If you're just going to talk to professors ahead of the application, you don't need to bring a portfolio and certainly don't need to bring letters. That's just overkill.

Just come prepared to talk about your work. If you have any publications that came out of it, you could bring those. Or even a brief summary sheet.

Verification will come later when the letters of reference come in with your entire application package.

Use your early visits to get a sense of the departments and the faculty who might be enthusiastic about your project and possibly serve as a PI. You'll impress them most by being enthusiastic about your work, being able to articulate its importance without having to fumble through your briefcase for external validation, and being able to express great interest in working in that particular discipline with that particular department and PI.


Is it too late to ask the faculty for a summer research internship position?

No, it's not too late to ask. But whether it is too late to get one depends on the local situation and so we can't help with that.

So, ask. If you don't ask you won't get one.

There is a Chinese proverb: The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is right now.


How can I assist other graduate students who may feel increasingly "unwelcome" due to their countries of origin?

The best thing you can do in my opinion is to be the change you wish to see in the world. Namely, be as friendly and welcoming to the international students as you can be. This will show them that negative views towards people who hail from the countries they come from are not shared by the entire US population, but are simply the opinions of certain people who happen to hold political office these days. It will also make you a role model for other Americans in your lab and department who may be inspired by your positive example to act in similar ways.


Should I Use the New Term in the Title Which is Introduced in the Paper?

Coining a new term in the title of your paper -- while defining it there or not -- is definitely something that you are permitted to do (so it is "proper", as you ask).  I have seen this thing happen: the first example that sprung (!) to my mind was

  Duchin, Moon Curvature, stretchiness, and dynamics. In the tradition of Ahlfors-Bers. IV, 19–30,
  Contemp. Math., 432, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2007.

  [First sentence of the MathReviews description of the paper:] The author introduces stretchiness, a new and interesting notion describing a kind of curvature of a metric space.

On the other hand, not only is this the first use of "stretchiness" in all of MathReviews, it is also the last.

A recent paper of mine is called "Quadratic reciprocity in abstract number rings", and you have to read the paper (or at least the abstract) to learn what an abstract number ring is.

Whether you should use a new term in the title of the paper is a very subjective and personal choice.  I guess it's no secret that many, many people instinctively roll their eyes a little when they encounter a new word being coined.  (In fact, I this to be an interesting socio-linguistic phenomenon.  But moving on...) Making up your own language can make you look arrogant, overly playful, simply ignorant of existing nomenclature, and so forth.  But the majority of academic terminology was coined by some prior academic within the relatively recent past rather than the mists of prehistory: as new ideas and new objects are created, we need new words for them.

Maybe -- maybe -- a good rule of thumb for this is that if you don't feel acutely that something would be lost upon removing your new term from the title, then it really doesn't need to be there.  If you introduce the terminology within the paper itself, then you give the community a chance to chew on it, and then others can decide whether full promotion of the new term is a good idea.  In fact, if I apply this standard to my own paper above, I am coming around to the idea that the title could be changed.  The concept of an "abstract number ring" is not as important to me now as it was when I first started writing the paper.

Whether it is good or bad in your particular case seems impossible to answer without (i) seeing the title of your paper and (ii) having some real expertise and wisdom in the subject area of your paper.  I would suggest that you find someone who satisfies (ii) -- e.g. a current or former advisor or mentor -- and show them your paper.


Why is there such variation in PhD length internationally?

In the UK system (or similar systems, like Australia) students enter their Ph.D. program with a stronger background due to earlier specialization, and they typically leave their Ph.D. program at a less advanced level than a Ph.D. from a comparable American school.  The difference is not in how fast people learn, but rather differences in what a bachelor's degree means and what a Ph.D. degree means.

Note that on specialization for undergraduates the US is the outlier, but in terms of Ph.D. outcome it's the UK that is unusual.  For example, Chris Parks writes, "Across Europe the view prevails that the three-year UK doctorate is too short and thus of inadequate quality compared with the more common four-year doctorate."


I sent an angry e-mail to my interviewers about a conflict at my home institution. Could this affect my application?

I had some troubles following your question, but if I understood correctly then I would assume that:

The professor interviewing you is highly confused right now. They seem to have literally nothing to do with your university, the program, you (other than having interviewed you recently), and the person that you accused of being unjust - and yet they are drawn into a conflict that they have no stakes in nor responsibility for.
You may indeed have lowered your chances of getting accepted considerably. In the best case your email would be seen as odd. In the worst case it would be seen as grossly unprofessional, painting you as a trouble maker who will randomly lash out whenever something happens that you consider unjust. I have seen students like that, and I know of no professor / admission committee that wants to bother with this kind of drama.

  However, now that I have calmed down I have realized that I should not have let even injustices affect me and it was unnecessary to email my interviewer.

I think your reflection should go deeper than that. It is true that part of being a professional is also being able to absorb smaller perceived unjustices like that (empathy and an ability to accept that grades aren't everything helps here), but I also can't help but wonder what you were trying to achieve with this email in the first place. To me (and note that I am only going by your short recap) this sounds rather vindictive, serving no other purpose than to get back at the person not recommending you. If that is indeed the case, you should take a good hard look at your actions in this case and learn from that for the future.


If you're a student you should consider Involve, or other publications geared toward student authors.


Ethics of gathering data from social networks for research

In the United States, if you are funded by any government agency (NIH, NSF, etc.) and you do research involving human subjects, you are required by law to get approval from an IRB (institutional review board). Research involving messages on social networks can, in some cases, be considered human subject research under this law. Similar laws exist in many other countries.

Furthermore, many conferences and journals require prospective authors to have clearance from an IRB or similar ethics board if they submit a manuscript involving human subjects research. For example, ACM SIGMOBILE policy:

  As part of the submission process, authors of papers that describe experiments on human subjects, or that analyze nonpublic data derived from human subjects (even anonymized data), will be asked to certify that their work was vetted by an ethics review (e.g., IRB approval). We expect authors to follow the rules of their host institutions around data collection and experiments with human subjects.

Note that IRB approval must be obtained before you start working with human subjects, not after the fact.

Legal requirements aside, when working with human subjects or their private information, you have an ethical responsibility to get clearance from an independent third party. There is an obvious conflict of interest associated with having the researcher decide whether the research is ethical. That is the function of the IRB.

For an example of what not to do, see the case of the OKCupid data release and some of the fallout from that.


Freeman Dyson had two advantages on his side: (i) He was brilliant. (ii) He was educated at a time when, as he put it, everything was "screwed up".

(ii) is no longer the case for any of us, or at least not in any of the countries where I take it that you want to be a professor. (i) may be true for you, but statistically speaking is not true for all but a very very small number of people; consequently, (i) also does not provide a route to becoming a professor, and certainly is not something anyone should bank upon.

In other words: Forget about becoming a professor without a PhD. While it may not be completely impossible, it is so unlikely that nobody could reasonably advise anyone to take that route. In actual practice, almost all professor job ads contain a phrase similar to "PhD in X or a related field is required", and there truly have to be exceptional reasons for a hiring committee to ignore this.

[I will add that all of the above specifically only applies to the sciences and mathematics; professors are frequently hired out of industry in engineering, education, and business departments, and I would not be surprised if other criteria apply in such cases.]


Would it be okay to provide a template when asking reference?

Personally, I would be somewhat offended if a student gave me a template for a letter, and I wouldn't use it.  (Unless I had asked for one, which personally I would not.)

However, it is perfectly appropriate to say, "I believe that the committee will probably be interested in my ability to dangle participles and reticulate splines; it would help if your letter could address this."  It is also fine to include a list or resume of your other activities that he may not be aware of, but leave it up to him how to use this list.

It's quite possible that your professor has written letters for students in this different field before and already knows what is expected.  Also, for letters which are submitted online, the writer normally gets a message from the requesting institution explaining what issues should be addressed.


I would suggest graduate level textbooks for that. They often leave proofs or part of it to the reader and some of them even have exercises, allowing you to learn the new topic by actually working on it. Furthermore, they made sure that what they left open is solvable in an appropriate amount of time.
Another nice point is that they often discuss the most important theories and concepts in a field, where on the other hand a paper might be focused on a very tiny topic.

There are textbooks for many different levels (starting at undergraduate and going as far as to being interesting to a professor who wants to extend his knowledge to a new field), depending on how much you already know.


Etiquette for establishing contact with multiple professors for PhD guidance

Advisors understand that students are fishing around - that's normal. What's less common (but possible) is students fishing around in wildly different areas. Just keep in mind that either an advisor is going to see something in you that will motivate them to try and convince you to work with them, or they'll view you as someone who needs to make up their mind first, and won't spend too much time thinking about you.

