship. Understand your health benefits. Many universities give you health care as part of the funding. In addition to the standard health benefits, my university has extra goodies like an on-campus dental care where you can get a free dental cleaning every 6 months. Using these kinds of services will help you stay healthy without spending much. A: In the US, if you have federal student loans, you can defer the loan during graduate school, meaning that you don't have to make payments as long as you're in graduate school. However, depending on the details of the loan, interest may still be accumulating, and you may end up making bigger payments when you eventually start paying off your loans. This kind of deferment doesn't apply to private loans, and you should think carefully about what it will mean in terms of your payments after graduate school, but lots of students take advantage of deferment.

Q: Timing and length of 'author response phase' I've submitted my first scientific paper to KDD, an academic conference with a decision deadline of May 12, 2016. However, before decisions there is an "author response phase" (see below). I'm a bit surprised that we haven't heard from the reviewers yet as there is only about 5 weeks from now (Apr 3) to the decisions deadline. Is this normal? Also, how many days are authors usually given to formulate a response? It seems like we'll have very limited time so I'm slightly concerned with how intense the author response phase will be (seeing as I also have other ongoing projects). Papers will be reviewed by members of the KDD program committee and decisions will be emailed to all authors by May 12, 2016. Note that there will be an author response phase between submission and decisions. A: It's still relatively rare for conferences to have an author response period at all, and when it happens, it's typically very different from the response to a journal submission. For a journal, you are expected to submit a revised version explaining how you've changed things to deal with reviewer criticism. For a conference, on the other hand, the author response period is typically more an opportunity for quality control on reviewers, in which the authors get a chance to say things like: "Reviewer #3 claims that this paper should be rejected because we didn't do experiments, which we find confusing because several key experiments are presented on pages 4-5." The program chairs then use this review/rebuttal pairing to make decisions on which papers will be accepted and whether they will need shepherding to ensure quality of the camera-ready (for those conferences that use shepherding). As such, the response time is typically quite short, often only around a week, and typically happens not long before decisions are scheduled to be sent.

Q: Is it ok to write a follow-up paper for a paper which has been accepted but not available online yet? My field is image processing and computer vision. I wrote a paper and presented it in a conference in November 2015. The paper is yet to be available in IEEE Xplore. Now, I've written a follow-up paper which describes an improved version of the method which was presented earlier. Does the fact that the paper is still not available in Xplore, affect my submission in anyway? The conference does not allow submission of any supplemental material, so I also cannot attach the previous paper as a supplementary material. Can somebody help me regarding this? Moreover, I've read that putting reference in abstract section is generally not recommended, however, in my case I have put a reference to my previous paper in asbtract because I'm mentioning that this is a follow-up work which shows an improved version of method presented in [previous_work]. Please help. A: It is definitely OK to write a follow-up paper even though the previous paper has not been published yet. There is no requirement to wait. When you submit your new paper for review, you need to give the reviewers the opportunity to compare your old paper against the new paper. If you submit to a journal that allows attachments, putting the old paper there would be an option. Another option would be adding a private URL to the bibliography entry of your older paper, or to cite a preprint of your paper instead (if is already available).

Q: How do you organize your academic papers? I have nearly 1750 papers in PDF on one folder, all pertaining to medical research. What's the best way to organize them? I have thought about creating one folder for every subject/sub-category, but I want to know if there's anything more efficient that many academics use. A: I highly recommend a software to manage this like Endnote, Zotero, or Mendeley. The last two are free if your library is small enough (depends on the size of the PDFs). That will make things much easier by cleaning up the metadata and helping you use search tools to find the right papers. In each of these software, you can also sort the papers around. The key is that within these software, you can put a paper into multiple folders/categories/groups/whatever else they call it. I use this liberally. Note that the software will keep the reference as one reference with multiple links, and so if you do things like annotate or add notes to the file they will be visible at all locations where you can find the paper. Before doing anything make sure the metadata is all correct. You can always last resort with using the search bar if it is. First put each paper into a field. So I would make a folder like breast cancer, and then have a subcategory like metastasis if I have a bunch of papers specifically on that subtopic. Finding odd papers reduces to remembering what subtopic it's from, and finding that subtopic folder within the right topic. If a paper works in multiple different places, I put it in each place. Then add the papers to project folders. I make a master folder for each project, and subfolders for different parts of the project, put the appropriate references. The software can now automatically generate a file with all of the references for the paper which helps with citing. Using this method, you can always dive down into a folder/subfolder that makes sense, either by project or by field, then sort by title/author/year/etc (and easily switch between these), or use the search in the subfolder, and always quickly find what you need. But... you will need to take a day or two to set this up. That's a long and tedious task, but definitely worth it. Then I usually just do a minor fix up for new additions every few months to keep it tidy.

Q: Admitted to a masters in Cambridge - no scholarship! I was admitted to the MPhil masters program in "Advanced Computer Science" at Cambridge, UK, but unfortunately I wasn't offered a scholarship. I browsed the internet a bit, but as I'm not from England (though from the EU) I couldn't find any possibility of loans or studentships, that would cover the whopping 20000£ needed to cover fees and living costs for the 9 months the program takes. Does anyone here have any experience what possibility for funding exist ? Cambridge, as it seems, of at most grant me a bursary which does not nearly cover theses costs. Would it be a good idea at all to take a loan (supposing that that's possible) ? A: Here is the actual list of funding sources that may be available to you. http://www.graduate.study.cam.ac.uk/finance/funding But you should give their financial aid office a call. They're the definitive source for this kind of information, and they should be able to give you advice that is not listed on their web site. Since you're in an EU country, your tuition should be comparable to what the British people pay. And because you're coming from an EU country, funds may be available to you solely because of that reason. And yes, loans can be a good investment, especially for what you'll be studying. Obviously, if you were studying something like Archeology or Art History, I would try to steer you away from taking loans. A: If: you have quite low debts currently, and the evidence is that this degree would considerably increase your expected earnings (don't just assume it - tackle it like a research question: try to find the best evidence you can that's the opposite of what you currently believe, and assess it), and the non-completion rate of the course (including drop-outs and exam failures) is not too low then it may make sense to take on the debt. Providing a list of possible sources of funding is out of scope for this site, but you will find such lists across the web: individual Cambridge colleges, charities, organisations to promote international study, and commercial sponsors may all be options.

Q: Shall I explain to grad school admissions that 'the first year didn't count' (UK)? I am considering applying for US PhD Program. In the UK, at many unis the first year does not count towards degree classification. Is this known in the US? Will they be wondering why I stated I have X %, but they calculate Y % ? Shall I explain to grad school admissions that 'the first year didn't count' towards my degree classification? A: For the benefit of non UK members, the first year marks of a degree at a UK university is not used for calculating a student's final grade. The only requirement to continue on the degree is achieve at least 40%. It is therefore not uncommon for students to achieve marks in their first year which do not reflect their full abilities, and while it does not affect their grades it can affect how future employer or post graduate admissions view their application! If this is the case you should address this in your personal statement. Tell them how you gained a new perspective and work ethic after your first year at university and demonstrate this with your improved results in your subsequent years along with appropriate participation in university clubs and societies. If however your first year marks are consistent with your subsequent years, there is no need to mention it. Your application is about you as a potential student, not about explaining the intricacies of UK grade calculations. Edit: The reasoning behind only requiring a mark of 40% for the first year is to allow students some adjustment to a more independent study style and also to give young adults entering university the freedom to have new life experiences outside of academia. The prevalent philosophy at UK institutions is that academic achievement is not the only goal of attending university (though it is obviously still important!) Since the progression of students enrolled on a degree is decided on a department by department basis its impossible to find a single decree stating this how all UK universities operate it is by far how the majority work. Provided below are links to progression guidance from 2 UK universities, stating that only pass marks (40%) are required and that this mark will not be used to calculate degree classifications. University of York Progression, University of Durham Progression A: I've served on a PhD admissions committee as a student member, and we considered many different kinds of extenuating factors that might explain low GPA. That committee would certainly have appreciated the info. I would mention it, being careful to frame it in a way that portrays myself as a successful future researcher. The concern of a PhD admissions committee is primarily, "Will this individual successfully complete our program?" and secondary, "Will they be a leader in their field of research after completing our program?" What you do not want to do is imply that you blew off the entire year because you didn't have grades to motivate you. No grad school wants someone who's primarily motivated by grades. Even if your PhD program puts emphasis on grades in the program (mine doesn't, but I think the more STEM fields might), you won't have grades to motivate you after you complete the degree. So mention it, but tell a valid story--something like: "I've always been more concerned about learning than grades, although grades are important. In the UK they do _____, and this was ideal for me because I could get settled and embrace all the learning opportunities of my university without having to worry too much about a summative assessment. [Give an example of something valuable you learned that first year.] So I can understand your need to look at grades, but I'd point out that grades weren't my primary concern my first year because of the UK system, and that my GPA after that point was _____. I don't think this feature of UK higher ed is well known in the US.

Q: PhD programme dilemma: Doing it in a good faculty with strong supervisor or weaker supervisor but more interesting project? In the past days I was accepted in two PhD programmes about biomedical imaging processing and I have a big dilemma about which one to choose. Both of them are in similar biomedical imaging fields but the mathematical and computational techniques to develop are not the same. Lets call them Phd program A and B. I find PhD programme A really motivating, fits my interests and I like the mathematics involved in it. Although, the institution where it is done is a good place to do research the supervisor has just ten years of research experience, not big amount of citations and the journals in which he publishes have not a big impact factor. About PhD programme B, I do not find it so interesting and I guess that after some time I could loose some motivation but it is also fine (in fact, if programme A would not exist I would accept programme B without too much hesitation). Nevertheless, the supervisor has a huge experience, he publishes in good journals (like PNAS) and has contributed to the writing of some books in the field. Moreover, the research centre is quite tough/challenging (there would be more pressure but I find it necessary for doing good research) and students there are motivated and enthusiastic. About other aspects of the programmes, like country or funding both of them are more or less the same, good public funding but perhaps I prefer the country of project A but it is just a guess. Has anyone faced the same situation? What would you do? Perhaps I am missing some important point? A: Here are some good things to think about. Research topics look very different when you dig deep into them. Right now A's work might look sexy, but you can get 3 months in and realize details that make you understand why it's not "hight impact". The reverse can happen with B: when you actually start doing it you may find it more interesting than you thought (this is quite common!). The fact that B's research generates so much buzz means I think it's likely that when you learn more you'd find it more interesting, or you might not. Your Ph.D is a long hard process where you will have plenty of doubts. I personally believe the only way to keep your sanity is to be working on a project you truly love. I am saying that as a current student where right now things are tough but I'd never leave because this is the only thing I want to be doing, while I hear others who are almost ready to quit because it's a lot of work and the reward is quite far away. I know I'd be reconsidering what I am doing if I didn't love my projects. You will do much better work and put more time into what you find interesting. When you say the research centre is tough/challenging, did you get any bad vibes from the students? Trust your gut instincts. They won't say anything bad about their boss when he's around. The only thing you'd hear on a visit is little sour notes dropped around. Pick them up and understand them. Look at the professor's CV. Are his/her students doing well after graduation? If they aren't, that's a big warning sign. Have you asked B to explain to you why his/her work is interesting? Sounds silly, but that's probably the most common thing B has to do. It may totally change your perspective. A: Based on what you've said I like option A. But of course you know more about this situation than can be conveyed in a post, and there is more information you can find out, to help make the right decision. For context, I am a math PhD student just about to graduate. Some points for option A: In my opinion, the most important thing in pursuing a PhD is to be passionate about the work. I have known people who went about it differently, picking a topic that they thought would gain them a reputation so they could later do something interesting, but most of the time these people end up either not graduating, or taking a very very long time to graduate, or settling for a mediocre thesis just to get it over with (which makes it hard to find a job). What you are about to do is extremely challenging, and you need that personal drive to get through it. Now, you can pursue something you are passionate about with both A and B. But the fact that you already know a project that gets you excited with A outweighs that the supervisor at B has a better reputation. Especially since the adviser at A is young, maybe s/he just does not have a good reputation yet. Someone interested in what you are interested in is valuable, and more rare than you may expect, and a collaboration can bring good things for both of you. When someone has a good reputation in academia, it usually is not a result of their skills as a mentor, or in finding jobs for their students, or in helping students find their place in the community. A professor might be good at those things, but it is not required for them to be known as a great scientist or mathematician. Nonetheless a professor with such a reputation is going to attract a lot of students, often for the wrong reasons, and they must compete for his/her attention, also often for the wrong reasons. You don't want to join a fleet of satellites. Schools that are concerned about their reputations are less likely to encourage exploration of unconventional topics. Everything I've said though is coming from my more categorical impressions. You have the ability to get more information, and maybe what I've said does not even apply. So my main advice is to get more info until you are confident about a choice. One of the best ways to do that is to visit each school over a weekend and, in particular, buy some of the supervisors' students a few drinks.

Q: Should I disclose to the editor that I am reviewing a similar paper by different authors for a different journal? About a year ago I received a request to review a paper from author X in journal A. The paper uses a hype tool T to solve a common problem, which is good, but due to some shortcomings in the implementation I recommended to revise the manuscript. The editor followed my recommendation. About a month ago I was contacted by an editor in journal B asking me to review a manuscript from unrelated authors Y. They use the same hype tool T to solve the same problem. I accepted to review it, and mentioned that I had reviewed a similar paper for a different journal (without naming it). It is now due in a couple of days. Now to my surprise I just received a request to review a revised manuscript of author X from journal A (I thought X had given up on it since more than a year passed). I would like to accept but won't be able to deliver the review before 3-4 weeks. This is a "winner gets it all" kind of situation. The paper that gets published first wins, and I think would be ground to drop and reject the second paper as not really novel any longer. (No plagiarism here, and nothing unethical done by the authors; just an obvious answer to an old question with hype tool T. I had myself thought of it before hearing from A, and discarded it only due to lack of time.) How should I deal with that? Should I disclose to the respective editors that I am reviewing similar papers? I suspect that would be a breach of the confidentiality. Should I have refrained to mention to editor of journal B that I had reviewed a similar paper in the past? Would it be a conflict of interest to review the revised manuscript from X? Should I decline the review? Also, should I inform the editor of the other journal once the first paper gets published? If so, how can I politely ask to be informed when the manuscript gets published without giving away that there is a similar manuscript out there? A: Simultaneous or independent discoveries happen often. If the paper A has a first submission date published, that should ensure paper A being fairly treated. Apart from that, I do agree with the other responses that actually discussing the situation with the editors (without disclosing mutually the authors) may be a good idea here. My purely personal view (others may disagree) would be that independent results which overlap temporally due to an unlucky accident both deserve publication. It was pure coincidence that in your case they ended up going via a single-person bottleneck. A: This exact situation is difficult to assess without detailed knowledge but the editors of the journals should be aware of the situation. Since each case is unique and we do not know the details it will be up to the editors to judge or take the matter further. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has one case on simultaneous publications that can be of interst to read. So the advice is: yes contact the editors and provide the information you can. They will then have to take action, compare manuscripts or whatever the deem necessary. Similar works have been published simultaneously before so it is not certain there is a violation lurking somewhere but it is unusual. A: There are many cases of simultaneous discovery. I don't think you need to interfere, unless there is reason to believe the second papers authors were referees on.the first, author overlap, dual submission or other plagiarism/unethical behavior. As far as I can tell, you have no reason to believe so? See: there is a good chance the first (or both) will be in print before one could have read the other. Then both have studied this "first" (does not sound like major breakthrough anyway).

Q: Can a person register a conference using someone else's credit card and still get IEEE membership discount? I am in a situation where my paper is accepted in IEEE conference and only one of the author is IEEE member. For IEEE members, there is some concession in the registration fee. Can that co-author register the paper using my credit card while availing the concession(which is only for IEEE members)? In case, this varies then, what would be the best way to proceed? A: Generally speaking, the name of the person registering does not have to be the same as the name on the credit card. You can pay for your co-author's registration if you want. the IEEE discount applies if the person registering is an IEEE member, regardless of who is paying. If your co-author is registering to attend the conference, it's fine for him to use your credit card (if that's what you want) and he can still get the IEEE discount, since he's an IEEE member. If you're the one registering to attend the conference, you can't get the discount if you're not an IEEE member.

Q: How to handle 2 years hiatus after PhD? One of my friend has a 2-years gap after completing his PhD in 2014, gap due to personal reasons, family-one mainly. He is now trying to get a postdoc position in electro-engineering. To me, this two-year gap is hard to justify as he has not produced any relevant papers, nor really gained much sought skills as he had to take care of his family. I'm not familiar with academia but I'm familiar with recruitment in tech. I advised him to find an angle where he can put his two-years gap in a way that would work for him, instead of letting this 2-years gap being an hindrance. Except to be involved in side projects or do side researchs that he can put on a cv, to help him find a postdoc, are there any other things he can do to make his cv better and make this 2-years hiatus less visible? Many thanks for your feedback A: Universities are often very aware of the equity issues facing academics (usually women) who have career gaps due to family responsibilities such as maternity leave. A two-year hiatus is not ideal, but rather than trying to hide it in a CV, it might work in his favour if he lists it explicitly in his CV, e.g.: 2014-2015: career hiatus due to family care responsibilities. If he can be clear about what these caring responsibilities entailed, all the better, as people reading it will be more inclined to believe he is not bullshitting. E.g. 2014-2015: career hiatus to to family care responsibilities (primary carer for our baby, now in day care) or (caring for a terminally ill father) or (unavoidable primary care for a mentally ill sister, now recovered). It will probably help if he can make clear that these care responsibilities are now over, but if not, it is still worth being up-front. If your friend can add to this by showing evidence of relevant activity during the hiatus, this will help too. Activity could include publishing papers from his PhD or adding to his skills by completing Coursera courses. While looking for an academic position, your friend should also, if possible, improve his CV by working in a voluntary position in a research group -- perhaps the group with which he did his PhD or someone to whom his PhD supervisor can recommend him. This can usually be listed on the CV as an "adjunct" or "visiting" academic position. While acting in such a voluntary position, he should make sure he impresses the people he is working with to get favourable reference letters and should aim to be doing publishable work.