In that respect, matching up with an advisor is more like dating than an job interview, at least in the US :)


How do I get LOR from a project mentor who's still pursuing PhD since she doesn't have an official email or access to the University letterhead?

Although it looks more professional to have a faculty email address on a letter of recommendation, it is not a must.

The person that you are asking might have left the university, and also they might not yet have started in another university. This would not prevent you from having the letter of recommendation.


What leads to contentious tenure cases and can they be avoided?

One source of problems is a lack of communication over what are the expectations for the tenure candidate to meet before becoming "eligible" to receive tenure. But a substantial amount of the issues can lie with either someone in the decision-making chain, or the candidate himself or herself. In the latter case, this makes a tendentious situation inevitable.

For instance, there is the rather notorious case of James Sherley at MIT, who alleged multiple issues, including racism, and claimed that he believed his papers from his previous institution would "count" toward his tenure case. (Meanwhile, at MIT, his publication list in five years amounted to a total of six publications, three of which I believe were editorials.) He went on to hold a hunger strike to protest.

So I think that there really isn't a way to prevent things from becoming contentious unless everything is made "open": criteria are specified in advance, and everybody participating can follow along the entire process. (That is, the candidate can attend the meetings where the tenure case is being discussed.) However, I suspect this is unlikely to occur.


Is staring into the cover sheet of the exam paper and looking at the second page considered cheating?

I don't know if I'm simply overthinking this or if it is a genuine ethical issue.

You're overthinking this. You are complying with all instructions, and I presume are not even intentionally exploiting any loopholes. To the extent that simply looking at the cover page allows you to guess the subject of the first question, that is a defect (if it can even be called that) of the exam.

A good exercise to test for ethics is to consider what the reaction be if you were publicly known to have "stared at" the cover sheet. Can you imagine anyone at a disciplinary board doing anything other than laughing at the triviality of the "offense"?

Whether you should attempt to avoid seeing through the cover sheet or whether it is "fair game" is perhaps a more complex question -- however, I suggest you find more significant matters to spend your mental energies on.


risk of shifting to online learning permanently

Well, based on the 3 institutions I have close contact with, their attempts in the past few weeks hardly represent a shining example of hugely successful online learning! It feels more like the Keystone Kops!

That bit of snark out of the way, effective teaching in the online/MOOC/e-channel, etc. is not easy, and making the transition between a face to face course and an effective online course requires a lot of thought and a lot of design a prep, which of course no-one has has time to do this time around. So my snark was not meant as a true criticism, but at the same time, it means that mainstream universities' efforts in the balance of this semester are themselves unlikely to make anyone -- teachers or learners -- say, "hey, that went really well; let's dispense with classroom instruction altogether".

That being said, I do think this will strongly accelerate the shift towards e-learning in the medium- and long-term, and that in 2 ways.

In the long term, this will make e-learning a much more mainstream offering that students and faculty will become more comfortable exploring and integrating into the curriculum. Forced immersion brings familiarity and less fear. Up to now, in North America at least, we tended to have old-school in-person institutions, a few more e-learning focused disruptor institutions, and a select few dabbling in MOOCs layered on top of their usual approach. There was a lot of mutual mistrust. That will lessen. And just like a greater degree of teleworking throughout the economy, with the Pandora's box on it opened, will persist past current social isolation, so will demand for -- and willingness of faculty to explore -- e-learning.
Next year, there will be a lot of financially and emotionally wounded students, whose life plan took a pretty big hit. Some will be keen and able to return to their university campuses and continue as before. Some won't be, and when they get their affairs in order a few years later, in a world that will have lived through months of forced virtual work and socialization, they will probably be keener to explore online offerings than they were previously. And the more they start work somewhere and become mature learners, or the more straitened their financial circumstances become, the more they will seek out good-value-for-money education with schedule and geographic flexibility, and the less they'll be keen to return and pay for the conventional on-campus student experience. Of course that won't apply to all, but I suspect to enough that it will make a difference at the macro level.


My manager wants to be the lead author for a paper which I have done all the work for. What ethical reasoning should I use to dispute this?

I feel confident in my answer because, although norms differ between fields, you are in exactly my field.

You are absolutely correct that it is not ethical for your manager to ask for first authorship on this paper. From the work you describe, this is your paper. He may need more first authorships, but so do you, and even aside from the ethics of relative contributions, his role should be to help you to progress your career.

Managing this situation is going to be very tricky for you. This happened to me during my PhD -- my PhD advisor was first author on all my publications -- and I did not confront him over it. Obviously, this wasn't good for my career. It wasn't great for his career either, because it meant I was unwilling to work with him after I finished my PhD and so he lost the opportunity to be a coauthor on several more papers that followed on from my PhD work.

On the other hand, having a blow-out with your boss that puts your ongoing work in jeopardy or results in your work not getting published at all is also not going to be great for your career.

I suggest you do try to change his mind, but keep it very polite and civil. Mention the benefits to him of having you do well: it will boost his reputation as a successful PI and mentor, it will increase the likely success of future collaborative work with you, and it will reduce the amount of work he has to do on the paper himself so that he can concentrate on getting more of his own work published. If this fails, it may be worth involving a third party -- in the first instance someone you mutually like and respect, if possible, and not his boss -- to facilitate a discussion about setting some more formal guidelines around how authorship order should be determined.

If all else fails, you could appeal to authority - his boss or the journal editor - but be warned that WILL get messy and bitter.


Sign copyright agreement before paper acceptance?

This is rather normal for non open-access articles in my field (Physics), however all journals I have submitted to until now had a clause that the copyright transfer is voided if the paper is not accepted or withdrawn. For example IOP’s copyright agreement contains the following sentence:

  In the event that the Article is withdrawn prior to acceptance, or is rejected, this agreement shall have no effect and no party shall be bound by it.

If such conditions are included, requesting such an agreement at an early stage seems somewhat reasonable to me, since it would be a waste of time to review your paper if you did not agree with these terms.

If such conditions are not included, this is a clear warning sign that the publisher may be up to nothing good. However, even with such a clause, problems may arise, as the publisher may just instantly accept your article.

For open-access articles (pay-to-publish), a similar situation holds, however, the copyright agreement usally requires less commitment from you, as you should retain most rights on your article (since the journal does not make money with being the only one making your article available). This not applying to the copyright agreement is another warning sign of a predatory publisher.

In both cases, you should read the copyright agreement carefully and ensure the reputability of the publisher.


How to get list of journals in a discipline within a specified range of impact factors?

Web of Science Journal Citation Reports provides lists of journals on a topic along with a range of citation-based metrics, including impact factor. It's straight forward to sort such lists by impact factor and then extract journals within a range.

Many universities have subscriptions to Web of Science Journal Citation Reports. So check out your university library.


Updating the arXiv version of paper after it is published in ACM proceedings

According to the ACM Copyright Transfer Agreement, you are allowed to

  Post the Accepted Version of the  Work on (1) the Author’s home page,  (2) the Owner’s institutional repository, or (3) any repository legally mandated by an agency funding the research on which the Work is based, and (4) any non-commercial repository or aggregation that does not duplicate ACM tables of contents, i.e., whose  patterns of links do not substantially duplicate an ACM-copyrighted volume  or issue. Non-commercial repositories  are here understood as repositories  owned by nonprofit organizations that  do not charge a fee for accessing deposited articles and that do not sell advertising or otherwise profit from serving articles.

So, yes, you can update your manuscript on arXiv with the accepted version but you should not use the published version (version of record), i.e. the one with the ACM copyright. Remove the ACM style by, e.g. using another style sheet in LaTeX.


Don't expect to understand the whole paper. Many researchers won't manage that either anyway, without a fair amount of time. Read the introduction. That should be written in simpler/less technical words, and give you an idea of what's going on. If that's still too hard, identify the main words in the title/abstract, and see if there are corresponding articles of Wikipedia (which isn't reliable enough to quote, but in many areas is actually pretty accurate).


Will lack of teaching experience be a major hindrance for a faculty position?

I'm surprised to hear you say that "most positions for assistant professor require you to show some teaching experience, i.e., at least co-teaching some courses."  If you are applying to positions in the U.S. where research will be your primary duty, your prior tutorial and guest lecture experience should be sufficient to get you past whatever minimum you need, especially if you have evaluations to back this up.  Of the five colleagues of mine who received tenure-track offers at Reasearch I universities, only one of them had co-taught a class, and the others had one semester of TA experience which was, primarily, grading.

That said, there are other ideas for getting teaching experience:

Creating your own course or seminar to teach in the summer or during a January term.  If you pitch it as a non-credit course, it might be easier to convince your department to let you teach it.
Look for adjunct work at a local community college.  You'll probably be limited to introductory courses, but this gets you experience.  You may need the buy-in from your faculty boss at your current school.
Talking to individual professors about helping with their course -- I find it hard to believe that everyone has all the help they might like already, and you may have more luck getting your foot into a classroom without trying to be officially assigned to it.