Q: How many references should be included in the bibliography of a Master thesis? Surprisingly, I have not found a similar question to mine - all I found was a question about the maximum number of citations per sentence. However, I am more interested in the total number of citations that is considered normal for a paper (to be more specific, a Master Thesis, which in my case will be around 60 pages of content.) I heard that about 1 - 1.5 multiplied with page count would be a good number of sources cited. I am asking because I am a little worried that I might have cited too many sources. A: There is no definite answer. It really depends on how much previous literature exists, how much of it you have reviewed and cited appropriately, and (loosely) what the word count of the document is. Page count can misleading, as some theses have many more figures and tables than others. No one is going to skip to the bibliography, think negative thoughts, and say "you have too many references!" without reading the document. If no individual part of the thesis could be considered as having too many citations, then the thesis as a whole has an appropriate number of citations. These related questions have answers as to how you can decide if a particular part of the thesis has too many citations. Maximum number of citations per sentence? Is there such thing as too many references for one paper? A: In addition to the other answer, this question is based on some slightly questionable premises, as seen in the sentence "the total number of citations that is considered normal for a paper (to be more specific, a Master Thesis, which in my case will be around 60 pages of content.)": In the communities of CS that I am familiar with, a Master Thesis of some 60 pages is not a paper. A paper is usually a document that concisely describes something on typically 5 to 15 pages (depending both on the paper type (short, full, journal, poster abstract, ...) and the layout. Hence, a Master Thesis is not comparable to a paper. Papers published in conferences (and maybe to a somewhat lesser extent, in journals) are usually bound to a very strict upper page count limit. When you have lots of interesting stuff to tell, there is only so much space left for references and you often have to skip citing some sources that you would have liked to include. Such a restriction usually doesn't exist in graduation theses such as Bachelor or Master theses. There may be a rough guideline for the expected number of pages, but exceeding that by a moderate amount (in the case you presented, I'd frankly say 80 pages instead of 60 is ok) if the content is worth it is not necessarily a problem - least of all if the extra length is caused by "additional info" such as the appendix or references rather than the core document. Lastly, there is no normal number of references because each topic is different. For some Master Thesis tasks, there may be a number of default works that should always be listed in the initial exposition of the general topic, which in itself already fill a page of references, whereas other Master Thesis tasks might not have such a "default list"; the general exposition is done with very few or without any references.

Q: How should you approach your adviser and tell him that he has a communication problem (Not his actual hand writing) I am currently working under an academic research adviser who is a very nice person and very knowledgeable but I think he has problem in communicating with others (myself included) that is hindering the research progress and outputs of his group. This problem is demonstrated on three fronts: 1. Poor handwriting His hand writing is very very messy, comparable to the figure above. I do not understand how anyone can understand him. Everyone else in the research group communicates using Latex or some other software to make the writing neat and understandable. Further, he never erases anything but just scratches things out. Can you imagine what scratches on messy hand writing look like? Even messier. I'd like to think that messy hand writing is linked with unfettered intellectual creativity but I just cannot understand anything that he writes and neither can anybody else. 2. Unclear presentation or slides. In my opinion slides should be made to the point, clear and concise. I found a random example not even related to my field of study to clarify what I mean: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2011/sargent-lecture_slides.pdf But his slides are routinely overloaded with equations and unclear graphics obviously cropped and pasted with no regard to background, positioning or anything. Simply put, the slides do not capture the main idea. And because of this reason he routinely go over time or skip large chunk of complicated equations during presentation, this causes 1/2 of the people to stop following him and it is very noticeable. 3. Unclear notation I think this one is quite serious because he routinely uses symbols that are a little ambiguous in their meanings. In fact his symbols seems to consistently go against whatever is currently in the literature. For example, people in my research field uses Greek alphabets for one thing but he uses it for something completely different. Also there are definitions he sort of made up on the spot that I thought were standard. I am honestly not sure whether I should just adopt his conventions or keep whatever other people have been using in this field. I think part of the reason is because he is from an older generation who is used to the paper and pencil type of work and is not very adapt with technology. I think he is also a very busy person so he has to come up with ideas and notations on the spot which causes conflict with the rest of the world. Is there a good way I can approach him to address these problems without offending him or hurt his feelings? A: I would advise you to approach him on a different base than he has a communication problem, namely on the base that you have a problem with his way of communication. Note the slight shift. Phrasing it that way eliminates the problem that you may accuse him of something or even offend him. For example, you would not say "your handwriting is poor" but "I have a hard time to read your handwriting and it costs me a lot of time to read it". Also, you would not say "your slides are unclear" but "I do not get the main idea from the slides and would find it helpful if [...]". Finally, instead of "your notation is unclear" you would say that "I consistently get confused since the book X uses the notation Y while you use Z". A: I can understand your frustration, I have an advisor right now that has some of the qualities you have mentioned (points 1 and 2)! Here is my take on your situation. Facts; He is an older and busy professor => I'm sure he has heard many complaints about these points before. I'm even sure his colleagues and dept. chair know that too! Guess what, he is still the same, he will be the same. My advise to you is learn how to adapt. My adivor's had writing is really bad and we (his PhD students) keep old drafts of his writing with marks up of words that we could not get the first time just in case we need to decode his writing from a current draft! We all faced this issue once we joined his team. We would go to his office just to ask on how to read certain mark ups he wrote on our drafts and papers! To be honest, we tried to introduce him to the very simple and friendly Word "track change" but he politely said that this is not the way to teach and correct drafts. He only requests hard copies of manuscripts to go over and only asks for the soft copy once the paper is ready to be submitted. Also, he gets annoyed if he sees any of us reading/reviewing a paper or a draft using the computer, he would simply shake his head and say, "Kids these days!" (smiling and in a funny way). Honestly, I used to hate that but now, this is what I do. I still use pencil and a hard copy of the paper I'm reviewing or writing. To be honest, my advisor is right in a way. I agree that it is not the best/optimum/environmentally friendly way to do research (by printing pages and pages of drafts), but papers really sound and look different when you hold them in your hands. As I said earlier, to each his own, but since you are his student, you do not have to agree with him/her all the time! But, to keep your work going and avoid delays and arguments, you might want to do things his/her way! I believe that each student should has his own scientific charisma, but so far you are still a student so you might change your views if you try new (or in this case old school) stuff! His note are all over the place and 1/2 the people stop following him and it is noticeable. If it noticeable to you, it must be noticeable to him/her too (during all his/her years of research and teaching)! Keep in mind that slides or presentations need to be somehow clear and easy to follow. But, they also do not need to be colorful and include cinematic effects! Perhaps to your advisor, having clean cut presentations is not that important. S/He cares about the science only. I would suggest that you offer to fix 1-2 of his presentations. Change them into something completely different. Arrange them in a way you would do your own presentations. Then, show them to him, perhaps he will like them and change the other slides (or most likely, will ask you to do change them). Unclear notation => read point 1 above again. Finally, being a graduate student is tough. The truth is, if you look closely, many PhD students turns to be like their advisers (in a way or two). How many of us have said "he (your advisor) does not know hat is he talking about?!" or "That does not make sense, he (your advisor) must have not read the previous page". But that is ok, I'm sure our students will say the same one day! Having daily contact with someone can and will change the way you do or see stuff. Simply put, try not to over think such things that are annoying you and focus on the positive aspects. Your advisor is a nice and knowledgeable guy! Trust me, this is a hard combination to have in an advisor!

Q: How is it possible to switch careers from undergraduate to graduate level in the US? I have read about many astounding career paths of scientists in the US. E.g. someone had a BSc in education and switched to physics in graduate school. How are such switches possible? In Europe I guess it's mostly so that such diverse careers can't be pursued without having had a reasonable exposure to the subject in college. One would have too many courses that are missing without prior knowledge so that they can't be put all in a Master's curriculum; thus, having had a specific subject is necessary as a major or minor in college...at least in Switzerland. How come that in the US such switches are possible? Or is it just that all necessary courses are put into the graduate(+PhD) program lasting in total almost a decade, in which case I wouldn't wonder that it's possible? A: My PhD was in neuroscience. When performing neuroscience research, there's a lot one needs to know: Biology: Starting with the basics, almost any course in neuroscience will have both macro- and microbiology of the human/animal bodies being studies. This includes topics at the molecular, cellular, and systems level. There's a non-insignificant chunk of anatomy to be learned as well. A specific focus will be spent on the biochemistry of neural transmissions, which involves a lot of... Physics: The principles of electromagnetism govern the firing of neurons. As such, a thorough understanding of both the chemistry and the physics leads to understanding neurons. To study these cells, people using implanted electrodes need to understand a fair chunk of circuitry, as the quality of their cellular recordings is dependent on them understanding impedance and amplification and such like that. People using surface monitoring (EEG/MEG) need to understand the basics of electromagnetism, which govern how the fields propagate and are measured. As an added bonus, they get to familiarize themselves with the signal processing of source localization as well. Wheee. Psychology/Sociology Some people study how the brain controls complex behavior, such as motivation, learning, addiction, planning, visual abilities, motor abilities, bla bla and bla. This works for both animals and humans, so there can be a lot of literature to cover. This doesn't begin to discuss the computational skills required to create and analyze experiments, or the statistical knowledge required to make sure you're not screwing up your analysis, or the writing (yes, that's a skill) knowledge required to write a paper that someone gives a poop about, or the public speaking skills required to give a conference talk. And that's just neuroscience. Long story short, successful researchers nowadays BECOME polyglot experts simply due to the highly cross-disciplinary nature of the fields themselves. Obviously, you don't need to be expert in all these fields, but you have to start somewhere. When it's all said and done, the person coming to neuroscience with a biology background is surprisingly not that far behind the person with a computational background, because they both have so much to learn.

Q: What does Graduate school mean: Master, PhD, or both? In the US one seldom reads about Master and much more about Graduate schools. I have the feeling that Graduate school can also mean doing a doctorate/pursuing a PhD degree; thus I am confused with the lack of clear separation here as it isn't a problem with the European distinction of Bachelor, Master, and Doctorate. Is there a general rule that can be applied to understand what educational level is meant? Like for PhD there is an department admission process required and for Master there isn't, or something like this? Moreover, one could say to have graduated from High school, from college, from Master's...from kindergarden if you want. Wouldn't it therefore be more logic not to use "graduate" when talking about some specific educational level and instead use terms such as Bachelor, Master, PhD? A: Graduate school refer to a school that offers advanced degrees (MS, PhD, or both), even if a school offers only MS degree, it is still called graduate school. I think med-schools are also called graduate schools (since they offer MD and OD degrees). There will always be some sort of an admission process. Student usually apply for MS program, finish it then join a PhD program. Although in some cases, students can combine MS and PhD together and save 1-2 semesters. A: In STEM disciplines at R1 universities (the big research universities) in the US students tend to go direct to PhD programs. The main reason is that usually PhD programs have some kind of funding whereas Masters programs are self-funded. Because PhDs are funded, their admissions process is more demanding. Usually there has to be some faculty that is interested in you or some other indicator to the department that you will have alternative funding during the later stages of your PhD. Leaving the PhD early in these cases results in a Masters degree which people colloquially call mastering out (some people do this intending to get only the Masters but not having to self-fund, though that is not looked at favorably by the institution). For some disciplines (for example, I see this in a lot of biology programs) there is ONLY a program for PhD students, with the option of mastering out. In some disciplines, after completing certain course/exam requirements you get a Masters degree "for free" along your way to the PhD. However, in other cases there are stand-alone Masters programs. These are called terminal Masters programs because they are meant to be the end of your time at a given university, i.e. not many people go from a terminal Masters to a PhD (at least in the same program. They will make you re-apply). Collectively, all of this is called graduate studies in the US. You can see how it's all muddled together. Note: Sometimes medical, business, or Law school are also lumped into graduate studies. More often they are termed professional school.

Q: How to tell my advisor that I am quitting my PhD and what to say to an employer about why I am leaving I got a job offer shortly after starting my PhD. So my question is: What should I say to my advisor about why I am quitting my PhD? Is it fair to tell her that I have accepted a job offer? And What should I say to an employer about why I am leaving my PhD? Will it not cause them suspect that I can't survive a PhD, let alone a job with them? A: This is pretty common in my field (applied math). Students see the amount of money they can be making, and see the amount of work a PhD is, and leave. Be cordial about it, but the institution (and potential adviser) will likely be very unhappy. Make sure you are confident in your choice before even mentioning it to your adviser. Because of this being a common issue, I know that for plenty of professors the moment you start speaking about industry you have already burned the bridge. As for what people in industry will think, I can't comment for them. Some will probably think you made a good conscious choice to not continue pursuing a PhD (just tell people about how the job market isn't that good). Others will think you dropped out. This is just such a personal thing. People will see it how they want to see it no matter how you tell the story. A: Chris's comment is spot on. Some other points: Aside from people being unhappy, you will be faced with a lot of pressure from your advisor(s) to remain in academia. In my experience, professors view it as a mark of personal failure when one of their students leaves academia for industry. Some of your classmates may respond in this manner also. It's always your choice whether you want to engage in conversation, listen to their points, or simply just say "this is my choice and that's that", but you should be aware that the conversations will happen. People in industry likely won't care either way. That said, it will be in your best interest to have a good reason why you're leaving. Simply saying "I had a chance to earn gobs and gobs of money" doesn't look good on you. Likewise, any sort of complaint against the program ("didn't like the research", "didn't like the advisor", "too slow") is bad. Your stated reason typically should include (1) interesting topics in industry, (2) personal demands (spouse was relocating), or (3) opportunity too good to pass up. Be optimistic about everything. If at all possible, stay on good terms with people in your academic department. Wherever you're going, you'll eventually be in a situation where people will need to be hired, and knowing people in the university can give you an early look at graduating students looking for positions. Don't consider this a burned bridge; try to leave on good terms, if at all possible.

Q: Level of detail when reviewing a PhD thesis - very picky (draft) reviewer I am currently finalizing my written PhD thesis. I think in practice it is often the case, that a PhD student has a formal advisor (often head of the lab, very busy) and then an actual advisor who is much more familiar with the PhD's work and progress. Often this actual advisor is a PostDoc and the student has regular meetings with him. This is also the case for me. With the PostDoc I have weekly meetings. I meet my formal advisor unregularly/randomly, about once a month. So, I finished a first complete draft of my thesis and handed it in to my formal advisor, because he is my official advisor. As expected my formal advisor sent the draft to my actual advisor. My formal advisor is often traveling and very very busy. So I did never expect him to read the full thesis, let alone providing detailed review of my work. The thing is, that I know that my actual advisor can be very picky about language stuff and how scientific texts are written. I know this from writing papers together with him which was always somewhat cumbersome due to his over-detailed reviews. His reviews were always very thorough causing some headache and also sometimes a shaking head on my side. So today I received a first review from him just for the introduction chapter which is about 15% of my thesis. His review is extremely detailed, he picks on each sentence, and often even words. He critisizes the word order of my sentences and questions every argument I make. He tries to be perfectionist. The result is for me, that I feel really bad when discussing the review with him. It is frustrating to get corrected that thoroughly and it makes me think, that I am too dumb for this. Moreover, I am sure that my quality of writing and lines of argumentation have a decent level of quality and I think he is over-interpreting most things. Of course, I try to not take the feedback personally, and see it as an opportunity to improve my work. However, I think his level of detail is a bit too much. It also means a lot of work for me (to correct everything) and I think, it will take at least 2 more months to hand in a final version. One example of his reviewing, which I know from a colleague of mine: My colleague needed to verbally express that two things are connected. The reviewer suggested to use the word link instead of connect. My colleague followed the advice and replaced all instances of connect with link. At the next reviewing iteration, the same reviewer suggested to replace all instances of link with connect again... So you know what I mean? It's just too much and he even seems to have different opinions when reading the same text a second time. I also want to make clear, that I am very sure, that my formal professor does not doubt my academic qualities. For instance, he is aware that I received a Best Paper Award for one of my papers and we always have nice discussions about different research topics. Hence, I think he would not deem it necessary to have my thesis reviewed that thoroughly. I think, if I would confront my formal advisor with the review of my actual advisor, he would be stunned. Finally, my question is: Is it normal that a thesis gets reviewed that thoroughly, even when the advisor knows me (and the quality of my work)? And more importantly: How should I proceed? I obviously want to get this done really quick. Of course, I know that reviews are essential to improve the quality of my thesis and I am willing to put in substantial amount of time. But I think it's too much, if I need to change (nearly) each sentence of what I have written... Should I talk with my formal advisor about that? What should I let him know? A: This type of question doesn't have a single correct answer, but many different approaches. To that extent, here's what I would do. There's two ways to go here: the difficult one, where you try to fight back, and the easy one, where you just make the corrections. Given that (a) this is a thesis, not a publication, making it essentially a single-purpose document unlikely to be referenced again in the future, and (b) the completion of the thesis is entirely dependent on this picky advisor saying that it's complete, I would DEFINITELY recommend just making the corrections. Stated differently: choosing to fight this will likely cause far more damage than choosing not to fight. Only caveat to the above is to only let this happen once or maybe twice per section. I.e., if this goes on for two rounds—i.e., if you make all his changes, and then he gives you another redlined document, where he essentially edits most of his own edits—then you're in infinite editing purgatory, and you'll have to work with him to figure out how to break the cycle and agree it's just good enough.

Q: Should you choose your committee members or should your advisor? The question of how to choose PhD committee members has already been asked and answered in general terms, but I have the following more specific questions regarding the choice: Is it more important that your advisor already know your committee members or that you do (e.g., your advisor knows them but you've never met them before vs. you know the member but your advisor doesn't have a strong or pre-existing relationship with them). Is it better to get someone in your discipline or someone doing more related work (e.g., if you're getting a computer science degree, you ask computer science faculty vs. you're getting a computer science degree but everyone except for your advisor is from the English department)? Should you pick people who are already invested/interested in you succeeding or is the dissertation process supposed to be a chance for you to win people over to your side? A: You first have to check to see what the university rules are for a Ph.D committee. Many universities have rules that limit the number of external members, the number of members not from the department, the number of members that are not "regular faculty" and so on. Assuming that you've checked all those constraints, then you should definitely discuss this with your advisor, who will have more experience in constructing committees in your area. Which brings up another issue: community norms. In your field of research, are there customary roles that committee members play ? that's something you need to discuss with your advisor. Finally, after all of the above, to answer some of your questions: Should you already know them? Not necessarily, although that helps with the first approach. It helps if they're familiar with your work even if you don't know them personally. Should they be doing research related to your dissertation topic? Not necessarily, but they should have some connection to your work, otherwise they won't be able to provide any kind of useful feedback for you. Should they be in your discipline? Definitely, unless your topic is interdisciplinary and you want the input from someone in the other discipline. Should they be selected more for how much they'll help you get a job? That's definitely a factor. It's not a critical factor for all members of your committee, but it can be a factor when looking for an external member. Ideally, if you're able to do some research with members of the committee, they can write a letter for you. Bottom line: talk to your advisor and discuss all of this with him/her Different members of the committee can play different roles. The mix is what's important A: There are many ways to build PhD committee, which depend on the local system (country, etc.) and your field. But, here are some general principles that should apply broadly. You need to bring a mix of highly competent yet diverse evaluators, with not too much proximity to yourself or your advisor lest it be thought that you are cherry-picking a partial (friendly) jury for your work. Is it more important that your advisor already know your committee members or that you do I don't think it's a very important part of the decision-making. Certainly, you don't want the advisor's best friend (or yours!), that could make people think you're scared of unbiased questioning. Is it better to get someone in your discipline or someone doing more related work Here's one of the factors that play a very important part, for me, in picking committee members. First, all members need to be able to have a good understanding of your work. However, it is good that not all of them are precisely expert in particular field of expertise. It helps to have people from other (related) fields, because they will bring a different perspective, and give you the opportunity to highlight not only the very technical details of your work but also its significance for other fields. is the dissertation process supposed to be a chance for you to win people over to your side? No. It's good to bring people who don't necessarily agree with you on everything, but you should also avoid as committee members anyone overly critical of your approach of things, unless you know them well and they can keep it under control and agree to disagree. Otherwise, you risk that person actually coming to your defense to win you over. I have seen defenses being “derailed” (though all ended well) by a committee member who was overly argumentative, and it wasn't a nice experience for anybody involved.