FAFSA eligibility for international students

No. You must be "a U.S. citizen or eligible noncitizen" (i.e., a permanent resident with a green card) to get federal student aid.


Is looking up the source of tests and using those to practice considered cheating?

No, that is not cheating as the comments point out. You have invested time looking for material to practise and come across some. However, if you had to “hack” a system to get the test that is a different case.... :)

The “cheating” or , at least poor practice is from the teacher just taking and using verbatim a test from somewhere - editing, changing questions, changing numbers is often done to make a new or suitable version.

Using a test from somewhere else may be ok, but all the questions need to be checked : vocabulary, level etc before use and adjusted as necessary.


Why are [some] professors ambiguous about material that is actually tested on exams?

There are at least four worries, in my experience:

The students may be trying not to study any more than they absolutely have to study. So if the professor says something isn't on the exam, they won't study it.
If the professor says what is on the exam, but doesn't explicitly mention something, and then that thing comes up (even as a minor part of another problem), the students may complain that "you said that wasn't on the test!". This can happen even if the professor really made a good faith effort to say what was on the test, and the students simply misunderstood.
The professor may not have written the exam yet, and so she doesn't know the exact topics that will be included.
Someone else may write the exam, if there are many sections of the course taking the same exam. In that case, the professor may not be permitted to say what is on the exam. When I was a postdoc, they didn't even show us the common calculus exam until just before it was administered.

There are various strategies to cope with these worries. A common one, as described in the question, is to just say that the exam can include everything from the class, which is not very informative but is otherwise harmless.

There are other strategies, as well, such as making an exam review packet that includes more than the exam possibly could, and then selecting exam problems based on the review packet. But these don't help with the issue of common exams written by someone else.

By the way, if turnaround is fair play: we professors often ask the dual question: why do students so often ask what will be on the exam, when they have just had a class on the same material that will be on the exam?  As you can imagine, we may feel that we have already told the students what we want them to know, by designing the course to include it!


What good is engineering research with no practical relevance?

The short answer to your question is that you are vastly overestimating your, and other engineer's, ability to judge what techniques will ever have practical relevance.

I think it was Michael Stonebraker, a Turing award winning computer scientist with no lack of practical impact, who said that the sweet spot for academic applied research are techniques that are about 10 years away from being widely implementable. If you limit yourself to things that you can already do today, you will fail to propose the kind of radically new developments that should, at least in theory, distinguish academic research from other drivers of innovation, such as startup companies or industrial R&D. Incidentally, if the lack of impact your work has right now is distressing you, you should ponder the question whether you would not achieve higher job satisfaction in a startup or industrial lab.

I find your example of self-learning power grids particularly unconvincing. If we rewind time a few years and relate your arguments to research into automated driving, I am sure you will find plenty of people who found this research to be a waste of time. Driving surely is a safety critical field, and automotive is highly regulated. Algorithms for automated driving assistance completely failed to, and to some extent still fail to, address the practical concerns of many stakeholders as well as governmental safety guarantees. And yet here we are. I am not sure if the same will happen to power grids, but it is absolutely plausible that it will.

You may also be interested in reading into TRLs (technology readiness levels), as used for instance by the European Union's framework programmes as well as NASA.

The basic concept here is that academic research is usually best suited to bring ideas from TRL 0 or 1 to 3 or 4. The "Matlab implementations" you complain about may very well just be the laboratory tests that are meant on TRL 3. This is very much in line with the position in the grander scheme of the progress of technology that many large organizations envision for academic research labs.


What are the potential ramifications of a student intentionally deanonymizing his/her class evaluation?

The only ramnifications I can think of is that whoever handles, edits or publishes that class evaluation may recognise the deanonymisation, consider it accidental and thus decides not to pass it for that reason.

As you can always pass deanonymised criticism to an instructor, be it by mail or by putting it on public display, there seems little point to me to protect the instructor from it on this particular medium.

Something else you might consider though is that even if the professor does not want to retaliate that criticism, they will have more difficulties to fairly evaluate the critic, which may have effects in either direction. While this is some annoyance you could spare the professor, it would also happen with non-anonymous critique made in other ways.


What's the point of conferences on a CV?

I typically have seen conferences appear in CVs in three ways:

Peer-reviewed conference publications, which in some fields (e.g., computer science) can be as important as journal articles
Talks given at conferences, whether based on peer reviewed papers, non-reviewed abstracts, or invitations, which give evidence that the person has experience with scientific speaking.
Service to the community, whether as an organizer, a reviewer, or a student volunteer.

Beyond that, just saying "I paid $600 to register for this conference and all I got was this lousy tote bag" seems rather pointless.


Convention for excerpting from the middle of a paragraph in another work?

I don't do this sort of research, so I can't answer if there is a 'standard approach'.  I have read analytic works on the writings people such as Charles Sanders Peirce, who was notorious for having both a vast and an unorganized body of writing, including personal letters.  Yours might be similar, though in your case it seems even more important to be very precise about what source material you are referencing and quoting.  To my eye, it resembles Biblical analysis in this way.

I like the idea of assigning paragraph numbers to all your source material, but I would suggest using them differently.  In your quotes, I suggest quoting only the relevant words, using ellipses as appropriate to indicate omitted text, and also new lines or paragraph marks to indicate a break in paragraph. But at the end of each quote, in square brackets, you could add the paragraph numbers of the sources, plus any qualifying remarks, such as "spanning both paragraphs" or what ever.

Using your example:

  "... Maecenas mattis erat in metus ..." [citation, starting mid-pargraph in §52 "Lorem ipsum dolor..." and ending mid-pargraph in §55 "...nunc sollicitudin lectus."]

This approach has two advantages. First, your quote includes only the text relevant to your exposition and analysis.  This will make it easier to read and understand.  Second, exact and detailed context information is given in the square brackets following, including the citation if needed.  This will serve you as researcher or a reader who needs to follow along in the source documents.


How to contact a prospective supervisor for undergraduate research at another university?

Some details to include

Attach a copy of your CV and your unofficial transcripts.
Briefly describe your past undergraduate research experience.
Briefly mention the coursework you have taken/are taking that is highly relevant to the work he is doing.
Briefly explain what excites you about the work in this lab.
Mention your future plans (for after graduation). For example, if you are planning to do a PhD, I would be much more interested in mentoring you as an undergraduate research student, because if you are a strong student I can try and recruit you into my PhD program. This is especially true if I am a new professor looking for graduate students!

From the professor's point of view, mentoring a short-term undergraduate student is a relatively low-risk and low-commitment endeavor (compared to taking on a graduate student.) On the other hand, it does require significant investment of time that may never really pay off (the student will probably move on before they become really "useful" to the professor.) Some professors do it largely because their department wants to provide undergraduate research experiences to their own students. In this case, they probably won't be interested in outside students. Some professors do it because they enjoy it (I do!) or because it looks good on grant proposals (it does!), and will be more open to undergraduates from outside their institution. It's certainly worth a shot.


I think there is little reason to write. They haven't lost your paper behind a filing cabinet somewhere. They are likely busy, maybe due to the time of year or pending deadlines on publication of other issues. Having to respond will just add to their load.

It is frustrating, I know, when you have a lot riding on a paper, but there is no need to panic. You can and should both relax a bit and also work a bit more on your research.

Two weeks in the queue isn't very long, really. It may even be that a key person in the decision process is off on a late vacation.


PhD first-year transfer including credits

I can add to this a bit more about credits if needed (as per my comment), but for your advisor, I'd just open with the fact that you need to change programs for non academic reasons and that you would be happy to discuss it with them. If they need more information then they will follow up. Otherwise there isn't really a need.
But it would be good to leave on good terms with them. As a first year student you probably don't have a deep relationship yet, so it may not matter, but anyone and everyone who has a good opinion of you can be an asset going forward in your career.


Do online students deserve video content?

First of all, what students do or do not "deserve" is more of a moral/philosophical question than an academic question. However, I will attempt to respond to your situation in a way that is academically practical.

Students who are attending the in-person classes are getting a live, visual, possibly interactive version of the content, but online students are getting something different. Given that you mentioned online students asking for more visual media content, but no in-class students requesting an extra explanatory text, one might reasonably infer that the visual is more highly demanded. Also, you didn't explicitly say that the explanatory text is a transcript of the lecture or a copy of your lecture notes, so I'm going to assume it is not simply an identical typed version of what is said out loud. If students are taking the same course with the same assignments, syllabus, and expectations, it is reasonable for them to expect to get as close to identical materials as possible.

However, I don't think they are expecting a scripted/staged/performed video either. In most of my classes, the professor records a screencaptured video of the projector and/or a video of the lecture and posts it to the class' online site. That way, if you miss class, you can see what you missed as it played out. These videos aren't particularly high quality or effort, but they allow students to watch lectures even when they physically can't. Most students I know taking online classes aren't doing so because they prefer the format, they're doing so because they can't physically attend the class at the offered time but still want/need to take the class. Offering lecture videos helps to equalize the material available to both online and in class students.

Before you take any action, I recommend:

Checking to see if your university has a policy on recording lectures/seminars
Check to see how expensive it would be to start recording lectures
Survey your online students to ask if lecture videos would be beneficial. (If you find out it's not expensive, I would skip this step based on the feedback you've already received).


Your perception of the situation seems to me fairly accurate, but there are some critical details:
Yes, in a small college town, if your partner is not an academic (ok, there's a significant separate issue of "spousal hires"... addressed in a moment...), and does not want to be involved with pizza, there are limited opportunities. Obviously. And your department, and the university, cannot really do much to change this.
Happily, in recent years, the "issue" of academics being partnered with academics (unlike the "simpler" days of yore when wives just followed their academic husbands ... wherever...), is being much better acknowledged and addressed, at least intermittently, by some universities. It is my perception that there is still a tendency to stigmatize "spousal hires", but, also, given the realities (!?), this attitude is less and less acceptable.
Yes, I do think any sort of equity for partners (among many other equity issues) will involve major changes in pretensions... The pandemic has jarred things loose in some ways, which may be good, but it has also diminished resources, which tends to make people pull back and be stingy ... I don't know what will happen.
But it does not quite make sense to plan our lives on the most cynical premises, since then the optimum might be just to exit as soon as possible. In contrast, I think some gambles, even though definitely not "sure things", are worth making.


How can someone with a large and unique data set, but limited time to write articles, find experienced researchers to co-author papers with?

How good is your data?  If you truly have amazing unpublished data that could readily form the basis for multiple top tier publications, then with some persistence you should be able to find academics who are interested in writing publications based on that data.

However, are you able to truly judge the suitability of your data for academic publications? In general, if you are not in academia, you are likely to have a poor to modest understanding of what makes a great dataset. For example, I sometimes work with industry datasets that look at the characteristics of workers (traits, job performance and so on). There are all sorts of academic reasons why a given dataset (that the consultant may think is interesting) will not yield a good publication: e.g., the sample size is too small; there were issues with data collection; the measures used are insufficiently reliable or valid; the measures used do not map onto the theoretical constructs in the literature; the questions that can answered by the dataset have been examined many times already in the literature; the meta data is incomplete.

Even if you have a dataset that could be used for a publication, there is still the issue of whether the dataset is good enough to persuade an academic to work on it. In general, more established academics have a large collection of studies and datasets sitting around waiting to be potentially written up. In this case, the academic is likely to strategically prioritise their publications in terms of some sort of effort-reward trade-off. So, your dataset needs to not only be publishable but sufficiently aligned and interesting to an academic to persuade them to work on it.

Thus, my advice would be to start to connect with a few academics in order to assess how suitable the datasets are for publication.

How to find a suitable academic? There are many strategies for finding a  academic who might be interested in analysing your data for publication. Ideally, you'd have a sense of the kinds of publications that could be obtained from the data, and therefore which academics are working on these topics. A targeted email to some of these people explaining the data you have and your interests in sharing for publication should help to start a conversation. You can then have skype chat or face to face chats (with people in your city). If you're lucky you might have existing social networks with existing academics (e.g., where you did your studies, or in your town).

As you interact with these academics, you can get a better understanding of whether the data is suitable for publication. Also, if you have good data, but the first few academics are not interested in it, such academics may be able to refer you to other academics who are interested.

You also mention that you want "experienced researchers" to write the papers. In this regard, there is a trade-off. More high-profile researchers are more capable of getting quality work published. However, they also have many more opportunities. So there is a trade-off. For example, early career researchers may be more interested in your data, if they've had less time to obtain a broad range of research options. Your dataset might also be useful to form part of a PhD project.

How to negotiate co-authorship? Based on respected criteria for co-authorship (E.g., here), merely providing data is not sufficient to warrant co-authorship. You generally need to contribute to some degree to the writing and conception of the paper. That said, if you make co-authorship a condition of sharing your data, then academics are free to take or leave your proposal. If collecting the data in itself involved some degree of academic contribution and you also agree to contribute to the writing and analysis process (even if not leading), then such a proposal is likely to be more palatable to academics.


whether to send a follow-up email asking for research internship

It is quite possible the email just got lost in the flood. Some professors, especially the more famous ones, get up to 100 emails a day - not including the spam. It is also possible that the professor is waiting for all the applications to come in, or for some funding for the intern research costs to be decided, or just didn't get round to deciding what this summer's intern projects will be.

I would recommend you write a slightly more detailed email (don't go crazy, but a bit about why you want the internship and how it fits with your studies/projects, the kind of things you identify in your email that you perhaps could have written). You can frame it as "I thought I should provide more information" rather than "I want to bug you".

The other alternative is to look for clues about who might be the actual supervisor in reality - in a large group, interns often work for PhD students, postdocs or associate professors. If the research internships have their titles on the webpage, do some sleuthing and write to the most relevant person. Or if there are associate professors or other experienced researchers in that same group, pick one who does something interesting and write to them.
Good luck!


What are good practices for sharing protocols online

Thanks to Stack Exchange, I've recently started to become familiar with Markdown and in particular its variants, including MultiMarkdown and Pandoc. These might be the ideal alternative, as they're very easy to master—after all, it's what powers sites like this one!—and yet powerful enough that it can handle most of your needs.

Individual users can write their protocols in a simple, easy-to-read text format, and then output that to HTML, PDF, Word files, or whatever. Then all you need is a master page to catalog everything, and a web site manager who's skilled enough with a command prompt to handle the conversions using one of those tools. The format's flexible enough to handle hyperlinks as well as graphics with a minimum of fuss.

The other advantage of having a text-based system is that it makes version control very easy as well.


In which countries must college professors be cleared to work with minors?

Any special requirements or background checks regarding working with minors are a matter of employer policy or local law, and there are no standard rules across different jurisdictions.  In particular, there's no way to give a definitive answer without knowing the exact circumstances.

As a general rule, though, these sorts of background checks are rarely applied to college faculty.  Even in locations with unusually strict laws, there are often exceptions for college professors, despite the fact that some students may be under 18.  For example, the University of Sydney policy explicitly says "Where University staff or affiliates have direct contact with University students under the age of 18, this is not regarded as child-related work under the Act."


Extending a result submitted to a conference before acceptance/rejection notification

Firstly, this question is relevant to your considerations.

In my community it is quite common to publish a (possibly extended/revised) submitted work as a technical report or a pre-print right after, or before the conference submission. The idea is to get a useful reference for future work falling exactly in the period between submission, notification and hopefully publication. ArXiv, or a TR with ISSN is fine for that.

Having said that, the option 2 is something I myself often resort to. Also to consider with this option, if the publication date of the "generalization" is after the submission deadline, such a rejection would be baseless.

As you yourself note, option 1 leads to a non-self-encapsulated paper and option 3, even though fine and correct, prolongs the period between invention and publication.


List of international internships/student programs

Though it may be outdated now, my father and now myself are both part of AIESEC
https://www.aiesec.org/


Is there a standard dictionary for referencing English words?

www.oed.com is the online version of the full, official Oxford English Dictionary. Requires a subscription (institutional or personal) to access. This is the site you should use whenever possible.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com is an ad-supported version with some features cut. Avoid if you have subscription access to the full site (as any university should).
http://oaadonline.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ is, clearly, for learners of the English language. Use it as a guide for learning, sure - but not as a guide for writing papers.

The OED is the English dictionary to use. Other dictionaries are probably fine in all but the weirdest corner cases, but it helps to have some standardization.

Your journal probably specifies its own preferences in this regard. Every publisher's "guide for authors" that I have seen tells you to defer to the OED. Sometimes you'll see specific instructions to use either British or American spellings, and you may specifically be told how to spell words that don't have a British or American "standard" spelling, such as parametrize.


Is it Unethical to Work in Two Labs at Once?

Unless there are real or perceived conflicts of interest there should be no ethical issue here. If the two labs are sufficiently distinct then conflicts are unlikely.
But, to protect yourself, you should let the PIs of both labs know of your work in the other. Don't try to hide it or questions might be raised.


How to complete part of PhD in foreign lab but still get PhD from home insitution?

Some scholarships will pay for you to attend a foreign university for a short period of time as part of your PhD, which will give you the chance to work with a foreign researcher in their lab. For example, if you'd like to attend a university in the US, you could try for the Fulbright-Nehru Scholarship, which will allow you to spend 6-9 months at a U.S. host institute.