Q: Is it acceptable for paid online course to use quizzes and materials from elsewhere on the internet? This question is specifically about a high school course, but it should be applicable to any online course in general. I was taking a physics course online to skip it in school, those courses are really expensive, so I took the cheapest one that my school was allowing me to take, and it was understandably low quality. This much was ok and expected. What wasn't ok however, was that all the questions on the quizzes and exams were stolen from the internet. Every single question was taken from some school's "Ch 3 Review Sheet" or "2008 XYZ High School Physics Final Exam" etc. that was made public online. My parents paid $500 for this course and the people didn't actually write anything themselves, and I'm pretty angry. Is it ok for a course to do this? If not, is there any official organization I can complain to. A: Is it ok for a course to do this? It is common for instructors to use teaching materials from outside sources. There is generally no expectation of originality when it comes to teaching materials, including lecture slides, assignments and exam questions (which may be provided by the publisher, especially at the high school and undergrad level). See this answer for details. This is similar to the way we don't consider politicians to have plagiarised when they give a speech that was written by a speechwriter - in that scenario, too, there is no expectation that the material was written by the politician who delivers it. (In that situation, we only seem to mind if the speechwriter lifts parts of the speech from another source...) But if a student submits a homework assignment that was written for him by someone else, or an advisor puts chunks of her student's thesis in a paper without proper attribution, we would consider that plagiarism, because there is an expectation of originality. You wrote I'm not getting taught off a textbook here that comes with a set of slides and test questions, I'm supposed to be paying them to write their own material. I'm not sure why you think so. You're not paying anyone to develop course materials. It is common for instructors to use prepared material, including slides, test bank questions, etc. that might come with the textbook. It's also common for instructors to share material between themselves. What you are paying for is for them to deliver an effective educational experience to you. If they have been educating you effectively, it shouldn't matter whether the materials are original, or whether they came from a test bank or other outside source. If they haven't been educating you effectively, you can complain on those grounds - not because you expect them to develop original materials. If not, is there any official organization I can complain to. If you believe you have been treated to a sub-par educational experience, you can complain to whomever is responsible for the course. A: To comment at length on issues addressed well by @ff524's answer: First, as a fact, in all my observations, at all levels of education, from k12 through advanced PhD-program stuff, at most 1/100 people create their own course material. That is, yes, 99/100 use something published by traditional publishers, etc. For that matter, probably an exact zero percent of high school teachers use anything other than what is mandated by their school board, which was not created by them... and they would not have been paid or compensated for creating anything anyway, so, ... At undergrad level, a similar dynamic is in play: most universities, colleges, and even community colleges do prefer "tried and true" texts to anything that their own people might create. (See "prophet in their own land"...) So, actually, it's all the more certification of conformity that they don't use their own in-house material... Returning to the literal question(s). Low level math is so intensely cliched that no one can claim much originality to anything at all... Ok, given that, can you complain that anyone's not original? No. They aren't original, and they know that, and everyone else does... and how many ways can we ask basic calculus questions? Or can we copyright "2+2=4"? Hopefully not. Nor need we compose original narratives about arithmetic algorithms using Hindu-Arabic numerals. Nevertheless, a too-literal copy-and-paste of stuff off the internet is cheesy, cheap, etc. Double-nevertheless, there isn't much room for "original" questions about 350-year-old, or 1,500-year-old, ... math. The fact that your "teachers" didn't create their own content is completely unsurprising, given the realities. (I note that, due to my luxury of having a low teaching load, blah-blah, I can create more true-to-reality notes on many mathematical topics... But many people do not have a light-enough load to do this, and so on...)

Q: Turning down a scholarship...with the hope of getting more funding? I recently applied for an intensive language program at my university; the program's relatively expensive, but many students get full or partial scholarships to cover some of the cost. I just got a letter confirming my acceptance into the program, along with a modest scholarship. I'm thrilled, but, unfortunately, there's no way that I can afford this program based on the scholarship they've given me. I have to write back to the program executive, who I've spoken with several times throughout my application process, either accepting or refusing the scholarship. What I'm wondering is: is there some way that I can refuse the scholarship while also hinting at the fact that the only thing keeping me from attending this program is money? I've had a lot of friends who have written letters along the lines of "I would love to enroll in University X, but University Y has given me a larger scholarship", and have gotten larger scholarships from law/grad schools. I'm wondering if sending an email like "I appreciate this opportunity and would love to attend, but, unfortunately, cannot afford the tuition" would have a similar effect, or does it seem... I don't know, slimy? Is trying to subtly manipulate my way into a larger scholarship inappropriate and/or a futile effort? Should I just politely reject the scholarship offer instead? Any previous experiences/advice anyone has would be a huge help! A: "I appreciate this opportunity and would love to attend, but, unfortunately, cannot afford the tuition" - that's pretty much the situation according to your description. It's not flattery, it's not manipulation, it's the fact, isn't it? It sounds just right. It gives the commission full discretion to decide whether they consider you worth being helped over this hurdle. Just don't decide to join, after all, at this support level without having a very good idea how to justify where your suddenly newfound riches have come from. A: Just tell them. They are choosing to fund you because they want you there. If you do not accept, they have to go further down their list and because they are paying the money, they would like their first choice. Some universities even have scholarships for helping recruit students who are on the fence due to financial issues. They can't pull from that pool unless you say something. There is nothing ethically or morally wrong about saying what your situation is and asking for more financial aid. The worst that happens is they say no.

Q: How much theory should be given in article? I have created a software and the assisting methodology for its application to some kinetic studies. I used a lot of theory. E.g., I used kinetic model, reactor model, data analysis (about 7 methods to analyse the results totally). Now I have prepared an article where I report this methodology and demonstrate the results of its application. How much theory should I include into the article? Can I only refer to other publications/books for the models/methods proposed earlier? I have seen many publications where a part of theory is taken out from the main text to appendices (example with 5 appendices). In some journals appendices are not included into the article (supplementary, accessible online-only). Is it a good solution to include some theory in appendices? If yes, how many appendices would be OK (i.e., would the reader like the article with 7 appendices? As for me, I do not have anything against many appendices). A: Besides the already given hints I offer another guideline: Give as many background as you yourself would have needed to get the idea and method before you have developed it. Write the paper to your former self (before you knew about what you've found out). If you would have been happy with a paper that described the idea and references a lot to standard, readily available books for the background, then go for that style. If you had found it awkward to work through a paper that has a lot of references to papers/books that are hard to find, then don't do that. Note that different principles can apply at different places in the same paper. These hint is in some way a simplified form of the general hint Know your audience! Oh, and also discuss this with your advisor.

Q: Response article to a flawed paper you reviewed I recently reviewed an article. I found weaknesses in assumptions that meant none of the conclusions that were made could actually be made; basically they had absolutely no result. As such, I gave a detailed review (~ 2000 words) explaining why the assumptions made by the authors were wrong. I was civil and polite throughout, it was not an attack and I tried to remain constructive. I recommended to the editor to reject the paper and, despite recommendations of accept with major revisions from the other two reviewers, the editor rejected the paper. I believe that the authors will take the easy option and just submit to another journal without making serious edits, rather than paying serious attention too my review. If the paper does get published in (almost) unchanged state, should/could I write some kind of response article? How does one get to do this (should I email the editor with a draft of a response article)? Should I contact the authors (before they publish, after they publish, or not at all, before or after I contact the editor, before or after I submit/publish a response article)? A: Wait. The authors have seen your review, they should know that they have a problem. There's nothing to be done until the flawed article appears in another journal (if it ever does). You might write a draft response article and sit on it until the unchanged article appears. If it does, you can update your draft based on any changes and submit it to the same journal in response. If they fix it before resubmitting it, then you have nothing to do, and your review will have been successful.

Q: Is making minor adjustments to an online tutorial for a coding assignment considered plagiarism? For one of my pieces of coursework I have to make a game engine and I wasn't completely understanding what my lecturer was going on about. So I looked online and found a tutorial on how to make one and its been really useful and I understand better how it all works but my coursework is basically just the tutorial code. I submit it in a couple of weeks so it may be a bit late to start thinking this but isn't it just plagiarism? I'm not copy and pasting the code but I'm writing it practically word for word. But on the other had there only so many ways you can use OpenGL and make it look different and do what you want it to do. A: Yes, in this sort of situation (writing your first application with a graphics library), it is plausible for your code to look a lot like whatever tutorial or teaching materials you learned it from. Typically there will be some setup that has to be done in a particular order. I suggest you do all of the following: Add comments to your code. This will also come in handy for the next opengl assignment you do. Add an extra feature to your code, just to show you went that extra step. Maybe change the default background or font, or move some of the code to a separate function, or something like that. Let your instructor know what tutorial you followed, and the steps you took to make sure you understood your code rather than just copying it. I suspect in this case the instructor will understand.

Q: I need certain courses not covered in my undergraduate studies, can I take them at another institution? I recently got accepted into a graduate CS program (provisionally), but I need to take two classes that my undergraduate studies didn't cover. Now, where I got accepted those courses aren't offered until the fall which poses a problem for me. I would only be able to take one of the graduate courses without those missing courses in the fall. Question: Could I take those classes at another institution I'm not enrolled in? If so, is there a database I could search comparable CS classes? I know the standard procedure would be to contact the graduate school's admissions director and see what they recommend, however I feel like I've already annoyed them when I had to defer my summer acceptance. So, I would like them to have all the information needed in order to make that discourse easier for us both. A: I would still suggest you contact the admission director (one more time)! He is the one with the "right" and "only" answer you need to follow. All what we can do is share relevant experiences that may or may not be along the lines of your school's standard/system. Having said that, If I'm not mistaken, I think you can take the courses in other schools (as long as they are accredited and/or sister schools + cover a similar syllabus as the one your school has). As for a database, try to look through your school's graduate handbook or admission website.

Q: Should authors omit statements / citations of well known results in response to referee requests? I am asking this question to get further perspective on an issue that has come up with a student (undergraduate, mathematics) I am mentoring. At last summer's REU he wrote (in particular!) a solo paper. I was not directly involved with the research, but I gave him some feedback on the writing before he submitted it for publication a few months ago. He has now received a referee report, which is very positive and is of the sort that I would recognize as being 99% likely to lead to acceptance. The referee requests revisions, many of which I agree with. However, one of the referee's suggestions is for the student to not explicitly state two well-known theorems that he is making use of. (In case it helps to know, these are Dirichlet's Theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions and Minkowski's Convex Body Theorem.) The referee follows up by saying that even if he does want to state them, he should not give citations to them, since they are so well known and google searches easily turn up references. My questions: (1) How would you respond to this referee request if you were the author? (2) How would you advise a young student to respond to this request? A: I would recommend approaching a referees recommendation to drop a citation in the following manner: First, consider carefully whether there is good reason to keep a citation in the paper at all. The key factors to consider are reading audience and the customs of others in the field. For example, in cross-disciplinary work I have often cited extremely basic material because core dogma known by every undergraduate in one field are sometimes viewed as nearly unbelievable statements in another field. On the other hand, students in particular are sometimes prone to over-citation because they have been well-trained in citation and decide to err on the side of caution. If a citation is warranted, consider whether to use the primary source or a textbook source. Notation and interpretation change over the years, and for purposes of elucidating a well-known result, a readily accessible modern text is often a much better citation for the reader than a difficult to find or understand original. In certain cases, however, returning to the original is important: for example, the standard interpretation of the Turing test is different than what Turing originally proposed. Whether the decision is to keep the same citation, change the citation, or drop it all-together, in responding to the referee one should explain carefully why one made that decision. I would be startled if a paper could be imperiled by deciding to keep a citation when a referee recommended dropping it---it's just such a minor issue, all things considered. With a careful explanation of how the choice has been reconsidered and the final decision, most referees are likely to be sufficiently satisfied, even if they might have chosen differently. Bottom line: no paper is going to be put in peril by a few extra citations as long as the author is reasonable in explaining their decisions. The citations might ultimately get dropped or not, but in every case we are talking about "minor revisions" territory and not the boundary between "major revision" and "reject." A: Here are my answers: (1) Erring on the side of being slightly more careful / explicit / wordy has never hurt anyone. I agree that a large majority of the readers of this article will know the theorems of Dirichlet and Minkowski, but if some do not then omitting the statements signals that the paper is not for them whereas including them makes it much easier for them to continue reading. (Of course I agree that anyone can google and find the statements of these theorems and it is easy to do so...but it is even easier to put the paper down and go on to something else if your interest was borderline.) On the other hand, a reader who knows these statements well can just skip them: no problem. So provided that as an author I had made the expository choice to include these theorem statements, I would not be easily talked out of it by a reviewer. As to whether I would actually have done this: I have a paper where I state MCBT. I often say "by Dirichlet's Theorem" (more often: "by Cebotarev density"!) and assume readers know what I mean. In terms of citation: I don't like the idea of a referee talking an author being talked out of citing work that they use in the paper. It feels like getting pushed in the wrong direction. I have to admit though that I would not myself cite either of these results, and I do have some sense that if you cite things which are too basic then people start to wonder about your background. ("No one cites Einstein..." And Einstein came after Minkowski and way after Dirichlet.) (2) Not lightly do I advise anyone to do anything which could result in their paper not being accepted. But in this case I am tempted to advise the student to leave in the statements. He should respond to the referee: for instance if his response includes other papers published in the last decade by the same journal which include statements of one or both of these results, his case looks strong. That one should not rewrite papers so as to make them harder to read seems like an important lesson. I am tempted to tell the student that I would not include these citations and the referee is really correct that they are not needed. If he does want to leave them in, then maybe he should go "whole hog" and include primary source material. I haven't seen many contemporary math papers with works by Dirichlet and Minkowski in their bibliographies...but I wouldn't mind at all if I did see them. A: Citations serve two purposes: Acknowledging the original source of ideas Giving readers easy access to a source to read more about a result that they may not understand. In the case of standard theorems that are named after their discoverers and which are sufficiently famous to be in Wikipedia, I don't think citing a textbook accomplishes either of these goals. It's much faster and easier to google the theorem than to find the particular text mentioned. I don't think there's any harm in this kind of citation, so I don't know why the referee cares. But I also don't see a good reason to include them. If anything, I would cite Wikipedia with a hyperlink. That at least saves your reader some time.

Q: How many graduate credit hours are generally required teach in a department? I've heard some conflicting reports on this, but in general, how many graduate credit hours are required to teach in a department or secure a professorship in it? I'm an interdisciplinary PhD student with a heavy focus on computer science, but I will have close to thirty credit hours in social sciences when I'm done and I'd like to know if it is worth getting the count up a bit. A: In the US there isn't a standard requirement. If you have a PhD, you could potentially become a professor. If you have a master's, you could potentially be an adjunct or instructor. Although, I have seen smaller schools and community colleges advertising a requirement of X graduate credits to be an adjunct, where X is rather small (e.g., 6 classes). A: In the South, you need generally need 18, hours per SACS. I would imagine other accreditation agencies have similar guidelines or standards, but I'm not familiar with them and you would need to research them, and there are always exceptions or edge cases, but those aren't going to apply in most hiring situations. But if your PhD is somewhere near half/half between two fields I doubt you'd have any problem teaching in either half anywhere. One of my favorite professors was a triple hire, and had no trouble teaching in any of her three fields, even at the graduate level. I'm going to doubt seriously she had 30+ hours in each, though.

Q: Someone referenced my work in a journal paper using my first name only, do I contact them or the journal it was published in? Someone referenced my work in a journal paper but they did not cite it the right way. They only included my first name, my supervisor's first name, the name of the paper and the date. They did not include our last names or the journal that the paper was published in. Do I contact the authors or the journal to correct this? Or can it not be fixed? Currently, the citation is not included in my Google Scholar page because they didn't write my last name nor my supervisor's last name. A: I would recommend approaching this problem through the following layers of triage: First, is it a serious journal, or a predatory trash publication? If it's not a serious journal, just ignore it and move on. It won't really count as a citation anyway, and there's basically nothing you can do to get a meaningful response from the people running it. Second, if it's a real journal, is it in the final form or a "just accepted" pre-print? Some journals give early access to "just accepted" manuscripts before any copyediting occurs, typically with a big warning label saying "Not yet final, things may change." If this is the case, then you may be able to count on the production staff catching the problem and getting it fixed before the final form; if you don't want to count on the error being caught, it is reasonable to (politely) contact the authors. If neither of these is true, and the paper is in its final form in a real journal you can write to the editorial staff to request a correction.