IRB guidelines for secure online data storage, backup, and syncing?

While this solution will likely be only a drop in the bucket for your request, I did write a paper covering security issues related to health information and HIPAA while finishing up my Master's. Section 6 has a case study on Amazon Web Services as a "HIPAA-compliant" cloud storage solution, including both its positives and its negatives.

Since this was a review paper, I feel the need to point out that I don't have any personal experience with Amazon Web Services or with setting it up for HIPAA compliance, so don't take it as an endorsement either for or against its use.

It's important to evaluate exactly what any proposed service you select actually provides. AWS, for example, supports basically the creation of the HIPAA-compliant environment. That being said, that's the creation of one, not one provided out of box. You'd have to implement a variety of features normally associated with data storage such as backing up data, auditing all changes, and so on.

Basically, you're asking what you need to do to satisfy the IRB, I guess. What you should probably be asking is what you can do to satisfy HIPAA regulations, and using that, justify that it is a viable solution to the IRB.

I can't really provide you a concrete example of an actual cloud data storage plan (the one I was involved in is non-disclosure and I'm also not an IS guy) but I might be able to answer some more conceptual questions.


Can one or two spelling mistakes in a statement of purpose hurt your chances for graduate school?

We once had an applicant for graduate study in mathematics whose statement of purpose explained why he wanted to become a "mathematition". This was not regarded favorably by the admissions committee.  On the other hand, a misspelling of a professor's name might not even be noticed; it depends to some extent on whether the professor's name is "Blagoveshchenskaya" or "Smith".


Took GRE two times, same scores with minor differences - worth sending both?

I actually think that sending both tests would be detrimental for your application:

it decreases the ratio of signal to noise in your application
[opinion based] it shows the lack of improvement in your math and verbal scores over the year (which would be my interpretation if both results are sent) as opposed to your intent to show the will to improve
generally adds confusion

Since your most recent result is in all aspects better/equal (I don't count 153/154 to be different, while 6 on the essay is much better than 5) than the previous one, I strongly suggest sending only the newest GRE score.


Is writing a grant proposal at the end of Ph.D. a good idea?

Writing grant proposals with your supervisors is great experience and good for your career.  Writing in partnership with more experienced researchers is a great to to get "apprenticeship" experience and to become introduced to key funding agencies, program managers, and the expectations and practices in interacting with them.  Moreover, even if you move on before the grant is funded, you may find yourself able to work on the project via a subcontract to your new institution or else to help supervise students on the project from afar (I certainly had this experience).

Thus, if there is a good opportunity for doing collaborating with your supervisors on grant-writing, I highly advise doing so.


Is there a rule of thumb regarding the minimum threshold for a person to be 2nd author of a paper?

There’s no minimum limit. Second authors can contribute ideas, work or anything that went into the paper. Some might even cynically say that contributing reputation is enough.

Having said that, if you’re not satisfied that your friend has actually contributed anything significant to the paper that warrants author status, you can always mention him in your acknowledgement section instead of adding him as a second author.


You are conflating funding sources with affiliations when they should be discussed separately.

The affiliations tell you where the work was performed. The work was performed at the old institution, so it must be listed as an affiliation, and should be the primary affiliation. If you have done work on the presentation at the new institution—for instance, used your research time to prepare the presentation and rehearse it in front of colleagues—then you can list the new institute as an additional affiliation. It should be listed as a "current address" in any event.

As for the funding issue, since they're providing the resources for you to travel, it can be acknowledged when listing anybody else who sponsored the research alongside those other sources.


Should I choose an tenured advisor good at research but bad at teaching or an untenured professor good at teaching?

I'm not sure why a professor's capabilities as a lecturer should have anything to do when considering her competencies as a mentor and research advisor. The two skill sets are almost completely separate from one another. Moreover, if part of your concern is that you want to become a teaching faculty member some day, then there's probably a chance to be a teaching assistant for another faculty member who is more qualified as a teacher (such as your Professor B).


Is there a standard template for a long list of acknowledgement section for master's thesis?

In our format, acknowledgement is part of foreword which is at most 1 page, which goes usually something like this:

  Working with Thesis has been pain but thanks to my colleagues fun. I want to acknowledge my supervisor and advisor for their effort... I could not have finished my Thesis without the support from... Also special thanks for those that use Latex instead of the hideous WYSIWYG, you have saved my eyesight.

You should see previous Thesis from your university or department for an example about how you do it.

EDIT: Here is an example: https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/36413/Thesis.pdf?sequence=1
 , but it could be that your department does it in a different way.


Is an improved algorithm for a non-hot problem publishable?

Journals often publish articles that show something that is "interesting" or "elegant" or "unexpected", even if the topic may not necessarily be "hot". (Of course, it is easier to publish something that combines any of these attributes with "hot", but not all articles are on "hot" topics.) So, I think there is hope in your case and I would give it a try.

I would, however, suggest that you do a careful literature review. You compare your algorithm with a "naive" one, but that may not mean that the "naive" algorithm is what people would use or what is considered state of the art. For example, the traveling salesman problem is known to be an exponentially complicated problem if you are looking for an exact solution, but that doesn't mean that that is what people use when they actually want to solve such problems -- very good approximate solutions can be found quite efficiently.

In other words, in your paper you will not only have to explain your new method, but you should point out that people have actually been using the "ridiculously bad" method. Otherwise, you will hear from the reviewers that you make your approach sound artificially good by comparing it with something no reasonable person would use.


What does "university ranking" mean for a graduate admissions committee?

In the context of graduate admissions, the “ranking” of universities by members of the committee is a purely subjective one, and depends heavily from place to place, from department to department, and from committee member to committee member. That's why you're not getting a simple silver-bullet answer to your question.

Now, most admission committee members will rather rely on their own past experience with students coming from various schools, and would probably go further and would not “rank” the same the different undergrad programs from a given university. They would typically consider things like:

how ready were past students from program X for our graduate courses? e.g., did they know and master well enough all the prerequisites for our courses
how well did these students do during courses? e.g. what sort of grades do they get (knowing that a top student from school X usually doesn't make it to the first half of your program, for example, is interesting to know for future candidates from this school)
how well did they perform in terms of research? e.g. school Y has students with excellent grades and educational record, but are they prepared for a wide-ranging professional experience that is a PhD?


What value does one derive by doing research as an undergrad vs spending that time in coursework/projects

Research is totally different than anything else you do in schooling. It's the distinction between learning what everyone else has done before and learning something no one knows yet (no one ever).
Do you need to learn truly new things to be a productive member of society? No, you really don't. Our society is really advanced, and almost all the work out there is about doing things people have done before. You could spend your whole life learning what other people know and never come close to learning it all.
Do you need research experience for a non-academic career that doesn't involve research? No, probably not. That said, depending on the research environment you can also get exposed to a lot of more broadly applicable job skills as well when you do research.
You'll have to decide for yourself whether research is worth it. It's hard, probably you'll fail in almost everything you do as you get started unless you're given a very simple project, but you can still learn a lot. If nothing else, you might learn whether research could be a path for you in the future, or whether you should avoid it.


How to refer in an acknowledgements section to a group of people in industry who helped you in completing your thesis?

You can largely avoid the terminology question by saying something like:

  Thank you to my company supervisor [NAME] and to the people at [COMPANY] who I have worked with, including [NAMES]


How to improve as undergraduate student doing research?

Being a burden is the sine qua non of undergraduate researchers! That's not a dis, it reflects the truth that the professor isn't having you in their lab for your abundant research output, but for your own education (and possibly so they can lure you in to joining them as a graduate student). After all (it's easy to forget sometimes) a professor's main job is education.
Therefore, don't worry about asking too many questions. Those are natural because you're in a situation where nearly every step of your work is new to you. The key thing you want to focus on is how to make it so the question frequency decreases with time. The gradual transition from undergraduate newbie to postdoctoral rock star of course has something to do with gaining additional domain knowledge, but it's just as much about learning how to learn, and learning how to work.
So part of your learning now should be a bit meta. In addition to "how do I write a python script to do X?", your questions should also take the form of "how can I solve this myself?" "before I go to Prof. X, have I googled? did I ask their other students?" "is this related to my previous experience, and, if so, how did I solve it last time?"
I think as long as you are going to Prof. X with novel questions (and getting clarification counts as novelty), then you are doing your job just fine, and answering those questions (or helping you to answer them yourself) is them doing their job.
And to +1 what Buffy said, keeping a good notebook where you record not only your conversations with Prof. X and other members of their group, but also your own learning (like summaries of papers, results of experiments, key techniques you picked up) is a key skill to learn.


Is it ethical to use past years' final exams that the professor hasn't explicitly given, to study for a final in the same class?

Perhaps this is a bit of a genuine ethical issue: should one use "game advantages" one might find, that one knows other "players" will not have? Of course, these questions completely ignore issues of the subject itself, learning, scholarship, etc. But, yes, there are advantages to "good test scores". That game is primarily (contrived) an adversarial one between "teacher" and "student", and any information obtained "legally" by the students is... "legal". It's a game!

In that model, other students may suffer "on the curve". Not nice, true, but, ...

I think the real answer is that, especially internet-wise, any policy that presumes secrecy of information is misguided. Sounds innocent, but, as this test case shows, there are "victims".

My sincere conclusion, and basis for my own actions for 15+ years, is that everything should be made public. If someone can assimilate good solutions to all the exams for the last 20 years, ... then why shouldn't they pass the current exam? :)

(So, the kids who cram from the last few exams are merely being rational, assuming they didn't have to break-and-enter.)

The unasked question about whether the behavior of the "teacher" is inadvertently unfair is the interesting one. That is, lacking intent, can one be unfair? Yes, it turns out, by negligence...


These things happen with grad students headed to one group deciding at last minute to go to another.  I wouldn't belabor it too much.  Be graceful, sure, but really I wouldn't even feel like you need to explain it or give K a pre-notification before you make your decision.  Same thing happens with job openings, house purchases, etc.  It's just part of life. K is a big wheel...you are a little new fish.  It won't kill him.  Minor annoyance but he will be on to emails and grant committees.  Of course figure out how to play it, but may even be better not to bring it up if you expect unpleasantness (the converse if you think discussion will mollify him.)
Prestige matters, sure.  But being with someone you get along with is much more crucial (don't be miserable for years).  But if you are at a name department, it might not matter much...both are likely strong.  I would just make sure that N is not (1) unlikely to get tenure, (2) giving you too much of a sell job (some is fine, shows he cares...but just try to estimate how dynamic will change after advisor selection).
Personally, I discount handholding and apprenticeship.  Eventually you need to be independent.  But I am realizing math is a lot harder than experimental science in terms of making new work.
I don't understand the use of the definite article "the" joint project. Is there already a proposal in play?  Or do you mean "a"?

I actually might be mildly positive about a joint project in that you have your cake and eat it too...takes care of K with the fellowship letters...especially if you do get funded.  Plus having two bosses can be like having none.  You decide how to spend time with one or the other (gives you some power).  But of course you have to look at the specifics.  But if the "the" means something has already been floated, I might see that as a positive.

Of course if K squawks at joint, then he just gets nothing.  But it is also true that if the joint thing is not working, you can probably even convert it to a solo with one or the other later.  Really I sort of love the option value here!
This is a little bit in contravention to (1), but I am capable of different ideas at same time:  perhaps there is a (gentle) way to play it so that both guys know you are in demand and drive some competition for you.  I inadvertently created this for myself during advisor selection long ago...this can be the case if funding is plush but students limited.


I have never heard of an undergraduate institution inflicting this level of lecturing on a professor.  Perhaps it happens at vocational or associates degree schools, where, e.g., you might be teaching a whole bunch of sections of "database entry" or "machine operation" or something like that?

For my colleagues at institutions offering 4-year degrees, the normal range is:

1-2 classes in a semester at a research-centric institution, where the professor is expected to also be supervising Ph.D. students
3-4 classes in a semester at a teaching-centric institution, where that is expected to be the primary focus.

Depending on the format of the classes, then, that is likely to mean somewhere between 2 and 20 hours of lecturing per week, which is still far less than what you report.


My professor presented a problem that I solved. He says I can send it to a conference. What is the etiquette in cases like this?

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

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

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

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

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

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


How do NSF Graduate Fellowship panelists feel about images in the personal statement?

First of all, I am assuming that you checked and figures are allowed.

If this is the case, I don't see any reason why having a figure would globally be received negatively. I think it very much depends on the content of the figure, and whether it is justified (given that you are losing some text space). Personally, if I would review this and see a figure, I would not be biased against it in any way (if anything it might show creative/out-of-the-box thinking).

So the main thing is to use the figures wisely. To me, this means that it contributes something significant that would be difficult, or too long, to convey with text. I do not know the details of your entire application, so I cannot say whether what you propose is relevant, but it sounds to me like the first figure (the technological one) might be ok, while the other one (photo of yourself as a child) seems irrelevant and that may hurt your application.

This also means that you should probably consult with someone who knows all the details to get a second opinion with regards to what is a relevant figure and what is not.

Finally, just a technical tip: I would try no to make the figures not too large, since if you can convey the same information with a smaller figure then you are effectively wasting space, and that looks bad.


Reasons for not releasing mark schemes for past exams?

I'm not aware of any particularly compelling reason not to provide solutions for past exams, but here are two possible reasons:

Providing solutions encourages students to study by learning isolated facts.  If they have to look things up, then they are more likely to absorb some of the context at the same time.  (Looking things up takes more time, but you typically learn more than just the one thing you were looking for.)
Some students find it very difficult to resist looking at solutions when they are provided.  They will think for a minute or two about a problem and then check the solutions and convince themselves that this is exactly what they would have done if they had spent more time.  In some fields (such as mathematics) working out a solution oneself is usually much more educational than reading someone else's solution.  Withholding solutions is inconvenient for students, but the inconvenience may push them towards better study habits.

Only your professors can tell you why they do not provide solutions; without knowing the specific situation, all we can do is guess.  It can't hurt to ask them and to explain why having solutions would be valuable for you.  They may not have strong reasons and might decide to start providing solutions.  (And, as Dave Rose points out in his answer, you should also get any appropriate accommodations for dyslexia.)


Does one need a master's in math before taking a PhD in math in Europe?

I will try to respond to the abstract question, with a perspective from Germany (that may or may not be valid for other European countries):

  Is the master's in X PhD requirement in Europe satisfied by a master's in Applied X rather than Pure X?

The general answer to this is yes.

As opposed to the subject chosen for the Bachelor and Master degree, which is usually supposed to be the same or closely related in Europe, as Bachelor and Master curricula are closely coupled here, a PhD is often completely disconnected from the former studies.

Note that the Austrian website that Moritz linked to in the original version of his answer does not require a particular Master's degree, but a "relevant Master's degree". Without any further restrictions, this means that anything closely related to the subject (and the relationship between Applied X and Pure X might very well be sufficient) should do. At least, that would be the interpretation in Germany; it is possible Austrians interpret this differently.

However, it is also very well possible that the suitability of the Master's major is determined based on the research projects at hand. In that case, it depends entirely on the decision of the respective department chair, and it would be worthwhile to contact departments you are interested in. As a concrete example, it is completely normal in Germany to see Masters of Physics, Linguistics, and Maths starting PhDs in Computer Science, not only Masters in Computer Science.

EDIT: To clarify the last remark: None of them have to take any extra courses; rather, they are expected to bring their professional subject-specific knowledge from physics, linguistics, and maths, respectively, into their computer science research (while "informally" (i.e. without a class) catching up with the CS knowledge), just like Masters in CS are expected to use their professional CS-specific knowledge in their computer science research, while "informally" acquiring knowledge on (w.l.o.g.) physics, linguistics, and maths, as required for their respective research.


Confusion between citation databases: how are they related?

Web of Science is probably marginally more selective; Scopus is a little broader (I routinely get higher numbers of hits in Scopus for comparable searches). My understanding is that Scopus has also made a deliberate attempt to increase its coverage of conference proceedings, which would mean more significant coverage in those disciplines which are very conference-oriented - ie engineering and computer science - but I'm not a CS specialist so please don't take that as gospel. "Only on Scopus" may be a deliberate nod to this, or it may simply be that that institution subscribes to Scopus and not WoS!
No, they are not connected. Web of Science is based on the "Science Citation Index", but this is not connected to SCImago.
Thompson Reuters were the owners of the Web of Science product. (They sold it recently and it's now owned by Clarivate Analytics, an independent firm not part of any of the major publishers). Web of Science contains a number of distinct databases; the link you give there is a 404, but it looks like it would be some subset of this list. It probably indicates that the journal will be found in at least some part of the Web of Science product, though I believe not all institutions subscribe to all parts of the service. (You can always plug the journal into Web of Science and see what comes up...)


The thing that stands out here is that the new advisor is going on medical leave and won't be back. This sounds serious. Maybe he is facing his impending death. This would make his work very unpredictable.

It sounds like the department head was trying to make the best possible decision for you, though probably shouldn't have done so unilaterally. But starting over again will probably just delay your completion, which I assume you don't want.

You've been caught in two bad situations which is very unfortunate. Work with the head to find a good way to reach completion and also get good recommendation letters to support your future.