Q: How do you cite from a presentation or poster at a conference? For example, a presentation whose PDF is listed at http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/exoclimes/2012/pdf/talks/Day02_Ferreira.pdf? And what if the presentation doesn't have a publicly available URL? How would the citation style differ from that of a poster? A: The specifics of the citation would depend on the citation style you are using. I am most familiar with Chicago style. To cite the presentation you've linked to in Chicago style, I would put: David Ferreira, et al., "Climate of an Earth-like Aquaplanet: the high-obliquity case and the tidally-locked case" (presentation, Exoclimes 2012, Aspen, CO, January 16–20, 2012), accessed June 8, 2012, http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/exoclimes/2012/pdf/talks/Day02_Ferreira.pdf. Following these guidelines: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/08/ For APA style, you would only cite a presentation in a reference list if there is a tangible remnant ("recoverable data") of the presentation (e.g., slides posted on a website). The citation would look like: Ferreira, D., Marshall, J., O'Gorman, P., Seager, S. & Lau, H. (January 2012). Climate of an Earth-Like Aquaplanet: the high-obliquity case and the tidally-locked case. Paper presented at Exoclimes 2012, Aspen, Co. For more examples in APA citation, look here: http://citationonline.net/CitationHelp/csg04-manuscripts-apa.htm#53 A: To supplement Nate's comments, what I have usually seen is "personal communication". The poster isn't yet peer-reviewed and if it has yet to be written up as a manuscript and you can't cite it as a paper that is "in press", "personal communication" is a good substitute. A: It turns out that one commonly used weight update strategies for neural networks, RMSProp, was first introduced in a slide: Given the number of citations, it should give you plenty of examples on how to cite a slide. One common citation format: T. Tieleman and G. Hinton. Lecture 6.5-rmsprop: Divide the gradient by a running average of its recent magnitude. COURSERA: Neural Networks for Machine Learning, 4, 2012.

Q: How to complete laboratory courses after building fire? A couple of weeks ago there was a fire in my department. While it only directly affected one research lab, the whole building is currently closed due to safety reasons while the place is cleaned. The current timeline has the building closed for months (well into the fall semester). We've already started to recover from the shock. Courses have been relocated, grad students near graduation have been sent to other institutions to finish their work and researchers have started to find friendly labs to work in. However, we've been having problems with our undergraduate laboratory courses. These courses consist of three to five experiments, each of which takes several weeks to complete. The experiments require specialized equipment, which is now trapped in the building, and cannot be moved before the cleaning is complete. We are the only department in the university that has this specific equipment. We are currently at a loss about what do to with the students that were taking these courses. Some options that have been proposed are: Give everyone an incomplete. While this would seem logical, since the students will end up with only half of the course material, the courses are both a requisite to graduation and usually taken in the final year. This means that we would be pushing the graduation of many of our students. Additionally, we would not be able to handle the doubled demand for the courses when we can give the again. Try to complete the experiments in other departments Another department at our university has some labs that run somewhat similar experiments. However, they would not be available for at least two more weeks (when their students are expected to finish their courses). By that time the semester will have less than a month left, not enough time to fully complete the remaining experiments. To do this, we would have to design new experiments that attempt to have the same teaching value and that can be completed in the new labs in limited time. Some of the professors running the lab courses are understandably reluctant to do this at short notice. Additionally, some of the experiments are pretty much unique to our department, so that it might be impossible to do them at the other labs. Give the students experimental data to analyze My preferred option is to give the students experimental data, and have the students analyze it and file reports as if they had actually run the experiments. However, some professors argue that this would betray the point of the laboratories, which are meant to focus on the experimentation. Stop the courses and give everyone a grade based on the work completed so far Some professors prefer the idea of just stopping the courses as they stand, and basing the grades on the work the students have completed so far. However, this is difficult since the labs are run in groups, and different groups have managed to complete differing amounts of work. Additionally, this is likely to affect students grades negatively, since historically their grades are boosted by the final exam, which they would not take in this situation. Additionally, I don't see how this is better than option 3, since stopping the course midway also leaves unmet several course objectives. Are there really no better alternatives? Is there some way to allow the students to complete the lab courses without compromising its objectives? A: As an experimentalist myself, I feel strongly that that hands-on part of laboratory is an important part of the course, but ... The students have presumably already done some of the planned hands on work, so option #3 would not be a total loss on this front. Analysis of data is not generally the same as classroom problems, and is also an important part of the laboratory experience. Toward that end I would suggest Investigating option #2 vigorously in hopes of recreating or substituting for some part of the hands-on work that would otherwise be lost. Try to get all the students one more hands-on experience if at all possible. Use option #3 to address the analysis skill you were hoping to teach. Give them not only the data, but the equipment, methods and technique parts of lab reports from previous students (be sure to get permission where this might be needed). Use a library assignment to get them thinking about the skills they are not practicing. Perhaps assign them each to report (either a oral presentation or a paper) on the methods used to perform [some common analysis in your field] when that technique was new and the equipment was not as forgiving as today. And declare it the best you can do under the circumstances.

Q: How long does it take before an academic article can no longer be kept behind a paywall? Just a curiosity: after how many years does publications become public (cannot be kept behind a paywall anymore)? A: Strictly speaking, the answer to your question is Never. Even after the copyright has expired, there is nothing to prevent a journal from keeping articles behind a paywall. Many journals will make articles open access after a certain amount of time, and after the copyright has expired, other people may freely distribute public domain articles. However, there are some journals that nonetheless have paywalled archives going back to the nineteenth century. A: Some journals have in their copyright transfer some text regarding when the article becomes open access. When that is not the case, I would expect that copyright laws apply, and the articles might become public domain after a certain period defined in law, see e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths A: This is somewhat tangential to the question, but it's becoming increasingly common that governments, universities, and funding agencies require research to be published in an open access journal from the beginning. Such policies are not retroactive – but paywalls are (very) slowly but surely becoming obsolete.

Q: Is it common for PhD programs to require students to have a minimum number of papers to be eligible for the defense? In some countries like mine (Iran), you are asked to have at least two papers printed or accepted in an ISI journal before you can claim for your PhD thesis defense. Is it like that in other countries? Is there any world record for the number of papers extracted from a single PhD thesis? A: Publishing papers is not a requirement in many places, but it usually depends on the specific university and graduate program. In the U.S. these things tend to vary from school to school. Sometimes research projects funded by industry prohibit the people involved from directly publishing results. As for a world record, I'm pretty sure nobody keeps track of that. It is pretty subjective. How would you determine whether or not the paper is from your thesis rather than just being in the same field? There shouldn't be that much value in the number of papers either. A: In my dept. (civil engineering), a minimum of 1 published journal article is required for defense. However, my adviser won't schedule any student of his for a defense unless they have published 4-5 journal articles. Keep in mind that other professors in the same dept. go with the 1 paper rule. It varies from a professor to another and from field to field. A: Even if there is no formal requirement, here in The Netherlands several Universities/Department in my field require 4 papers to be submitted before Ph.D. defense. Yet, the limit is somehow soft and depends on adviser and impact factor of the journals where the papers are published.

Q: What do polarized student evaluation results say about my teaching? I taught my first class last quarter. The results for evaluations are very polarized. The raw data shows that my scores are either very high or very low for a majority of items. That implies some students loved the class and some hated it. Honestly, this teaching experience has been so tiring that I am seriously thinking teaching is not for me. My colleagues tell me it will get better but I am not sure how I feel about my average performance. I wish the evaluations weren't so polarized so I could know if I was overall an effective instructor or not. How would you make sense of the results? A: Evaluations only tell you whether your students liked you or not. Your main goal, however, is to have students learn the material and develop their intellectual skills, not to have them like you. Have experienced colleagues sit in on your classes and give you feedback, and have colleagues look at your assessments and the students' performance on them (with appropriate attention given to how you prepared the students - at an extreme, assessments mean something different (but not nothing) if you've given the students the questions and answers in advance!). This will give you much more useful information than student evaluations. A: From the OP's comments: Evaluations the students gave the OP: [...] there are like 3-4 students with really low evaluations. Grades the OP gave the students: I had about 20 who received As, around 12 Bs, around 10 in C range, 1 D and an F. I don't know if I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like in a class of 44 students, about 8% gave very poor evaluations, while the other 92% gave very high evaluations. I would say that there's some good news and some bad news here. If 92% gave very high evaluations, then clearly a lot of things are going right. To be unsatisfied with such high evaluations shows, in my opinion, totally unrealistic expectations. The grade distribution described here is extremely inflated. It's hard to know what this means without more context. It's possible that this is at a school that has extremely inflated grades in general. (This kind of extreme grade inflation is fairly common in non-STEM courses at expensive private schools that have highly selective admissions.) Student evaluations are basically measures of two things: (1) whether the instructor did what was expected (showed up for class, knew the subject), and (2) whether the student got the grade they wanted, without an onerous amount of effort. Evaluations are not sensitive measures of the difference between an average teacher and a great teacher. A: I would not sweat over it (not yet!). Not because ONLY 58% of students filled the evaluation form and definitely not from teaching your first course! Wait till you teach more courses, gather more data then re-evaluate from there. Teaching requires experience and experience comes with time. Remember this, how many professors did you have when you were a student that you did not like? Did you not like them because you did not like the course itself? Did not like their personalities? Just because they were mean? Got a bad grade with them? Had you do too many homework, etc. the point is, many students (especially undergraduates) tend to be somehow moody when filling evaluations. I fear sometime that many of these evaluations are based on the professor's charisma, personality, the way s/he dresses, popularity than actual teaching. One thing you can do is to collect informal evaluations every 4 weeks (or so) of the semester. So, you can see and re-evaluate your teaching methods sooner/faster. This can be done by sending online surveys to the students that let them post their reviews anonymously (You might wanna check your dept.'s rules for this first". Or maybe have short conversations with few students (A-student, B-student and C-student) to get some feed backs. Perhaps you can ask a fellow faculty member to attend your class 1-2 times to critique your teaching methods.

Q: Should I cite all R packages I used? Intro: R is a open-source software tool for statistical analyses and graphics, which is heavily used in different science disciplines and which is becoming more and more popular (although it is already quite popular in many areas). In addition to the base version, people from all over the place develop so-called packages, upload them, for example, to CRAN, where they can be freely downloaded to use. Q: I am writing a manuscript for a peer-reviewed psychology journal and used a lot of R packages in my work. Of course, I want to and will cite R itself and the packages that I relied on heavily (e.g., to simulate or analyze data). However, I have also some packages, of which I used only a single, little function. For example, I used the odd function from the gtools package to determine whether an integer is odd or even. As far as I can see, the function is only a single line long, and I could have written it myself (but I didn't!). On the one hand, I want to give credit to these developers, on the other hand I don't want to blow up my reference list and confuse readers. So the question is, should I cite every single R package I used? BTW: Note that R has the nice function citation("some package") to access citation information provided by the package authors; see also citation() to cite R itself. A: YES. There are lots of reasons to and no reasons not to (unless you're under some kind of strange space/ink constraint). Here is an important and underappreciated reason why: Most of the people who make the kind's of R packages, in fact the people who made R itself, are other academics. Meaning: They didn't get paid specifically for the time they spent making lme4, ggplot2, stargazer etc. Software development is very unappreciated in academia. Imagine spending a lot of time writing and maintaining a package that is used by thousands of people in your field and then being asked by a tenure/promotion committee why you didn't write more papers or do more experiments. It's very difficult to get someone who isn't a user (or even a software-minded person) to properly appreciate the time and skill involved in making good software. The only way to convince university systems and leaders that the work you spent writing that software is to show them in a way they understand, that means citations. They're not going to care about your StackExchange reputation or how much juice you've got on github, they need something Scopus can compute and they can itemize and count. Much of the workings of academia is based on beans. Much of the effort at universities is dedicated to counting and managing those beans. How many students are in your program, how many grants are awarded, how many Ph.D. defend, and how many papers are published and cited are all very important beans which decide who gets resources. It would be sad indeed if someone who wrote a useful R package didn't get the credit they're due and thus be allowed to make more wonderful tools. Imagine if Hadley hadn't started working for R-Studio, he might be standing in front of some committee someday asking him why he spent so much time writing "software" instead of "papers," or trying to explain why he can't take on a third course this semester because the dept chair doesn't understand that writing software is something that actually takes real time. Also consider this: Most scientific papers are cited fewer than 10x, if ever. A reasonably useful R package is likely to impact many more people than any "real" publication, but that person get's no credit if you don't cite it. A: Overall, I would suggest you err on the side of rather citing too many packages (with version numbers, please!), although odd quite probably is a borderline case. I'd rationalize this tendency as a bit of balance for all the people who use packages extensively but do not cite them. In general, I would certainly cite anything that saved me a non-trivial amount of own work (as in, "I could have done this myself, but it would likely have cost me half a day"). The length of your literature list should not really be a concern in the days of PDF publishing. And "we used R [3], packages foo [4] and bar [5] as well as multiple helper functions [6-10]" should not be too confusing to your readers. This would possibly be more appropriate for Academia.SE.com. Perhaps you want to edit your question (explaining what R is, so the question is understandable outside the r tag at SO) and flag it for migration. A: Absolutely! Citations are free, and they are a blessing to the creators of those packages. Unless you're held to a strict page limit, there's no reason not to have a "methods" section in which you list all of the packages you used. It can be a single sentence. If you want to give pride of place to a few key packages that your work relied on, then give them a sentence each, but don't snub the others. Some day, you'll be happy when others cite your work.

Q: How do you get a bad transcript past Ph.D. admissions? I have a master's degree in International Studies, and a double major with Computer Science from undergrad. My transcripts suck. There's no other way to dress it up. I have pretty good teaching experience, and my GRE scores are awesome, and I suspect my recommendations are as bland as everyone else's. Basically, to an admissions committee, I suspect I'm the model of a student who is probably smart enough but didn't work hard enough. I want to do a Ph.D. in Political Science, but the response from my applications is looking pretty grim. Am I permanently out of the running, or is there something I can do for the next few years which will help to counterbalance my unfavorable GPA? A: Short answer: Know what area you want to work in and be fluent with it. Construct an honest, compelling narrative illustrating your strengths, how you've learned from mistakes or pitfalls, and why you're a good candidate for your chosen PhD programs. Talk to as many professors as you can about their interests and yours, especially those you'd like to work with. More details: There is some excellent advice here and here. Basically, Bradley Voytek (who is now a professor in neuroscience at UCSD) managed to get into UCSF (a top school for neuroscience) with an overall GPA that hovered around 2.5. As Bradley Voytek said, your ultimate goal is this: Do everything in your power to leave a paper trail of excellence to overcome your grades. Your goal is to make those grades look meaningless. Your goal is to have your work speak for you so strongly that, when people look at your grades, they feel silly for even giving them a second thought. This was precisely why I was willing to give my unofficial transcript to professors at my school who asked for them (when I needed letters of recommendation). They already knew me well enough to know that my GPA doesn't reflect my true ability. As another suggestion, if you're applying for a school that puts a lot of weight on a subject GRE exam (like the Physics GRE), you can do your utmost to score obscenely high on the test and still get in. As an example, see this guy who managed to get into Harvard with a 3.1 GPA. For the record, I'm an undergrad with a 3.16 GPA (with 3 grades of 0.0s and 3-4 courses I retook with grades of 3.0-3.1 on the retake because I didn't even bother going to class on either class attempt). Despite all this, I managed to get into both the University of Chicago and Brown University - both with fellowships for being one of the top applicants. I also almost got into Yale in a year that was unusually competitive for them (they paid for me to visit+interview there) - but there were research fit issues involved at the end (actually - what ended up happening was that I had such intensely-defined research interests - exoplanet climate modelling - that it would have been hard for anyone there to take me individually, and everyone felt that I would be going to Chicago anyways). Click here for a rough profile of my "stats". You should also try schools that do interviews (especially in-person interviews) before they do acceptances, since the interview is where you have the opportunity to shine (and where they can at least give you a chance). Yale is one of those schools. You should also look into very interdisciplinary graduate programs that are expanding faster than what their textbooks (and courses) can keep up with. Newer fields also tend to be low-consensus fields, which also tend to be more tolerant to those with low GPAs. The geosciences is one of the few areas where plenty of people with sub-3.5 GPAs often do get into top schools. As the geosciences aren't taught in high school, it's often said that the Geosciences is something that you "stumble" into, and it's actually very common for people to enter the geosciences only after finding that they didn't like another major (this is often true for geoscience professors as well). Biology is another area that's often tolerant of those with low GPAs, from what I've heard. In both Biology and the Geosciences, research fit often matters a lot more than "being one of the top applicants", so if you have a focused interest that you've demonstrated through research (and that matches the interests of faculty members who are willing to take new students), then yes, they can be willing to take you over people with better GPAs and test scores. The thing in common with the two is that they're so broad that it's impossible to put every applicant through a common set of required courses (or through paper-based qualifying exams), so their quals cannot be based on coursework. In that case, performance in prior courses doesn't matter as much. In fact, some geoscience programs (like Berkeley EPS) don't even have admission committees because the interests of faculty members are so diverse that applicants often only have research fit with a single faculty member - so it then often becomes a single faculty member who decides between applicants. The MIT Media Lab is the perfect example of this, in fact (though most geoscience/biology programs will have more of a committee than the MIT Media Lab). The tips in this link can be quite helpful to anyone with a low GPA who wants to work with a particular adviser. You should also look for fields with very low people-to-problems ratios. Many of these fields don't offer courses that are part of the core requirements of numerous majors, so there won't be hordes of undergrads who take their courses. Fields like atmospheric science and various areas of biology are particularly known for their low people-to-problem ratios, and the professors in them can be incredibly accessible (and are more willing to closely look at unusual applicants). More here. Also, just write 2000-word personal statements. I wrote 2000-word personal statements for all the schools I applied for (they were necessary since I had to do some explaining), and they didn't prevent me from getting in. They can annoy some schools, but that's going to be a matter of fact if you're a highly unusual applicant. Finally, you can always stay somewhat longer. My GPA would never recover from the early mistakes I made, but I managed to recover by staying longer and by taking a huge number of grad-lvl courses in my last 2 years. When writing your personal statement, you should always put in statistics like last-2-year GPA and last-X-year major GPA in whatever field of study you're in (I put in post-(freshman year) physics GPA of 3.77 in). Be careful not to sound like you're cherry-picking though. If you need some extra inspiration, you should read about Stephen Smale too. He entered the University of Michigan in 1948. Initially, Smale was a good student, placing into an honors calculus sequence taught by Bob Thrall and earning himself A's. However, his sophomore and junior years were marred with mediocre grades, mostly Bs, Cs and even an F in nuclear physics. However, with some luck, Smale was accepted as a graduate student at the University of Michigan's mathematics department. Yet again, Smale performed poorly his first years, earning a C average as a graduate student. It was only when the department chair, Hildebrant, threatened to kick out Smale, that he began to work hard. Smale finally earned his Ph.D. in 1957, under Raoul Bott. One word of caution: Graduate programs have gotten a lot more competitive in the last few years, so what applied 5 years ago (or 40 years ago, for that matter), may not necessarily apply today. By the way, elite private schools (for whatever reason) tend not to have GPA cutoffs. If you're a student with a low GPA applying for an elite private school, you probably have something else in you that's extremely unusual, since very few students with low GPAs apply to them. In fact, when I emailed professors, those at elite private schools seemed to be more responsive to my emails (low student to faculty ratio could be a reason behind that). That said, they're not necessarily more forgiving of unusual applicants. It's often the programs that have some "weakness" in their applicant pool that tend to be more forgiving of them. Also - I would definitely look for areas where the department is trying to expand into, but where the department has no reputation for as of yet (visits/contacting professors can help you learn more about that). Going to academic conferences can also really help as well - but only when you can make sure that you have useful things to say. The same is also true for visiting schools before applying. A: It depends on where your weaknesses are. If they're in both the master's and the bachelor's degrees, you're in a lot of hot water, because it says, as you suggest, "student not serious enough about studies." (As someone on an admissions committee, I can tell you I need a heck of a lot of convincing to overlook a weak grade in a "core" subject, let alone an overall mediocre transcript.) The "best" way to get a weak transcript through an admissions committee is to have somebody who can vouch for you to the committee whose judgment the committee will respect. So, that means working either for a Very Big Name in the field, or working for someone at a particular institution which you'd later be interested in attending. If they can see that you're someone worth having around, that can sway an admissions committee a lot more than a good package from a complete unknown. Given your field, this may not be the easiest task to pull off, but I don't see many other options. A: Some universities impose a minimum undergraduate GPA requirement for all incoming PhD students. For example, the University of Illinois requires a GPA of at least 3.0 (out of 4.0) for the last two years of undergraduate study for all PhD programs. Applicants that fall below this line are usually culled from the applicant pool before any faculty see their application. Departments can petition for a waiver for individual applicants, but the case has to be pretty compelling. Of course, every university is different. Choose your targets wisely. (My undergrad GPA was well under 3.0.)