At least ask if the head can find a way to give some stipend to your first advisor to permit her to continue to work with you. Even if that isn't possible it may get the department head to start thinking of better solutions. It is a situation that is uncomfortable for the head as well.


What is the meant by "A high standard of illustration (both line and photo) is an editorial"?

"line" means "line art", and could be anything from pen drawings to graphs (plots) or other illustrations drawn with a thin pen or its electronic equivalent.

The reason line art is often listed separately from photos is that it requires a higher resolution image and usually also a different file format for high quality output.


PhD with no prior research experience, how?

Yes, In the UK, you can get accepted to a Ph.D. based on Bs.c. or Msc diploma, with no publication records.

I can answer this, because computer science is my field, and saw many people like you doing research here in the UK.

Background Work

Ok so you want to do a Ph.D. with a postgraduate degree which is on the practical side of things. That is totally fine; however you need to do some work before finding a supervisor. In essence there are three types of supervisors in the field of computer science:

Know it All: There are number of impressive supervisors, that know both the theoretical and practical side of computer science. These supervisors publications on both theory and practice (e.g., code generation, language design). This is the best kind of supervisors to have because they can bridge between theory and practice; and can navigate you through both theory and practice.

Theory-Oriented: They use Latex to create their papers/journals/books. They have no idea what so ever about the practical stuff. God forbid you ask them about JVM internals. They can still be useful, because you are covered the practical stuff; and they can help you through theory. However, they have no appreciation about how hard it is to make something work in practice. Also, they might not the best people to link between theory and practice.

Practical-Oriented: There are much fewer number of supervisors, that for example transferred from electronic engineering into computer science. They know very practical stuff (e.g., embedded system programming, active on developing Erlang application for telecommunication purposes); however for you these are the worst choice. Because, you have the practical background (so don't supervision on practical stuff), but because you need to introduce theory into your research they can't do much in helping you. So you end up wasting number of years just because for example your supervisor don't know game theory.

So overall look for their publications and the track record. How much open-source software they produce. How much theory-oriented paper they publish. These are the things that you will curse yourself later on during Ph.D. if you didn't think it through.


How can I handle publication jealousy among peers in my research lab?

I share an office with several grad students in a similar situation of non-overlapping fields. The problem extended to the PhD students of the program in general.

Is it common for others who have experienced such behavior during their graduate studies? Or, is it a paranoia?

In my experience, it is completely normal, but as you say, not desirable. I have heard that programs with less pressure to publish experience it less. I remember learning that a Masters student had entered the PhD program with a publication and felt like I had been punched in the gut.

How to handle such uncomfortable feeling inside the lab and feel positive?

To echo some of the comments, a lot of it seems to boil down to openness and collaboration. Here are some options that have helped me and my fellow grad students reduce negativity and increase the quality of our research:

Reading about the publishing process and ways to get better at it, like with How to Write a Lot.
Start or join a weekly writing group with your lab mates to mutually support one another. For me, this was the game changer. We talk about the good and the bad, as @Stefan_W mentioned.
Find a supportive community outside the lab where you can discuss your feelings. For example, in Barcelona, we have several city-wide communities of early career researchers from every discipline.
Similar to Point 3, participate in the associations of your field. For example, I attend events for the British Academy of Management. Not only do they hold seminars for grad students, but they generally require me to bring a work in progress, which has a motivating effect.

At my university, we went so far as to start a student association. We hold regular social events, mock conferences, organize writing groups, and participate in community events. These have started us in the direction of a feeling of shared victory (instead of resentment) when one of us manages to publish, and of course it gives us a place to turn for support in the case of rejection. In the beginning there were just a few of us in a weekly writing group, but eventually we got more organized.


Should I use my official legal name or the one I'm known by on my Master's dissertation?

You could write your name as Robert "Bob" KubaFYI, if your university policy allows for it. At least in the US, that's a standard stylization to indicate a nickname or unofficial name one goes by regularly. Classmates of mine who were international students from Eastern Asia and had traditional legal names but went by English names commonly did this.


Should my withdrawals be included on my transcripts for graduate admissions?

This will depend on the schools that you're applying to. The best bet is going to be to call the admissions office and just ask.  Every application I've sent in has specifically stated all colleges attended, but I suspect that your mileage may vary.

House-keeping note: Welcome to Ac.SO! Your question is fairly specific to your circumstances and so would be generally frowned upon as it doesn't really adhere to the format of the site. Check out the FAQ for more information on what a good SO question looks like.

Best of luck with your applications.


How can an IT undergrad become a Data Scientist.?

I have answered several related questions on the Data Science SE site some time ago. I hope that my answers are relevant to your situation and will be helpful. Wishing you best of luck!

Graduate Degree Choices for Data Science
Starting my career as Data Scientist, is Software Engineering experience required?
Data Science Project Ideas


Can we detect plagiarism from/in a podcast?

I doubt that anything currently exists. I don't, however, think the problem is infeasible. But it is very hard.
First, plagiarism is about ideas, not words. One can plagiarize without using any of the original words. Second, plagiarism is about the creation of the ideas and claiming them as your own. Both of these are difficult problems.
First, one would probably need both things to be in a common format, probably written language. This part currently has solutions that mostly work, but it is the easiest part. Second, the actual meaning of the words would need to be extracted and probably also structured in some way.
Finally, the system would need to watch out that the ideas weren't just being expressed but were being claimed. I can certainly speak and write about relativity without plagiarizing Einstein.
I think it would be an interesting research problem, but I also think that it would be pretty far in the future before such a system could eliminate most of the false positives and false negatives.
A data driven AI system might be the way to attack it, but these are still subject to many false decisions.
But it needs to be an intelligent agent to make the call. A person can use transcripts and understand the meaning and the intent. A sufficiently sophisticated AI might also be able to do it, but it is still a bit beyond where were are, especially if you require a low fault rate.

Copyright is easier, since it is about words (pictures, sounds, etc).
Likewise, students copying things to cheat is generally easier since they will most likely be copying words rather than extracting the ideas/semantics from the words and there is an implicit assumption that the intent is that the ideas are their own.


How to approach other professors in a department when the potential advisor is unsure of his funding situation?

The simplest solution seems to be the best - just be honest with both. Everybody knows that funding can be very difficult, and no one would blame you for having more than one horse in the race. It is, in fact, expected of a good student to seek out options. But we can consider some options.

Logically there are four options. You discuss with both, you discuss with neither, you discuss only with your first priority (called A) or you discuss only with your second priority (called B).

Discuss with neither: Nothing good will come out of this - they cannot read minds, and don't know your intentions if you don't speak up.

Discuss only with A: If A's funding falls through, this risks becoming awkward with B. You don't, in fact, know if B for example has other plans if you don't discuss it.

Discuss only with B: If A's funding falls through and you get a place at B's team, this may be awkward as you still have to be in the same department as A.

Now ask yourself - are there any downsides from discussing with both? I cannot think of any.


How to study for the exams which are mathematical in approach but subjective in nature?

Learning math, science and engineering is to a certain extent about learning a collection of computational techniques that one can improve at by rote practice - integrating, differentiating, solving equations etc. But to a much larger extent it is about acquiring a conceptual understanding of the key ideas and concepts of the science you are being taught. This is a higher lever skill, and one that is ultimately much more important.

What you call “subjective” questions are precisely those questions that are designed to test your understanding. They are the questions that, ever since I started teaching, I have been hearing students (even well-intentioned, hard-working, eager to learn students) describe as “trick questions”, “unfair”, “not in the book”, “impossible to study for”, and so on. They are the questions that students dread and loathe and complain about and seek to find ways to avoid and bluff their way through. They are the questions that really test whether you have learned the main thing we wanted you to learn.

To be fair, subjective questions are indeed hard, and I completely sympathize with your frustration about them. They are characterized by the fact that there is no mechanical practice procedure, like “solve X problems from section Y in the book”, that is guaranteed to prepare you for them. Learning how to study for them is probably the single most valuable skill a student can hope to learn in their time at university. If you have learned how to study for subjective questions, it means you have learned how to learn, and that’s a wonderful thing to know.

So how do you study for them? In some sense that’s something each person has to discover for themselves. But in another sense the answer is blindingly obvious: you study the material, and you think about it. That’s it! But what I mean is really really study the material, and really think about it: that is, you think critically about each and every sentence of each and every section in the book/lecture notes and each and every thing the instructor said, trying to identify what conceptual meaning it is trying to tell you. You try to probe into every nook and cranny of the theory by criticizing it, and asking “what if” questions and “does this make sense?”, and reading Wikipedia and textbooks and watching online videos. You solve problems, and solve more problems, then go back to the theoretical part of the textbook and read it again and think about it in the context of the problems you solved. And watch more videos and read more books and forums and talk to your friends about the material. Etc etc. - note that this process has no natural end because no one understands everything, not even your professors. But at some point you’ll probably feel like you understand things at a reasonably good level for the exam you are about to take.