Q: Is there a pre-publication access for ACM journals? After a manuscript is accepted in a journal, usually it takes serveral months before it actually gets actually published. Many publishers now provide online access to the published papars, before they get printed, and even before the typesetting. Some of the ACM journals have a section called "Forthcoming Articles" in their homepage, but clicking on the articles in this sections leads to nowhere! So, I wanted to know if there is a pre-publication access for ACM journals or not. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB) I have searched for some of the articles of this type in third party pre-print servers, but I couldn't find anything. A: My experience with ACM Transactions publications, as both author and editor, is that they do not generally offer any sort of early access. I find this rather strange for a computing society, but suspect this may be because they also have fairly liberal preprint policies: authors can put early versions of their article up on arXiv or similar repositories. Many ACM journal articles are also extended versions of conference articles, so that is another route for accessing information that you may be looking for.

Q: For how long is research considered valid for publication? Does a research/study have an 'expiry date' that prohibits it from being published in a journal after it has been completed? A: Research does not have an "expiry date", but what it does have is competition. Journals want to produce cutting edge research, new information that will help others in the field. If you do some research but don't publish it, then find 20 years later that no one else has done it and your information is still something other researchers would want to know then you can easily publish it. Delaying publication is only a risk in that other people may work on the same topic or have the same idea you had, and publish it before you. One interesting example is Brian May, guitarist in the band Queen. He was studying for a PhD when the band took off and quit his studies in 1974 to become internationally famous. In 2007 he re-enrolled at university, completed and submitted his PhD on the work he started 30 years before. Luckily for him, his field was a small one and no one else had decided to work on the topic he had studied in the intervening years, so his work was still new, interesting and relevant. A: Most research can be published even after many years. But if the research is out of date by then, the journal may not want it. An example: I attended a lecture by Chinese mathematician Hua Luogeng sometime around 1980. He mentioned one of his earlier papers, giving the date submitted to the journal and the date published. Then he paused while we all noticed the 10-year-gap between. He explained that the "Cultural Revolution" fits in that gap, when all intellectuals were sent to work on farms in the countryside. A: In general, I can not really see how a research will have an expiry date. Maybe if it was "too old" or "proven to be obsolete"? Even then, there might be some merit to your research. This will depend on the way you present you research and market it. After all we publish to "share, help and inform". Some high quality journals may not agree to publish such research, but others with lesser impact factors or standards might. What is your field? If a research conducted in your field can be labeled as old, perhaps your methods can be applied to other fields. If the results are "very time-dependent" and can no longer be used after a certain date, this can rise some concerns. Also, if your studying an aspect that has been thoroughly studied before, such research might not add much to current literature (not sure if expired is the appropriate term to use for this case).

Q: Wrong date in certificate My university made a mistake on my graduation parchment, which is the graduation date (they wrote the whole date in words so I guess that's how they made mistake, even I myself take years to realize that). But luckily, it's correct in the transcript. Should I inform them to correct it now? It's been years since then. Problem is I'm in the middle of an application and the deadline is coming soon. Should I just submit as usual and respond if inquiry arises? A: Very few places look at certificates when looking at applications. Certified transcripts are considered the authoritative source. If it's correct in the transcript, then that will be fine for the application. If they wish to validate the transcripts, they will contact the institution directly whose records will match the transcript, not the certificate (almost certainly). As for correcting the certificate, some institutions allow you to contact their registrar's office and request a re-printing of the certificate. If it has been many years, the biggest problem is often that the Provost/Chancellor, etc. of the institution may have changed, so the signatures may not be the same as when you were issued your degree. The specifics depend on institution. There's no harm in calling or emailing them and inquiring.

Q: How does a dropout influence one's later scientific career? Dropping out/Take one's leave from college or Master school. It happens and the reasons are almost infinite. Assuming dropping out/leaving from college but still wanting to pursue the same career and give a come-back after some time off. How will this failure in CV influence the admission to a later program? E.g. admission to some Master program or admission to a PhD in a public R1 university? Will the persons responsible for admission listen to the reasons? What would help in this situation? I heard that being expelled from a specific college would be much worse than just droping out but before being forced to leave. So will expulsion have more severe consequences than droping out? A: Especially if you are applying for funding, the admissions committee is taking a risk when they decide to admit each student. If a student comes and does not succeed, the department may have incurred expenses for the time the person was there, and they don't have another successful graduate they can show for it. Is the reason you dropped out before something that still affects your likelihood to drop out again? That'll be a question on the committee's mind as they're reading. Having been expelled before would be a bigger issue, because it means you were a major problem for the previous place and most universities don't want to have people who they think would be likely to cause big problems like that for them. An applicant with this background would definitely be expected to explain what's changed. Some departments expect a certain percentage of students to be "weeded out" or not make it through; find out what the norm is where you're applying. Also find out what the culture is in terms of encouraging people to branch out and try new things, but then be able to recognize when something's not working out and stop going down a path that doesn't lead to fruitful goals (once that's recognizable). These are important parts of research, and I think most faculty understand that. In your applications, clearly explain what happened, and how you made the most of it. Is the experience you gained an asset that can help you now? Also (this applies more broadly) explain why you want to now go back into academia and into the program you're applying for and why you think you'll be able to make the most of that opportunity, if admitted. If you just assume your history makes you ineligible and don't apply, you won't be admitted. If you do apply and explain things clearly, you have a chance, higher than zero.

Q: Deciding about publication venue with Advisor I have been working on a paper as the first author. The paper looks good to my advisor and other collaborators, and we are almost ready to submit. I have already submitted the abstract for a good conference, and the full-paper is due in a few days. In the past week, my advisor let me know about a special edition of a reasonably good journal, that is due in a few weeks time (special edition = faster publication time. Period). My advisor first asked my opinion about the venue choice, and I gave +s and -s of both, but refrained from providing a clear choice, saying that my experience in publishing is limited. In my mind, the +s of conference will be opportunity to travel and interact with community at large. Also I have never been to a conference before, so was excited about it. But I realize that the paper is a dead-end of sort, and doesn't have much scope to expand and publish later in a journal (Researchers in our field are usually interested to expand conf. papers into journal). Ultimately both me and my advisor agree that "getting it published" is the end goal that both of us would be happy to see. I wonder if I should intervene and provide a strong opinion? or just let my advisor take the call? I have seen my advisor being pretty good at making such decisions. and I want to avoid looking like a jerk, when I have a long way as a PhD student with him. I would like to thank Everyone for their suggestions. Things played out a bit differently than I would have anticipated. I talked to my advisor a day before the submission that I would like to submit for this conference, since my coauthor (ex-postdoc, 2nd author, experienced) recommended that's its a good venue and there will be scope to expand the paper into a journal later with xyz extensions. I had already discussed those extensions with my advisor before, but maybe i didn't sound as prepared / convinced. After our conversation, my advisor gave another quick review on the paper and let me submit it. Luckily it got accepted and I will be traveling to present it :). In retrospect, I feel my advisor was waiting for me to have a constructive discussion before giving me a go-ahead. I wasn't being as proactive earlier, was just too busy working on the paper and following up with coauthors. A: To be honest, I don't see a problem here. You seem to have a very good relationship with your advisor, who both repeatedly asks for your input and gives you the benefit of his expertise and experience. You have weighed in helpfully on the question at hand, but not definitively, because you don't yet have a definitive opinion. The part where I get a bit confused is where you wonder whether you should "intervene" even though (i) you trust your advisor to make good decisions and (ii) you don't yet have a clear opinion to intervene with. So...unless/until you acquire a strong opinion of your own, go with what your advisor suggests. If/when you do, talk to him about it. If the decision has already been made and then you have thoughts about it, you can still talk to your advisor about it, but you should frame it not as questioning the decision but rather as a learning experience for you. I think you're good.

Q: Can my supervisor use my code in his paper without acknowledging me? A student performed a thorough review of the available algorithms in the literature and constructed several coding implementations that were shown to be far more effective than previous implementations known to the supervisor for the last decade. The fundamentals of these implementations, which already existed in the literature, were complemented with a major adaptation. The supervisor used these implementations to perform a simulation that formed one piece of key evidence for the validity of his paper. The student was not in the author list, not in the acknowledgments section and his works are not cited. In fact, the vanilla algorithm presented in the draft was insufficient to perform the required calculations. For the sake of posing a question, let's take these claims as true and ask: - How should the student approach this matter? A: A lot of questions here are left unanswered. Are you a student? A staff programmer? Do you have a work-for-hire agreement with the university? Is it just your implementation, or is it your original synthesis of several algorithms? Is the synthesis something that is novel & not obvious and do you think it constitutes a significant intellectual contribution? Have you previously published about this synthesis and if so is that cited? How core is the use of these algorithms to the main results of the paper? It might be reasonable to point out to your advisor how it would be helpful to your career (ability to get a great job after leaving, etc.) if your contributions are recognized in the papers that use them, at least in the acknowledgements section. It may be that for whatever reason the supervisor hasn't thought of this (or doesn't remember when writing it up close to the deadline) but may be very willing to do so. If you are a student and the supervisor is your academic advisor, you may also ask questions/have a conversation about what authorship means in your field and what the expectations are for what contributions warrant authorship in your collaborations. Part of an academic advisor's role is to teach their students about these sorts of things. If you don't feel comfortable with a direct conversation or with the results of one, go to your program director and see what their perspective might be.

Q: How to deal with an unprepared professor? For one of my classes (upper-level), the professor seems to be quite unprepared for the class. More specifically, As they openly disclose, they haven't looked at the course material in many years (prior to the preparation of the course), and are formally teaching that specific class for the first time ever. Although the professor offers nice explanations and new insight in some course topics, it's clear that they lack the necessary knowledge to fully teach the course. Many of the students, including myself, ask questions on covered & related material to gain a deeper understanding, but we're far too often met with "Oh I can't help you with that. Sorry." Then we read the standard literature (textbooks) on the subject, and see that the answers to our questions are standard knowledge (i.e. should be known by an instructor). The professor has been packed with other obligations/commitments that are intruding in on his obligation to teach the course (or, more generally, be prepared for the course). These include graduate student advising, personal issues (family most probably - their health seems fine), and research-related stuff. As a result, the professor has literally ended class early and even cancelled class altogether on multiple occasions because, as they have openly disclosed, they "didn't have anything else prepared". On top of that, they have severely cut down on the number of exams and homework. For students who really only care about getting the course over with, having no intention of using and exploring the material covered in the class, this is heaven. But for those who care deeply about the quality of the class, most of which are paying, this is hell. What could I do to make this situation better? I haven't talked to the professor about this, because (1) I believe the problems are external to the professor, and (2) the professor is a bit hot-tempered. I don't know if I should talk to his authorities, because then I'd feel bad/mean. Obviously I try hard to supplement by studying the material on my own, but that shouldn't be the case for a payed class. A: One important thing about higher education is that in general nobody else than you takes responsibility for your learning. So if you decide to learn the material from books/other resources this should be fine. However, teachers/lecturers are still responsible to deliver good lectures. So the teachers set the stage to learn, but you can learn in any way you like. That said, it still makes sense to try to improve the teaching. You write that the problems are external to the professor. This should make it easier to approach him. For example you don't have to say "I would like more explanation and better answers to our questions" but you can ask for additional material where you can find answers to your questions. However, if you think that the assignment of this professor to this class was in general a bad decision (due to, for example, lack of expertise, lack of time, too many other commitments…) you can bring this up to people in the department who are responsible. However, it is important to focus on facts and describing the situation in neutral, non-judgemental terms. A: If you aren't comfortable bringing this up to the instructor, you should definitely bring this up to someone in the department, such as the under/grad coordinator or chair. Like you said, you paid for this class. Things like this can slip by without the department ever being aware of it but I would hope that they would take this very seriously.

Q: Are professors' salaries a function of the amount of grant funding they obtain? Some professors direct large research programs. What is the typical practice for compensating them? For example, it is not unusual for a top professor to be directing $30 million in research grants every year. If the professor got only 1% of this, it would be a salary of $300,000 per year. I would assume they are paid more than that. Please do not answer vaguely (impossible to know, it differs from place to place). Obviously, it differs from place to place. I want to know the general and typical practices. What is a common method of compensation. I am just interested here in compensation for grant-making ability. So, if that is a factor in salary, I would like to know the effect on salary. A: In the United States, the amount of money that a professor makes is not generally a percentage of the amount of funding that they have under management. Instead, professors are typically guaranteed a 9-month salary and can supplement with 3 additional grant-funded months (generally at the same rate) for summer. That salary is set by a combination of regulation, negotiation, and academic rank, in a manner vaguely similar to salaries at a large corporation. Thus, high funding correlates with high salary because a well-funded professor is also likely to be progressing in their compensation package, but there is typically an effective "cap" on the amount that a professor can receive through their university (consulting, startups, and patent licensing fees may be an entirely different matter, but again are not actually determined by research funding, just correlated as being another common product of a successful research). As for the actual compensation of specific faculty: for most US state-funded institutions, you can find complete salary databases published as public records. For example, here is one for Berkeley. Private institutions have relatively similar compensation rates (or a bit higher), since top private institutions are competing with top public institutions for the same talent. A: I am just interested here in compensation for grant-making ability. So, if that is a factor in salary, I would like to know the effect on salary. While it is very unusual, the University of Arkansas has a Faculty Salary Funding Incentive Plan faculty can earn cash rewards up to 25% of their regular salary for bringing in grant money that covers their regular salary. But, the total amount of this "bonus" is still a percentage of the base salary, not a percentage of the grant funding. In the United States, two major sources of grant funding are the NSF and the NIH, both of which limit how much PI salary may be charged to grants: The NSF limits the amount of salary senior personnel can receive from grant funding to 2/9 of their regular base salary. (See this question for more on that.) This roughly corresponds to a professor getting up to 2 months of their base salary from grant funding, while they typically get 9 months from the university. The NIH limits the salary that one may receive from an NIH grant with a salary cap. Professors work hard to get grant funding not because they earn a lot of money from it, but because (a) it's often expected for promotion and tenure, and (b) it allows them to buy equipment and hire students to help carry out the research they want to do. A: In Germany, one Euro in grants will typically not automatically increase your salary by x Euro-Cents. Instead, professors will have (possibly multi-year) targets: "Over the next three years, bring in at least x Euro grant money as principal investigator." If you reach your target, you will get a temporary salary increase (Leistungszulage) until the next target review. Reaching your target multiple times in a row may lead to this increase becoming permanent. (Of course, professors' targets usually also include publications, teaching and service.) As elsewhere, more success in acquiring grant money will strengthen your position on the job market. You will get more offers and have a better bargaining position for Berufungszulagen and Bleibezulagen, so grant success correlates with your salary indirectly. I have attempted to describe the German academic salary system here: Do professors in Germany have other payment than their standard salary?

Q: What is background check for the graduate admission processing? I received an unofficial offer for graduate admission. The graduate director mentioned two steps which will be required to get the official admit. Background Checking Signing on the offer letter As I'm an international student, is it for the security purpose? How long it could take to complete the process? One of my friends said that, It could be aa check from USA gov. Could you please explain? A: I don't know if this is universal, but I do know that some programs require background checks for anyone interacting with individuals under 18. For example, from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychology webpage (bottom paragraph on that page): Special note for Applicants to the Clinical Psychology Program: Consistent with Pennsylvania law, all students in the Clinical Psychology Program must satisfactorily pass required background checks that are intended to protect children from contact with individuals who have abused children or have been convicted of certain felonies (including drug felonies), as is further explained here: www.dhs.state.pa.us. FBI, Pennsylvania State Police, and Pennsylvania Child Abuse clearances must be completed during the fall term of the student’s first year. Students may not continue in the Clinical Psychology Program if they fail any of these background checks or decline to submit applications to obtain them. Cost of the clearances is to be covered by the student. Given that many undergraduate students are underage, and given that as a graduate student you will almost certainly be interacting with undergrads as part of your teaching assistant and undergraduate mentorship duties, this is required for basically all grad students. I know that, at Pitt, this isn't just for the Psych program; lots of programs have a similar requirement. Much of this is new since the Sandusky child abuse events.

Q: What's the point in hiring assistant professors instead of more experienced professors? I wonder what the upsides are of hiring assistant professors instead of more experienced professors. I am mostly interested in US universities and computer science departments. A: For example: Their salaries are far lower. (The discrepancy varies by department, high in the physical sciences, low in economics and business.) In fields that receive startup packages, their startup packages are far lower. Many schools cannot hire a proven superstar, but they can take a gamble on a bright young scholar and help her develop into a superstar This doesn't apply in my department, but you could imagine that a disfunctional environment the senior faculty might like having junior faculty around to take advantage of: make them teach the big intro classes, do the unpleasant service work, etc. Junior faculty often bring new bleeding-edge skills that are hard to find in senior faculty. A range of career stages within a department creates long-term continuity. I'm sure others can come up with a number of additional reasons. A: Assistant professors are not inferior versions of full professors. Aside from years of experience, there will usually be many differences between two candidates. Young does not mean not as good (it will when I celebrate my 60-th birthday later this year, though). The assistant professor may hold an advantage in a specific field or in general. A department may be intentionally focusing on a very specialized subject field that the assistant professor brings. That is to say, an assistant professor may be more proficient than a full professor in some departmental subject matter. For a more general illustration, I believe I was better at one aspect of teaching when I was a young assistant professor than I am now. I was better at helping students break through brick walls (such as clearly understanding the concept and point of calculus) when I personally could "remember not knowing". It is easier to explain how to go from not knowing to knowing when your own breakthrough was just a few years earlier instead of many decades earlier. A: In a system like the US, a "more experienced professor" typically has tenure already. Someone who has tenure won't want to give it up. Therefore, if you want to recruit them, you have to offer them tenure as well, either from the moment they walk in the door or very shortly thereafter. Otherwise they are not going to take the job you are offering. This creates a significant risk for your institution. The decision about whether to hire this person and grant them tenure has to be made based on limited information: their CV and publications, some letters of recommendation, and a one- or two-day in-person interview (during which the candidate is of course on their best behavior). These materials may not be representative of how the candidate will actually perform in the job. Maybe their teaching turns out to be mediocre, or not a good fit for your student population. Maybe they shirk all administrative duties. Maybe some aspect of your institution makes them less productive than previously. Maybe they have catastrophic personality conflicts with their new colleagues. Too bad for you! You gave them tenure, and now you're stuck with them until they retire or leave voluntarily. On the other hand, if you hire an assistant professor, you have five or six years to observe their actual job performance close up, before deciding whether to tenure them. You don't have to extrapolate from what they have done at other institutions - you know exactly how they work here. You know how effectively they teach your students. You know how well they get along with people in your department. If any of this turns out to be unacceptable, or even if it's okay but you think you could find someone better, you can fire them (or deny them tenure). So your risk of getting stuck with an ineffective or toxic faculty member is quite a bit lower. (Note: "You" in this answer could refer to a dean, department chair, or to the faculty of a department or institution collectively. Basically, whoever has the responsibility of making hiring, retention, and tenure decisions.)

Q: Want to pursue a second PhD I have already completed my PhD in Earthquake Engineering with soil dynamics specialization and recently joined as an assistant professor in a state university. In my PhD, although I got couple of publication but I am not satisfied with my work, I could have done way better than what I did in my PhD. So, I want to pursue another PhD in a related field like Geotechnical Engineering. How far it will be effective? And is it possible to apply for another PhD in a related area?Sometimes I feel attracted to change my research direction, I am really fascinated about space and time, would it be a good idea to change my research area to theoretical physics this time, and what are the possibilities to change my research direction into theoretical physics? Please advice. A: I'm finalizing my PhD in structural engineering and was thinking about getting an another PhD in mechanical engineering. After I have discussed this with my adviser, I do not think that it was the right move for me (mainly due to age [I'm 29 now, no family yet and number of publication is high in my case]). I know a friend who was getting his PhD in structural engineering while getting an MS in Math. He likes it! It is a personal decision. If you are doing this to compensate for what do you think is not a "satisfactory work" during you PhD, look at the facts! you graduate, got couple of publications and a faculty position! You can always self-improve, explore a different reach area or engage in interdisciplinary field. If you measuring successes by the number of papers, then, more papers will come with time! You do not need a "degree" to be satisfied. However, if space-time is something that you are very interested in, then the heart wants what the heart wants. I found this the other day while surfing the internet that might help you; "At least for a while, in your heart of hearts you'll be confident only that the university will soon enough discover its error in awarding you the PhD, and at some point will brand you (in public no doubt) the fraud you know you are. This too will pass as you come to realize that students are extremely gullible and many of your colleagues are even greater frauds than you. That is to say, you know more than you think you do, and students and the people you work with will appreciate the range and depth of your knowledge and abilities if you let them." The Transition from Graduate Student to Assistant Professor

Q: What is done in a workshop? How does it differ from an academic conference? I have done some research on this, but I still don't know what is carried out in a workshop. What activities are arranged? How are they different from conferences? A: The reason why it is difficult to tell what workshops are about is because it is a catch-all category that many different types of academic meeting are labelled as. To illustrate, let me give examples of the nature of some of the events that I have attended in the last two years that all use the same word "workshop" to describe themselves: A "baby conference" attached to a full-size conference, where the small meeting simply isn't large enough to meet on its own yet. A project meeting for researchers who are all funded by the same large grant A planning and discussion session aimed at helping determine the direction of a field A joint industry/academia fact-finding meeting sponsored by an industry consortium A specialty conference attended by around 100 people A premier conference attended by several hundred people A working meeting by a standards development group The length of these meetings ranged from a single afternoon to a full week. Their programs ranged from nothing but loosely structured discussion to a full-on tightly packed conference schedule. The level of peer review ranged from non-applicable to minimal to full-on single-blind review and revision. In short: a workshop is whatever it wants to be, and different ones serve different purposes in the academic ecosystem. A: In CS subfields related to HCI and related topics of communication between users and software, a workshop is almost the same as a conference, that is, there are speakers who give talks about their papers. However, the following differences can be observed: Organisational: A workshop lasts just one or half a day. A workshop is "embedded" into a conference; it doesn't take place on its own, but it takes place at the day before or after the main conference. Sometimes, conference registration includes workshop registration. The audience tends to be much smaller. This is partially because often, several workshops are scheduled at the same time, and partially, because not all conference guests attend any workshops (especially when the workshop needs to be registered and paid for separately). In any case, it is not untypical for smaller workshops to have just a handful of attendees, each of which will present something. Contents: There is less of an expectation of presenting fully finished work. Work in progress, or results based on a preliminary study, are usually accepted, if not explicitly invited. Likewise, remarks about future work can be a bit more central than in normal talks, as the workshop may prove as an opportunity to find collaborators who would like to help tackle the suggestions for future work. While conference sessions typically feature an opportunity for questions and answers on every single paper right after each talk, workshops sometimes schedule an additional (sometimes considerable in duration) wrap-up discussion that is supposed to provide some time for discussing everything that was presented during the workshop, identifying common issues and chances, and possibly developing ideas for further work together. A: Sometimes, a workshop is just a conference, but the organizers decided to call it a workshop instead for one reason or another. So while a lot of people will have some idea of what the difference should be, in practice the difference can be non-existent, so one will need to look at the details of each individual conference or workshop to decide which will be of interest. (Note that my entire experience is from mathematics, so it might be different in other fields).

Q: 'Introduction to Subject X' & Guide books : How do they influence the academic reputation? Many professors publish introductory books on their subjects, for undergraduates or sometimes books for a non-academic audience. something like "Introduction to Art History" or a 'guide book' to 'Thinker X' etc. How do these affect your academic reputation? Or are they primarily making them money? I don't quite understand, because many of these books are really quite basic and expository in nautre. A: How do these affect your academic reputation? Or are they primarily making them money? I don't quite understand, because many of these books are really quite basic and expository in nature. This question seems to be based on a false premise, namely that the two primary reasons for writing a book are developing a scholarly reputation or making money. One common reason to write an introductory text is dissatisfaction with the available options. If you write your own textbook, it will be a perfect fit for how you feel the course should be taught, and you can address any deficiencies you see in competing books. If nobody else seems likely to write the book you have in mind, then writing it yourself may be preferable to repeatedly using books you dislike. More generally, many books are written as a service to the community. Depending on how cynical you are, this could be viewed as noble (taking on a poorly paid and not particularly well respected job for the benefit of the world's students) or self-important (believing that you have unique and valuable insights on topics that hundreds of teachers with equal or greater experience have thoroughly addressed).

Q: An F grade (in a labor studies class) on the transcript will hurt my admission to mathematics grad school? So, I'm a third year student studying mathematics. My goal has always been getting a PhD in math. I'm currently doing ok with my math (taking grad courses and stuff). However, as many other students, I have to take courses outside math. I'm currently taking a labor studies class right now. All the class talks about is how bad America is treating its workers, and why don't we raise minimum wage to 50 dollars per hours to help the poor workers and stuff like that. I don't agree with everything I learn in class, and I show my disagree. As a result, the professor gives me terrible grades for saying my opinions. My question is: Will that bad grad hurt my future? Can I explain my situation in my application? A: This could possibly hurt you. In grad school, and even more so as a working academic, you will be asked to do various tasks that you might disagree with. For example you might be asked to teach precalculus or college algebra. Occasionally grad students don't like how they are asked to teach these courses and they either raise a big stink, or else simply don't follow instructions. In either case, this can cause huge headaches for the person supervising the TA -- even if the TA's complaints have some merit. Whether fairly or not, the prospect that you may be unwilling to follow instructions might give some admissions committees pause. Doing tasks which you disagree with and that were assigned by people whom you may or may not respect (and doing them quickly, so that you can get on to the work you actually care about) is a vital survival skill in academia. I recommend that you learn this skill immediately and do what you can to pass the course.

Q: Possible to accept GRE score and view it, but not report it to a university? From what I've read from the ETS and other sources, after finishing a GRE exam the system will give you the option to keep your scores, before you actually know the score. If you decide to accept the score and then view it and realize it's bad, do you still have the option to not send it to any school, or is the step in which you select the schools to send it to before the step in which you view your score? I'm wondering if I will be in either of the following situations: I think I did well, but I have to select the universities before I actually see my score. I select the universities, and then see my actual score and see I didn't do so well. I think I did poorly so I choose to not send my scores, but then I see my actual scores and find I did well, but now I have to pay extra to send my scores. Ideally: I accept my scores, then I'm able to view them. If I did well, I select my universities. If I did poorly, I don't select any university and just redo the GRE on a later date. Thanks! A: Yes. You get to see your unofficial test scores on test day. Then you have the option to send these scores or not. Also, you can always change your mind by sending additional score reports after the test day for a fee. If you provide the schools the day of the test, they are free.

Q: When writing a letter of reference, is there any reason not to show it to the student? I only agree to write a reference letter if I can write a positive one. Although it is only hypothetical at this point, I would hesitate to write a reference letter for an individual who chooses not to waive their right to see it. That said, I have sometimes shown students my letters for them since I feel it is useful for them to know what I have written. It also provides them a chance to remind me of things I may have forgotten. I do not do this consistently, but am considering making it a personal policy. I guess I have two questions. Is there a reason not to show a student their letter of reference? Just to be clear, this is for a letter I have written for the student and not for a reference I have recieved. The second question is, is it reasonable to refuse to write a reference for a student when the student does not waive their right to see the reference. A: Is there a reason not to show a student their letter of reference? One important reason is if you make direct comparisons with other students, which is one of the most useful things you can do in a letter. If you say "this student is even more promising than X, and perhaps comparable with Y, but not quite as strong as Z", then it doesn't seem appropriate to tell the student. Even if your letter doesn't name anyone specific, but instead says "this student was among the top two in a class of twenty-five", it still leaks a little information about how other students performed in the class. Even aside from direct comparisons, you'll be making implicit comparisons if several students compare the letters you wrote for them to see whose is more enthusiastic. That doesn't raise the same ethical issues, but it's still awkward. I have no interest in telling students my private opinion of how they compare with each other. The second question is, is it reasonable to refuse to write a reference for a student when the student does not waive their right to see the reference. Why not? The fundamental question here is whether you ever have an obligation to write a letter. In general I'd say no, although there are cases in which it would be offensive to refuse to write for anything less than very serious reasons. (For example, Ph.D. advisors owe letters to graduating students.) Under most circumstances, refusing to waive the right to see the letter sounds to me like a fine reason to decline to write one. There are also all sorts of intermediate options you could choose. For example, you could tell the student you would have to write something like "I warned this student that I could not write a compelling letter if he did not waive the right to see it, because I would be unable to compare him with other students. He insisted that he needed a letter from me but was unwilling to waive this right, so I will do the best I can. I can confirm that he received an A in my class and has sufficient preparation for further study in this field."

Q: Qualitative data but quantitative outcome; what type of research methodology is this? Following are the steps, how I am working on a project: Qualitative approaches to collect data Forming criteria from collected data Mapping criteria to function Getting a matheimatical function to quantify data Result in a (quantitative) tabular form. Is this quantitative research methodology or mixed methods research methodology ? A: Well, according to Alan Bryman in his research article Integrating quantitative and qualitative research: how is it done?, this is a theme that is still open to debate. He uses these 5 questions in separating qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods approaches: Are the quantitative and qualitative data collected simultaneously or sequentially? (Morgan, 1998; Morse, 1991). Which has priority – the quantitative or the qualitative data? (Morgan, 1998; Morse, 1991). What is the function of the integration – for example, triangulation, explanation, or exploration? (Creswell, 2003; Creswell et al., 2003; Greene et al., 1989). At what stage(s) in the research process does multi-strategy research occur? (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 1998). It may be at stages of research question formulation, data collection, data analysis, or data interpret- ation. Is there more than one data strand? (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2003). With a multi-strand study, there is more than one research method and hence source of data. With a mono-strand study, there is one research method and hence one source of data. However, whether a mono-strand study can genuinely be regarded as a form of mixing methods is debatable. In regards to your question, I would say that if by "criteria" you mean forming hypotheses that you later test with quantitative methods, that would clearly be a mixed-methods approach. If not, you are probably more in a grey area.

Q: It is plagiarism if my work is very similiar to something previously published? I am a PhD student in economics and making a mathematical model of some stuff in a subject of my interest. While I was searching papers on Google Scholar, I found a PhD thesis written 5-6 years ago in my university, in which one of the chapters is somewhat very close to my stuff. Just for an important detail, my idea is totally different and I think it is an interesting idea but the model is just slightly different from author's thesis and the solution method is very close. In particular, the model framework that author used is a very commonly used framework in the literature but accidentally my solution method is very close to the author's method. For sure without doubt, I will give the exact reference with the chapter and state where my idea is different from author's idea. My question is: is this a plagiarism? How can I avoid any plagiarism problems? Should I contact the author in order to invite him to be my co-author in this case? A: Your situation is not in any way plagiarism, but rather a common and ordinary case of independent reinvention. There is no need to have the other person as a co-author or anything like that: just cite their model as related prior work, explain how yours is similar and different, and learn from it so that you can do the best you can with your own work.

Q: Should I ask my online PhD interview panel whether my partner can sit in? I have an online interview for a PhD program via Skype. I want to ask the panel if my girlfriend can join in the interview. She will turn off her microphone and camera, so there will no interrupting sound from her. She will only hear our conversation and see our faces (if they turn on the camera). She is there just to share with my experience, not my stress. I can do the interview alone. I also don't need to impress her. This looks odd and unprofessional, I admit. But from what I read from the book of the professor that I follow, he is very open. He always use first person point of view. Even when at the time I contacted there was no funding for me, he managed to find one and asked me to do the interview. The professor who introduce me to contact him described him as "cool", though it is an informal conversation. Based on those observation, I want to take a little safety risk (just a little, and safety). I think the asking question is not the important thing; just pretend they are human and ask simply: My girlfriend wants to observe the interview. She won't make any interruption. Should I let her in? Q: However, should I ask this question? If there is no problem, there are some more things to consider: Should I ask this via email or when we begin to talk? It can have technical troubles, such as lagging. Of course the interview is more important, and if the connection keeps unstable, she shouldn't take part anymore. If this happens, would this leaves a bad impression on the professors? One more thing: seriously, I don't need her that badly for just one hour. Yes, this is not a Nobel prize, it's just a normal interview. I just think that it's nice to have, and until I can't find a good reason to not to do that, I'll take a try. If everyone is scare of making a mistake, when they can't point out what that mistake is, then there is no development in this world. I seriously don't think that "unprofessional" or "childish" is a good reason, especially when the person I'm talking with is open-minded. A: I would find this odd and unprofessional. I recommend against this. Also, I want to be able to talk freely and openly with you in an interview, and have you respond in kind, and I would be worried about how having your girlfriend on the line will affect this dynamic. (For example: I might worry that you would be distracted by thinking about how she is perceiving the interview, or trying to impress her.) I might also be concerned that needing moral support for an interview this badly does not say much about your ability to handle the stresses of graduate school. A: Consider whether or not this would be considered appropriate were you doing an in-person interview. Would anyone be allowed to sit in on said interview, even if they were told specifically not to interfere in any way? Now also consider that even if your girlfriend doesn't verbally react to your interview, that her presence there, and her facial reactions to the interview going on (assuming you will have video) could change how you react during the interview. Finally, consider whether or not this will make a good impression on your professor, or anyone else sitting in on this interview. Even if he is usually very understanding, he might find it a very odd request, and question the helpfulness of doing so. If, and only if, you have a very good reason to have her sitting in on it should you even consider inviting her, and usually 'moral support' is not a good enough reason - this is meant to be a serious interview, and anything not contributing to it in a significant way could very easily be treated with some skepticism. As some have suggested, recording the interview might not be frowned upon - even for personal reasons, but I would not share it with anyone else unless you have explicit permission to do so. What is said during the interview could be very personal and private information that you should not be disclosing to others - which, by the way, is another good reason why this request would be awkward and unadvisable. A: I agree with everyone else that having your girlfriend join in or even asking if that's allowed sounds very unprofessional. However, as an alternative, I'm pretty sure there are screen recording programs out there. Perhaps you could ask permission to record the conversation? That way you can analyse it with your girlfriend afterwards. If you still want to add your girlfriend to the conversation you should definitely ask the interviewers beforehand through e-mail and drop it if you have technical issues. But again, I would recommend against doing it at all.

Q: What should I do if I have accepted an offer informally but am denied the job? This is a follow up to my other question. In November last year I accepted an informal offer of a position at a university outside my country of residence. Since then, I have in good faith withdrawn all my other applications and stopped applying elsewhere as I understood that my acceptance of the offer was binding. I have now applied for the job formally as they told me to. Recently I enquired about the status and according to them the evaluation of applications will be concluded next week and I was also told that I am in a very good position. I know now that I should avoid this kind of practice, but I am in it already, and what I fear finally comes. Does 'a very good position' mean that there is a possibility that I will not get the job? What should I do if it turns out that I do not get the job in the end? Can I even start applying for other jobs now or should I wait till next week? The problem is that my current contract ends this month and I have to leave the country next month. I have a family to feed and to provide a home for. The following is added after the first two answers below are posted: Although the position was not yet advertised before I accepted the offer, I had always thought that this was a real offer, since they already said things like they were looking forward to welcoming me in the group and that they would get in touch with me to finalise my contract (all this was said in writing). I guess my question is, is there nothing I can do with all the email correspondences in which the promise and my acceptance of the job were all recorded? From the answers already given below, it seems that there is nothing I could do with it except to learn not to make the same mistake again. But then, can the university just walk away like that? Of course all this is still hypothetical, and hopefully I still get the job as promised, but I would appreciate if someone who has been in the same situation could share his/her experience and how they dealt with it, just in case. Update: The university in question has lived up to their promise and I have now been formally offered the position. A: I think the other answer is decent, but OP seems to think that his/her question is not being addressed, so here goes: What should I do if I have accepted an offer informally but am denied the job? Apply to other jobs, of course. Does 'a very good position' mean that there is a possibility that I will not get the job? Anything is possible until you receive and accept a formal offer of employment. What should I do if it turns out that I do not get the job in the end? Forget about that opportunity and start applying for other positions. Can I even start applying for other jobs now or should I wait till next week? You can/should be applying/interviewing for other opportunities until you have obtained and accepted a formal offer. A: Until you have formally accepted a job, there is no need to withdraw from any other job application process. It is very common at my university for us to go as far as offering someone a job, and them to not accept it as they received a better offer from elsewhere. Certainly this is slightly annoying, but no-one would suggest it is bad, or unethical behaviour. In this case, it sounds like you might have been over-promised. It is also possible (and we can't know unfortunately) they are hedging their bets. The person you are talking to probably can't promise you the job, so they are trying to encourage you, without stating anything which they could be caught on later.

Q: Can you study and contribute to physics if you are a mathematician? I'm an undergraduate student majoring in mathematics; I totally love it and I want to get Ph.D in pure mathematics. I'm also interested in physics, especially the theoretical field; my favorite areas are relativity and quantum theory. Of course, I'm more into mathematics than physics, that is why I majored in math; plus I don't get as high grades in physics as I do in math. Now here is my question, if I became a mathematician, can I switch to physics easily if I wanted to? I heard a lot about mathematicians contributing to string theory and other areas. I guess what I'm looking for is not a total switch to another field; rather it's more like the ability to learn more about physics easily and being able to contribute to the theories. What I meant was that I want my Ph.D to be in pure math; in essence my focus would be on math. But also I want to study the stuff that interests me in physics, e.g. GR, String theory, etc. I'm asking if it's possible for a professional mathematician to study these subjects in depth without much difficulties; and I'm referring to difficulties in getting enrolled in classes and being able to handle them, and be able to contribute to these fields I'm sorry English isn't my first language, I hope I made my question clear. A: Yes, technically speaking, you can cross the fence -- either direction -- between those two disciplines, but be aware of their different agendas. Physics uses the language of mathematics to construct mathematical models of reality, but the physics is really contained in the following three non-mathematical tasks: Establishing the association between mathematical symbols and reality (interpretation of the mathematical models). Verifying the validity of the conceived mathematical models (physical theory verification). Establishing their limits of validity. You can be a great mathematician, but if you fail in understanding the above not-so-easy tasks, you will be a bad physicist. A: Yes, if you choose your sub-specialty in mathematics wisely, you will be able to interact with physicists as much as you want and decide the amount you want to be linked between the two fields. Mathematics and physics are not in a binary from one another, but instead there is a spectrum amongst the fields. As you note above, you see that there are links between the two, namely in GR and string theory. Let me address your two priorities separately. "study these subjects in depth without much difficulties; and I'm referring to difficulties in getting enrolled in classes and being able to handle them" Typically, getting enrolled in classes during a PhD is a formality that one may even skip and just attend the course without signing up. As for studying these subjects in depth without much difficulty, that may be harder, in particular, because the subjects themselves are, in fact, difficult and will take time and energy. And you will be more focussed on mathematical knowledge in order to work on your thesis. "be able to contribute to these fields" This is quite easy if you choose your mathematical discipline and research problems with this thought in mind. Personally, I'm solely trained in pure mathematics; however, I keep my ear to the ground to string theoretic research and go to many talks in order to glean what mathematical problems string theorists have. Much of my pure mathematical research has string theoretic implications and I am in communication constantly with string theorists as I make a concerted effort to keep that connection. This leads to communication with physicists where I can try to help with mathematical problems that physicist contemporaries have in the context of physics research. It really depends on how much physics you learn with your pure mathematics if you learn the physics with it or if you need it to black-boxed. Many programs in pure mathematics now have Geometry and Physics seminars. Usually these programs have opportunities to focus on geometric problems that have origins in physics and might satisfy your aspirations for working in the intersection of the fields.

Q: What to do about accidental, easily corrected errors in a conference paper you already submitted? I am an engineering MS student (maybe going for PhD). I submitted a conference paper on some research I was working on last week. Before I submitted a conference paper, I regenerated all the plots (for a better consistent format). I realized today that I used an inaccurate, older code to regenerate a few plots in one section. This means that some of the plots are based on a code that had a theoretical error. Not good. Questions: What do you recommend I do? Is it ok to send the accurate plots a week later? Have I damaged my reputation with this forum? Are there ethical issues here - technically I sent innacurate plots but it was a small technical mistake? A: If I understand correctly, the paper has only been submitted for peer review, and this is thus not yet the camera-ready final version that will be archived and widely disseminated. As such, you have an opportunity to fix the error before it enters the literature. The key question, then, is whether your error will mislead the peer reviewers into having a different judgement of the paper than they would otherwise (whether better or worse). The first question I would thus ask is this: how different are the wrong plots from the right plots? If the results are essentially identical (just unsupported because of the error), then I would let it go and just make sure you fix it in subsequent revision. If there is a major difference, then you need to update the paper, because otherwise you will be misleading the reviewers. Updating the paper may be easy or may be difficult depending on the conference and its submission and review timeline. Since it's quite soon after the submission deadline, there's a fairly high chance that no reviewers will yet have actually reviewed your paper, and so updating isn't likely to cause problems. As for how to actually do it: occasionally conferences will allow you to continue updating a submission (whether intentionally or by misconfiguring their review system); for most, though, you will need to email the program chairs who are running the review process. If they are feeling generous, they will allow you to update; if they are not and the error is a major problem, then you may need to withdraw your paper and instead submit more carefully to the next good opportunity. There are a lot of ways to salvage this situation, though, so hopefully you'll have no difficulty in correcting your paper, whether now or at the camera-ready stage.

Q: What can I do if my supervisor does not publish my research results? By this, I do not mean I did not obtain significant research results. My supervisor has told me to finish up a draft of paper for submission, I wrote it, then after few months, he told me to correct some parts and did more experiments on certain area, I followed all his instructions and wrote a second draft to him. And until now, it is already one year after sending my draft to him, and still I have no idea when he will publish it. Actually, this not only happens to me, it happens to all the members in my research group. The average time my supervisor publishes our results is about 2-3 years after we have finished all the required experiments. The results just become idle. I would like to ask, if this is a common phenomenon (and the possible reasons behind it), if not, what I (and my colleagues) can do about it? You know as a research student, having publication is very important, it is really frustrating. A: This seems like a strange situation, since it is very counterproductive for both you and your supervisor. If this is indeed common in your group, I am sure several ideas have been scooped by the time they finally get submitted. Unfortunately, I really don't have any decent idea why your supervisor would act this way. The most important thing to do is to talk to your supervisor and don't let him/her dismiss the issue. This may seem like an aggressive approach, but you can disguise it as a learning experience, e.g. "Please tell me what is wrong with the current manuscript because I believe it is ready for submission, oh wise one". Whatever you do, remain polite. A few approaches you can try (all of which are reasonable, so don't be shy): Send reminders and send them often. Ask what you can do to improve the manuscript. If your supervisor has no further suggestions to change the manuscript, ask where you can submit it to directly. Don't wait for him/her to wake up. This approach may lead to your supervisor turning it into a ping-pong match, asking you to make trivial but time-consuming extensions again and again. In this case, confront your supervisor and explain your perspective. If you can find an appropriate call for papers, ask permission to send the manuscript there. Calls typically have deadlines and are not necessarily a downgrade in terms of venue quality. This includes conferences and journal special issues. Having a hard deadline might help. A: Finish writing the paper yourself. Send your supervisor a final draft, inviting him to submit his comments on the paper and suggest some changes. If your supervisor does not wish to collaborate on the submission, it's possible he will be OK with you finishing and submitting the paper yourself, perhaps as the sole author. Make sure to acknowledge his capacity as your supervisor at the end of the paper, if he is not included as a co-author. If it's your data, and you wrote the paper, you have every right to publish it by yourself as long as you offer your supervisor the chance to collaborate or object. Best-case scenario? Your own paper gets published, or your supervisor gets jolted back to reality and collaborates with you on finishing the paper together. Worst case scenario? Your paper gets rejected (don't fret, that can happen often!), so you have to head back to your supervisor or Academia.SE for advice on re-submitting it or choosing another journal. A: In a comment, OP added: Of course we have talked to our supervisor, he just said 'ok, I will look and see if anything to add', after few weeks we asked again, and he again said 'I will look into it'. Try to understand why your supervisor behaves likes this. Some hypotheses: Your supervisor prefers to spent time on some other work. Your supervisor has to focus on some other work for external reasons. Your supervisor prefers to spent time working with someone else. Your supervisor finds the paper boring and avoids working on it. Your supervisor is a perfectionist and wants to avoid publishing a non-perfect paper. Your supervisor has bad time-management skills and forgets to look at your paper. Your supervisor doesn't really want to publish this for some reason. ... many more possibilities ... It is important to understand why your supervisor is behaving like this, in order to react appropriately. For example, if your supervisor has very bad time-management skills and keeps forgetting your paper, it is probably better to ask about this much more often than every few weeks. Options for understanding your supervisor better include just asking him or her about it, or asking someone who successfully collaborated with your supervisor in the past. Maybe some former grad students of your supervisor figured out how to effectively interact with your supervisor and you can learn the trick from them.

Q: I want to quit PhD after 4 months. Should I? I am a first year PhD student. I am doing it from an institute in a remote part of the world where the temperature is -10 degrees most time of the year. I took this opportunity after doing my Masters in Europe and I was really happy with the time I spent during my masters thesis research and really liked my research and came up with good results and very good grades. Now, I have taken this scholarship position but I am already in dark. As said, this institute is in a very small town. I can't speak the language of local people. I can't go out for a walk because its too cold. I don't think that the project is difficult. In fact it is easier for me. But my daily life is not perfect because to read a research paper or write an article I need a fresh and happy mind, which in this city and cold temperature is not possible. I have money just for food and living and no more for even traveling to another city. Can someone please tell me if I should leave this program? A: It's impossible to advise you what to do. But I would consider to give it more time, e.g., a year, before quitting. You may still be effected psychologically by the change of place, weather, geography and location; you are still not adjusted to the new place. So you feel anxious and perhaps panic. But it may not be a good strategy to haphazardly decide on quitting the PhD while in this position. So I would advise you to wait more time and see if you adjust to your place and perhaps start enjoying your project. (Also, PhD is never easy, and so mild depression while completing a phd is quite common.)

Q: Sharing assignments with a potential employer I'm currently a first year information technology student majoring in software development. I applied for an internship at a software development company. I got an interview and now they're asking to see some assignments that I've done at school to prove my experience. Is it usual that a school (in Canada) own all the rights to assignments that I've done? The assignments contain some code by the school and the rest is mine. I'm wondering if there's a route I can take so that I can share these assignments with this potential employer without violating my school's policies? Or is there something else I can tell this employer? (Please note that I'm asking this question on behalf of a friend) A: I don't think you need to worry about school policy or copyright here: you're privately sharing these documents in order to allow somebody to better evaluate you, not attempting to transfer ownership or widely distributing them. As such, the question of who owns the code is irrelevant: you are not claiming ownership, you are claiming that the portions you wrote provide evidence of your skills as a programmer. The company should be expected to treat it as a confidential part of your application process, just like all of the other personal information that you have given them. If they do not, any possible fault and liability lies with them, not with you.

Q: I have no formal qualifications but want to be an independent researcher I have no formal qualifications in Structural Engineering but I would like to become an independent researcher. I have self taught myself from university textbooks, found all the relevant professional criteria and from this created my own portfolio of essays, design work, past exam papers I have found online. Do you think it would be worth any of my time trying to break into this area considering I have no qualifications. A: Well, you certainly can't work as an engineer... As a researcher..., as said in other posts, research is 'a world in itself', with its own set of rules. Anybody can publish, as long as the work is good and follows the usual format of the field. By good I mean relevant and, usually, original. Which is hard to do if you are not familiar with the field. Even worse for the usual format, you would only know that if you had experience in the field. Usually, that's why advisors exist. They guide the students, using experience earned from several years and degrees in the field. I would say it is tremendously difficult to publish anything worthwhile without experience. Personally, I would not even consider advising someone that is not, at the very least, an undergrad student on a related discipline. And in this case, the student would have to be outstanding. Keep in mind that, while most qualified jobs require some years of high education, professional academic research, on an independent level (without advisor), requires a whole lot of degrees and experience. It is a very skilled profession, with fierce competition, where a good part of the qualified people fail. I'm not saying you can't do it, but it would be a truly herculean task, if possible at all... UPDATE: Just as a qualifier, engineering degrees usually take 5 years. A very fast phd would take 3-4 years (sometimes more, US for instance). Someone who did that, after these 8 years, would be considered, a 'entry-level' researcher, IF the phd was reasonably done. That's more than 5k hours of dedicated study (my eng. was ~ 3k, I'm rounding off on the phd to 2k, which would be short, mine took way more than that). All these years to be able to start... Notice that, to work as an engineer, you would only need the first 5 years.... To be honest, what you are asking is almost like: "So, I want to be a heart surgeon, but I didn't go to med school. I read all the books, and did all the stuff, do you think someone would hire me to do a coronary bypass?" Would you trust this surgeon?

Q: Should I not hire someone who does not get along with me? When I was doing my postdoc, there was a PhD student who shared the same office with me; he didn't get along very well with me or anyone in the office. He could be described as unfriendly and a little bit rude. As we were working on different projects, I didn't know much about his research ability. I am now a lecturer (at the same university) and have just received funding to hire a postdoc. The same PhD student applied for the position and has since been shortlisted along with another candidate. Based on the CV alone, the PhD student is comparable to another candidate. However, based on his behaviour in the past, I don't want to consider him for the job (my department lets me make the final decision who to hire). Is it ok to not hire someone because, from past history, I believe that we will not get along? A: This question is fascinating to me on many levels. It shows a weird tendency that we have in academia to equate job offers to something like awards, where the decision for or against a candidate has to be based on scientific (or educational, or whatever) merit alone. I argue that if you posted the question "Should I not hire someone who does not get along with me" over at Workplace.SE, you would get very confused people asking you why you would even consider such a thing. To answer this very frankly - no, you should not hire a person that you suspect you will not get along with. Not over an equally qualified person that you might get along with better, and arguably not even over a slightly less qualified person that you might get along with better. Your main metric for deciding for or against a candidate should be how good you think he will be able to do the job. For a postdoc under your guidance, your suspicion that he will not get along with you means that he will likely not do a good job. That he might do a good job working under somebody else is not relevant to this decision. A: This has nothing to do with academia and everything to do with constructing working teams. Imagine you were buying a replacement brake caliper for a car. The skill you are paying for is "squeeze brake pads against disc with a specified amount of pressure". There will be dozens of commercial units capable of doing this, but you need one that will fit in with the rest of your components. Mount holes in the right geometry, fits a disc of the same thickness and diameter, clearances are such that it doesn't foul on anything and so forth. You aren't just hiring the skill, you're hiring the skill and compatibility with the rest of the team. Incompatible people are as unsuitable for your purposes as a caliper that doesn't fit. Some people are going to say that mounting geometry etc is quantifiable and objective, but compatibility is subjective. This is irrelevant in the context of the original question, which presupposes that compatibility has already been reliably assessed. Sometimes, you can tell. "Candidate is known to irritate and annoy existing team members." is an objective rejection criterion. A: If he was shortlisted with another candidate, that means both are equally qualified (to some extent), then who would you pick if you did not know him? If you would pick the other guy, then you can simply offer the position to the other guy. There is no guarantee that the other guy is friendly either! However, you know for a fact that your previous office mate is unfriendly and rude! If it was me, I would gamble with and pick the other guy (since both have similar qualifications). If the other guy tuns out to be rude (50% chance), you would have to deal with him anyway. PS, I assume you know that you can always interview the other guy to make sure he is fine. Also, you can start a fresh relationship with the second guy and set your boundaries/preferences.

Q: How do I get records proving that I was an Erasmus exchange student? I was an Eramus interchange student in the UK for my final year project 20 years ago. Whilst I have that in my CV, and even have in the Internet my final report in an old site of mine, I do not have a single proof in writing I was ever there. Even while there, I never had a proper student card, but just a provisory piece of paper. Come to think of it, the most tangible documents I have ever with me even at the time where the check with the grant money and the programme evaluation form. My tutor is probably retired. I recently emailed my project supervisor with this doubt, he did not answer. Note that I myself work in Academia nowadays, and although it is in a different city and unrelated University, I might also pose them this doubt. The document would come in handy someday, for instance to help me getting the nationality of my wife. What would be the best course of action for getting it after all this time? A: I ended up contacting the Academic Services / Student Requests Information Team by email. They said immediately they would provide a document, and they delivered; Pretty much professional and very attentive people. They found my records from 20 years ago, but not my grades. Fortunately my dissertation grade is not so important, as I have it in another set of documents. I already have the document in electronic form, and they also sent a paper copy.

Q: Translating a foreign degree's name? I plan on obtaining a bachelor's degree at a Norwegian university in what is called "dataingeniør". In the future I'd like to continue my studies in a different country, so I'm going to need to know what to write in my CV. A direct translation of "dataingeniør" would be "computer engineer", but my understanding is that that usually refers to hardware engineers in the English speaking world. The program I'm planning on taking is however strictly software as far as I can tell. Is there anything wrong with simply calling it "computer science"? The program covers typical CS stuff like OS, algorithms, databases and programming, so I feel like they are equivalent. A: I made a post on this matter a little while ago and just finished translating my CV, so I'll tell you what I did. Leave the university name alone, don't translate it, UNLESS you think it would be unreadable by the folks who are reading your application (so if it was in Russian or Chinese for example). Does the name of your university look like something that would resemble 'university' in English? Leave it alone, or, if you have to, put it in quotations NEXT to the original university name. But do not remove or change the university's name, since it's a proper name. In the case of "dataingeniør", leave that name there as well, and put in quotes the equivalent thing in your country. Same with the actual title of the degree e.g. B.Sc. Dataingeniør (equiv. Software Engineering Bachelors). Or you could put Computer Science if you feel it covered all the equivalent content (verified by a cursory glance at the CS programme information of the university for which you are applying). In any case, leave the title alone but then put in parentheses the equivalent qualification. And make sure it's actually equivalent (having a person from that country on hand to answer questions is important). I was told also to not translate the name of project/thesis titles, UNLESS they are in a very hard-to-read language, and to go again with the quotes. But my advisor advised against this because it makes the CV 'look cluttered' and, according to him, it's not important unless the title uses a different character system. Finally, if you are applying for a PhD, you should have a prospective advisor lined up, no? In that case, you can ask her/him or someone in her/his group to have a look over it for you, as it's in their best interest that you look good for the admissions team. Alternatively, somebody from the country should do. Add a comment if you need to know something else. I just translated my entire CV so I'm happy to clarify additional stuff.

Q: Is it a bad idea to buy plane tickets before the conference schedule is announced? I will be attending a conference to give a presentation in approximately two months. I would like to buy plane tickets to and from the conference location, especially because I am living outside the US and the conference is in the US, so travel to the conference is not an easy thing. Unfortunately, the conference organizers have yet to confirm and announce the conference schedule. I do know that the last possible presentation session ends at 2 pm on Tuesday, so if I wanted to book plane tickets now, the earliest flight that I could catch would leave at 4 pm. However, if my presentation is on Monday, I might prefer to book a flight that leaves early on Tuesday morning, skipping some of the sessions at the conference. Question: Should I book my flight tickets now at "safe" times? Or should I book my flight tickets, leaving early on the last day, hoping that I don't get scheduled for the very last presentation slot? Response to answers/comments: I don't need to leave early. I have just often observed that at every conference which I have attended in the past, the attendance at the last few sessions is rather low, and it just seemed to be "normal" to leave early. Based on the answers/comments, it seems that just because many others leave early doesn't mean that I need to when I can stay at the conference, learning things and meeting people. A: First, I would ask whether you think you really should skip part of the conference---you're going such a long way, and presumably it's a community that you care about, so are you sure you want to abandon part of it? If you really do want to skip, though, I would recommend a third path that I have often seen work: contact the conference program chairs, let them know your travel dilemma, and ask them if they can schedule you on the prior day. If they are likely to be flexible, this will let them be flexible now and let you book; if not, you'll know they're unlikely to be flexible at other times either and thus know that it's not safe to plan to skip until the schedule is announced.

Q: My paper has been provisionally accepted, but my latest results are not as reported in the paper. What should I do? After presenting a paper at a conference last year, I was invited to submit an expanded version of the paper as a journal paper. The review of the paper has recently been concluded, and the editors recommended acceptance subject to minor revision. While the paper was under review, however, we developed a more accurate approach which reveals that the finding reported in the paper was too optimistic and what was proposed in that paper did not seem as promising as previously thought. I have been contemplating which action to take: Withdraw the paper. Revise the paper significantly to include the new methodology and the new results. Keep the paper nearly as it is, only addressing the reviewers' comments (none of the reviewers questioned the previous approach), but adding a note that our latest approach produces something quite different. I am personally not comfortable with option 3, although it may be the easiest and fastest thing to do. I am deliberating between options 1 and 2. Option 1 because the result doesn't look as promising as before and may not be interesting enough to warrant publication. However, if I withdraw the paper, there is no chance to warn readers that the results presented in the conference paper were too optimistic. Hence option 2, which is the option I am inclined to take. It however needs more time and I am not sure what to say to the editors. A: A good review panel would not select your paper purely due to the impact of your result but also with respect to your approach to solving the problem. This may include how existing methods were modified and how novel methods are applied. This would also concern your analysis of the methodology along with related results. Withdrawing the paper (option 1) should be the last thing you ought to be thinking about. That is unless you plan to publish it in a different journal after much improvement, but this also has its own implications. There is nothing wrong with going for option 2. In fact it is to be most welcome in the ethics of research. Hopefully the reviewers would also appreciate such honesty. Most may prefer option 3 as this would mean that your paper is published without any further ado. But since this makes you -- the author -- uncomfortable, you rather don't do it. It is not worth the feeling of regret once it gets published. Convey your points precisely and see if you could try to describe the fallacy of the overly optimistic result in your communications. You may also include this as part of the updated manuscript if possible. Note that all communications to the reviewers must pass through the editor as part of the procedure.

Q: How conceivable is it to research independently while working in a non-research role in industry, to improve my profile for graduate admissions? I'm toying with the idea of finishing my undergraduate degree and then entering industry for a short while. If I spent three years and earned enough, my thought is that I'd soften the burden on my parents of financing the sinewy road -- filled with costs and time -- I'm willing to take in earning a PhD. If I earned enough after three years, then I'd feel uninhibited, for example, in getting two masters, waiting another year to apply for a PhD if I were rejected the previous year from one, taking a year off to research and so forth. Spending a few years to earn money seems good, except that during these years, it's dubious whether I can work towards making myself a stronger graduate school applicant (most importantly, by doing more research). Also, any research done as an undergraduate would, I fear, go to waste. If I returned for a masters at my undergraduate institution directly after finishing my undergraduate, by contrast, I could continue whatever I was working on as an undergraduate. A possible remedy is to research on my own (or under a willing professor's supervision) while I work in industry? Have others tried out such plans? Are they generally advisable? Please Note: My question is different from the suggested duplicate, because I ask about the possibility for a student (and not a PhD) to perform research on the side (after working hours) while working in a non-research role. The duplicate question resolves whether someone employed in some company's research division can also research themselves independently. A: It is hard to do both research and industry work especially something that is not related to your main research topic. I work as a database administrator and software developer. After I finished my undergraduate degree, I started working in industry in 2003. Fast forward to 2016. I used 3 years to finish a master and used about 9 years for a PhD. I am about to finish my PHD, but it was hard to do so. I offer following advices. Note that these points are mostly useful for PhD. You can and most people do finish your master degree while working. Try to find a company which do R&D, and try to align your thesis subject in your company's vision. This way even when you work for your company related work at least you learn something about your research. Try to find a company which allows about academy work leave in its employee guide. Even you talk about your academy leave when you interview about your job, another manager may not allow it. But if company has a clearly defined policy about this, they have to allow it. Be prepared to spend more time than others. Think about it. A normal PhD student in my country spend 4-6 years for PHD. In some countries, PHD does not require course work and qualification exam; thus it may took only 3 years. But this is their only job. If they spend 20 hours (reasonable for 45 hours) every week for their PHD. This means that they spend 3120( 3 years), 4160(4 years) , 5200 (5 years), 6240 (6 Years) to finish their PHD. You will not able to put 45 work hours + 20 PHD hours. You may be able to put 10 hours at best. This means that if you do not put extra effort in holidays and your leaves, you will need two times more time to finish PHD. If your institution require Qualification Examination, be prepared to take leave from your job. It will be near impossible to be successful in this exam with full time work. I changed my job to part time (2 days) for 6 months for this examination. Be prepared to fail. If you need industry work for your livelihood, sometimes you have to put your work ahead of your PhD. This is especially hard for normal academia people to understand. Similar to above point, try to find an advisor who understands your situation that sometimes you need to put your job ahead of your PhD. My advisor is similar to me that he changed his career from industry to academy. But I saw very different attitude from others in my university. And this is from a university where I pay tuition with my own money. I had an argument with department head about this subject. He told me that I need to put my PhD first, I told him that if I could afford that I would already have done that. I know that I would have host of other difficulties with other universities. Some universities in my country does not accept working PhD student. Be prepared to give up a lot of your social time for your PhD.

Q: Is verbatim copying of short technical phrases without quotes but with citation considered plagiarism? My question is similar to Is verbatim copying several paragraphs of text with citation considered plagiarism?, but I want to ask about very short, concise wordings. As an example, I read a paper in which the author uses the following sentence: While in the above description we have specified a local algorithm as a function that maps local neighbourhoods to local outputs, we could equally well […] Now, instead of copying the exact sentence with its grammatical structure, I want to point the reader to this paper and briefly mention one of the conclusions made in this paper. Consider the sentence author et al. [citation] show that a local algorithm is a function that maps local neighborhoods to local outputs. The wording "function that maps local neighborhoods to local outputs" is a verbatim copy from the original source. Of course, I could replace this wording with something else that expresses the same, but I find the original citation very concise and I could not come up with a completely different and equally concise sentence. I always use quotes in addition to a citation to tell the reader that not only the conveyed ideas and concepts, but also the wording, is not my own intellectual achievement. But in this case, one might argue that a person that has understood the ideas described in the original paper might come up with the exact same wording, hence the wording is not a result of the original author's linguistic style, but rather a direct conclusion of the idea he wants to explain. Is it acceptable to use this wording with a citation and no quotations, or should you always use quotes for verbatim-copies? A: I disagree with the two existing answers (gerrit and Patric). In mathematical writing, it is not necessary to put quotation marks around very short fragments of descriptive text where that text is the obvious and natural way to express the idea. For example, if Smith has written a paper whose main result is Theorem. Every even number is divisible by two. then it is perfectly acceptable to write Smith [cite] shows that every even number is divisible by two. without quotation marks and without clumsy rephrasings such as Smith [cite] shows that all even numbers have two as a factor. The significant intellectual contribution of the work you're citing is the theorem itself, not the obvious wording that they used to express it. As you say, anybody who understood the concept would probably choose to phrase it in that way, even if they'd never seen the paper you're citing. Mathematical writing would be completely unreadable if every phrase that had ever appeared before was put in quotation marks. After all, Smith was hardly the first author to talk about even numbers – are we going to accuse him of plagiarism for not acknowledging that the phrase "even number" is a quotation from somebody else? A: At our Physics Department we would not consider such a sentence without quotation marks as plagiarism, due it is below a threshold of originality. In technical writing words are less important than in humanities. Of course it is not allowed to copy whole paragraphs, but single sentences and phrases, which describe technical terms or lab procedures are too trivial and too standardized concerning the wording so there is no need for quotations marks.

Q: Is strict adherence to a citation format really necessary in actual research? In high school and college I remember whenever doing some research for a class, my English teacher then will look at the citation at the end and use a red pen to mark out any place where MLA format is not strictly followed. This is probably the reason that there are 106 million hits for "MLA How?" on Google. Doubtlessly citation is necessary and very helpful, but I question over the strict adherence to a particular formatting style. But the problem is I have this idea that you must cite with 100% accuracy and adheres to a particular style. It was drilled into my head by my English teachers and professors particularly those in the arts and social sciences. Now I am in graduate school and I am faced with having to cite dozen of extremely well known literature with a very small audience in mind. Some of the authors are who works at another lab down the street or I meet everyday. In all honesty, the citation is done in the off chance someone who reads it and finds that he needs additional literature support. By formatting style, I mean any generic formatting style MLA/IEEE/APA (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/) or otherwise that instructs you to cite as follows: [First Name][Last Name] "[Text]"...[Publisher][Page Number][Chapter]...[Web/Print/Hardcopy...][Date Accessed in m/d/y or d/m/y]... Don't forget each [...] needs to be separated, by ; , or a dot, or comma as instructed. For one, doing a strict alignment with a particular format a huge time waster for the author and practice feels a little bit cultish. Secondly, if the most necessary information pertaining to a particular reference is included in the citation section, do I REALLY need to ... align the format with a particular citation style with strict adherence? I think nowadays most people just look at the author and the book title and do an online search. For example, is there a huge problem with writing: A. Thomasz "Guide to IEEE or MLA format". Dover. 1999. Print. or Thomasz Antonie, Guide to IEEE or MLA Format, Dover, 1999. or Thomasz Antonie. "Guide to IEEE or MLA Format". www.guidetoieeeormla.com. Web. Or A. Thomasz. www.guidetoieeeormla.com. Actually if I remember far back enough in high school you would actually need to cite another person if he speaks to you. So if I had spoken to Mr. Antonie (made up person), then I would have to cite our conversation in a particular style. "Verbatim" was the word, or "Orally", or "Presentation"? I don't think I have ever done that after high school, even in reality much of what I know is by speaking to other people, yet I never reference any of those people. I have not yet written a research paper. Is strict adherence to a particular formatting style actually followed in practical research? Is there any big problems that would arise if a particular citation style is not strictly followed? This question is inspired when I was exploring around and seeing how people in other countries say France do not particularly care about this issue and everything works fine. I am in the hard sciences if that helps. Comment: looks like an American phenomenon, just so you know in American schools we are taught for the span of 4 years to manually type all citations in MLA (including the full URL link) Here's a paper addressing this interesting cultural practice A: First of all, almost nobody formats their references by hand. Typesetting systems such as Latex have a tool for auto-generating references, for instance from a bibtex file (which is essentially a local database of papers that the researcher often cites). Entries into this file are also not really manual in most cases, as bibtex entries for papers can usually be obtained via a quick web search from the publisher. For instance, in the ACM Digital Library (see example entry here), you can click on the right-hand side on Export -> Bibtex and obtain a bibtex entry. Other typesetting systems, such as Microsoft Word, usually have similar plugins or features. Now, why would your English teacher (or publishers) even care about whether you write Thomasz Antonie or T. Antonie (or Antonie, T., ...)? At the end of the day, this is not so much about understandability of the reference, but more about giving the paper a more professional look-and-feel. For journals it is important to retain their "trademark" optics. This includes obvious aspects, such as font size, column layout, or margins, but also extends to using a consistent reference style within each paper, and also across papers published in the same journal. A: No. Most people use automatically generated citations and references. Usually I find some errors (often case errors) and fix them. But strict adherence to a citation style is typically obtained by the copy editor of the journal, or nor at all. A: In my field (mathematics), citation style is almost irrelevant. Journals have house styles and most people more or less try to follow them. But I just can't imagine a paper being rejected for citation style issues. Sometimes a copy editor will correct the citations; sometimes not. As a referee I have occasionally complained about lack of citations for material that the authors take for granted as background knowledge, and I have occasionally suggested corrections to the spelling (especially capitalisation) of some cited titles. But given the often illogical and internally inconsistent nature of citation styles I would likely just ignore even relatively blatant inconsistencies. People tend to be a bit more careful when writing a thesis than for research articles, and of course professionally published books normally receive a thorough copy editing anyway. I am pretty sure things are quite similar in computer science and physics. At the opposite end, a lot of people in the humanities seem to be obsessed about this kind of thing. I suspect this is related to the fact that they typically have no way of checking whether a claim is objectively true or objectively false. A lot is essentially a matter of opinion. As a result, typical authorities in those fields are never wrong, or rather, would never admit to being wrong. Since walking off in the wrong direction and changing course when you realise it is a key part of progress, this is a very unhealthy atmosphere that tends to favour mediocre, anti-innovative people who obsess over trivial details that are objectively decidable, so that they find (trivial but verifiable) errors in other people's work while making sure they can't be attacked in this way by their kind. All that said, there are good reasons for citation styles and one shouldn't just ignore them. In particular, since URLs have a habit of becoming invalid after a few years, just naming author and URL (as in the fourth example) is not a good idea. It's bad enough that cited websites can change their content, but with so little information it can even be hard to track down the contents of one that has disappeared.

Q: Transfer of credit (masters) in Germany? Is it possible to transfer credit (masters) in Germany? I have completed half of my credits in a German university. Now I want to transfer to other university. Is it possible? A: Credits must¹ be transferred if you are changing universities, this includes courses you have failed. Any course with the appropriate amount of credits that is 80 % or more equivalent to a course in the program you are transferring to will be transferred. Be prepared to do the paperwork, documenting the “Modulhandbuch” for all of the courses you have attempted. You can only transfer, however, if there is space available in the target program. This is not always the case. ¹ This is demanded by federal law (Hochschulrahmengesetz, § 15(3)): Zum Nachweis von Studien- und Prüfungsleistungen soll ein Leistungspunktsystem geschaffen werden, das auch die Übertragung erbrachter Leistungen auf andere Studiengänge […] einer anderen Hochschule ermöglicht. (For certifying studying or examination accomplishments, a point-based system system shall be created that allows to transfer accomplishments to other degree courses of other universities.) Specific realisations depend on the state or even the university. For example, the Berliner Hochschulgesetz states (§ 22 (2)): Die Hochschulen haben Studiengänge und Prüfungen so zu organisieren und einzurichten, dass insbesondere […] bereits erbrachte Studien- und Prüfungsleistungen bei einem Wechsel der Hochschule weitestgehend anerkannt werden können, […] (Universities have to organise courses and exams such that especially […] already achieved studying or examination accomplishments can be largely acknowledged when switching universities.)

Q: How does one become a multi-disciplinary researcher? How can someone become a multi-disciplinary researcher? For example, can one study a multi-disciplinary domain that combines signal processing, artificial intelligence (neural net, machine learning), robotics, instrumentation and control engineering, and embedded systems? Is there a path that could make a candidate a marketable researcher across all these domains? A: To answer the general question: You can be a interdisciplinary researcher by getting multiple degrees in different fields, getting a single interdisciplinary degree, or by getting a degree in one field and, over the course of your career, working your way into another. Most academic jobs are hired by departments, and the wide majority of departments are single-disiplinary, though interdisciplinary programs are fashionable right now. To be a marketable researcher in a given discipline, you would generally need at least a phd in that discipline, possibly a interdisciplinary phd that centrally involved it (marketability depends a lot on the specific interdisciplinary program, but in general, these will be less appealing than an phd in the actual discipline), or, in very rare cases, a a phd in a different discipline but VERY extensive research in that discipline. When it comes to the latter, things are probably more flexible in the humanities than in the sciences, and often only in one direction (ex. there are philosophy phds in rhetoric departments, but not rhetoric phds in philosophy departments). In general, you need to be able to teach introductory courses in that discipline as well as in your particular area. Some universities do have particular interdisciplinary departments or other interdisciplinary lines, but these are in established interdisciplinary subjects—cognitive science, peace studies, asian cultures, environmental studies... There are also "cluster hires," where universities look to give a researcher appointments in multiple departments for work on topics like diaspora studies and agroecology that are appealing to administrators but too small to support entire departments. Cluster hires are rare and are not something you can plan a career around. There are no lines for unspecified "interdisciplinary" researchers. You need to be able to market yourself under a specific discipline or under an established interdisciplinary program. In general, the latter will be harder.