And then you move on to the next subject and start all over again. :-)


Background check before employment offer

I'd expect the following:

Some institutions do a criminal background check, others don't.  This will usually be disclosed in the job ad.  For those that do, they might do the check before making an offer (in which case the application will ask for the necessary identifying information), or they might make you an offer that's contingent on passing the check.
US faculty jobs will require letters of recommendation, or contact information for references.  The search committee might actually contact them to ask further questions about you.  (Your recommenders might or might not tell you if this happens.)
They will normally not contact anybody other than your letter writers or references you list in your application.  This is pretty important because people in existing faculty positions often don't want it known within their department that they are on the market; it could have political blowback if they end up not leaving.


How do I know how well I am progressing in my PhD?

In my observation over some decades (in mathematics), I think it is nearly impossible for a PhD student to gauge their own progress. Sure, it is possible to know whether one feels discouraged or encouraged, etc., but these are mostly artifacts of one's own temperament and of the general environment, not indicators of one's progress.

If you have an engaged, perceptive, competent advisor, they will by-far be the best judge of whether you're on-track or off.

Even then, the real goal is not to measure up to some scalar-valued "good/bad", but to _become_what_you_can_.


Official designer designed a logo for my lab but it turns out that it's just a copy from somewhere else, should I report it to the university?

I'm not sure if it is a violation of academic integrity or not cause it's not a research project

It is a violation of academic integrity.

Even I can't find any information about when this page is posted online

The Internet Archive shows the image existed on that page 26 July 2018.  Furthermore, it's advertised for sale:
https://stock.adobe.com/au/189585864?as_campaign=TinEye&as_content=tineye_match&epi1=189585864&tduid=4956906e07434ca59f9d78b2979d22da&as_channel=affiliate&as_campclass=redirect&as_source=arvato

should I report it to the university?

If you have used the logo, perhaps on a website, you should report this to university counsel.  They should figure out what to do to prevent litigation.
Of course it is possible the "graphic designer" purchased a license and then claimed the image was original work.  But it is more likely they did not purchase a license.
In a university context, you should have no tolerance for plagiarism by staff.


Apart from the points made by Stephan Kolassa, I would enter the number of articles to be processed as a variable in the equation.

If you start a journal you probably are aiming for a certain number of articles to be put through review per year. Note that the number of articles processed can be substantially higher than finally published since not every submitted article becomes accepted. Rejections rates vary but 50% is not unheard of and higher rates are not uncommon.

So you have a certain number of articles to handle. I then assume that your editors are working for free outside their normal work hours. You have to consider how much work load you want to put on these persons. In the journal I "run" I have set a goal of 4-5 articles per year for each editor and have tried to adapt the editorship to that number. I am not saying 4-5 is a norm but you have to judge what is reasonable. You can ask potential editors what they can consider. Obviously they need to put some effort in so one paper per year is perhaps not optimal. The work load I consider concerns finding reviewers, getting the reviews back and recommending reject/revisions/accept (and completing additional rounds of reviews) to a Chief Editor for final decision (the latter decision process can be done in different ways and reflects "my" journal).

The scope of your journal also plays a role in that with a wide scope you may need editors with very differing specialities. You then have to balance the number of reviews for each sub-topic so that editors will handle the flow without overworking any one editor. With a narrow scope, all editors can probably handle all manuscripts and the problem is then "just" to distribute work fairly.

You can expect there to be difficulties achieving a balance from the start and assessing the likelihood of attracting papers and maybe how many, although largely a guessing game, will be important. This is where the answer becomes closely related to the question of how to start a journal because many considerations involved in making sure people publish affects the editorship of the journal.


Balancing (Re)building Foundations and Research

This feeling is pretty normal at that stage. (I also guess that the feeling that one should know foundations better does never really vanish for many people.) To keep up your pace, but still broaden your foundations I suggest that you

choose some books you'd like to go through and reserve some time every week to work on it,
embrace the fact, that you will be able to pick up new stuff in your field more quickly than during graduate studies,
be aware that you'll pick up more and more foundations "on the fly" while doing research.


What do I do when my TA workload is more than expected?

You should consult with your department, asking explicitly:

  How do you want to proceed, I feel like these conditions are excessive and were not part of the deal as far as I know.

Come to the meeting with your signed contract / TA paperwork.

I assume, your department cares about quality of the education they provide. Don't let them pin this on you, you are a student first of all. If they employ you, they are responsible for your performance as a teacher.

Other answers didn't pause here:

  I feel extremely overwhelmed by this workload and my depression has made this worse I've cancelled class at least 5 times this semester because I couldn't get out of bed

I suggest you immediately seek professional help. Your university must have services available for students (and be paid-for by university's health insurance), especially given recent attention to mental health crisis in academia. That is your responsibility to take care of yourself. You are also a real person, not just a robot TA, don't let mental health issues fester.


Sending official transcript with mistakes

Would it harm my application if I sent this transcript?

Not if done correctly. This is one of those "special circumstances" where there is likely no established rule; you just have to contact a human and explain the situation. What you can do is:

Send the transcript with the errors
Reach out to the person in charge of admissions (either the professor and/or an administrator) at the University and explain that there is an error on the transcript.
Reach out to someone at your own University to see if they can send some kind of official notice to verify that there is an error.

Once everyone is aware of the problem, it should not be an issue. They can verify with your university that the transcript is indeed an error.

Of course, the best solution would be to contact your university to see if they can remove the errors and correct the transcript. But if this is impossible, then the above should be good enough.


Calling a professor regarding an advertised postdoc position

One week is very little time for these things. The person is busy. She is probably considering several applications as well as doing her normal work. Calling probably will not make the situation better and might make it worse. If she is considering your application, she won't want to make any decision in a phone call, of course.

The required documents are likely posted somewhere and can't be known here. You need to find them. If they aren't listed in the position announcement they may be in general application materials of the institution. Failing that, the common thing is your CV and a Statement of Purpose (SOP). You need to convince her or a committee that you are the right person for this position and that your background indicates you will be a good fit. Address both your past and your future as you see it.


Are reviewers chosen from among the editorial board of a journal?

Generally, when a paper is submitted to a journal it is first assigned an editor. The editor then identifies a qualified outside reviewer for that particular manuscript, and invites him/her to review the paper.

So the answer is: No, you should not expect that the possible reviewers of a paper are selected from among the members of the editorial board.


Applying to a second MSci/PhD with a PhD

If you got the maximum grade on a dissertation in another PhD program, that would be viewed positively. The admissions committee would be hoping that you will do the same in their program.

The basis for concern is that your pre-dissertation work will "average down" the value of your application. It's not something to be ignored, but most admissions committees will give the greatest weight to 1) the highest level of work that you have achieved and/or 2) the most recent level you have achieved. in both cases, your PhD dissertation grade is a big help.

I might refrain from taking math courses until getting into a program, even at the expense of being less prepared. Because if you take those courses and do badly, that becomes the new "most recent."


How to cite a paragraph from a paper with a citation in it

Normally, you would switch between double and single ticks for the outer and inner quotation, respectively.

Alternatively, for a quotation of the length you are showing, consider using a (slightly indented) quotation block.

I will look for some examples when I have a stable connection again.

Of course, you should also check the styleguide of your target venue, although in my experience, paper styleguides rarely mention such details/special cases.


Is there a need to always check for plagiarism?

Being certain that you quote correctly is pretty straight-forward (if it's not your words, use quotes), but learning to paraphrase well is difficult for some people.  I think this may be more often the case for those who are not native English speakers: my observation may be less about language than about differences in educational culture.

For a person who doesn't have confidence that they are paraphrasing sufficiently differently for typical scientific writing standards, I could see that running through a plagiarism checker might be useful as an educational tool.  Much more effectively, however, such a person might want to work with a trustworthy writing service (most American universities provide something of this sort free to their students) to get an independent evaluation of the quality of their paraphrasing and help in improving it if needed.

Once you have enough experience to be confident in your ability to paraphrase, however, I would not bother to do any sort of double-check unless you have an extremely nervous personality and it will help you to sleep at night.


How can a TA help a student who is certain she sucks at programming?

When you tell her that she doesn't suck at programming, all she hears is that you don't understand how bad she sucks.  The psychology is the important thing here, not pedagogy.  If I were in your situation, I would say something like, "Yes, you do suck at programming.  In fact, most of us suck at programming. (Heck, have you ever noticed that Windows doesn't work???) But by doing some of these exercises, we get a bit better at programming.  Likely, you'll never be World's Greatest Programmer, or even a programmer, but by struggling, even unsuccessfully, with some of these exercises, you'll make yourself a stronger thinker.  And therefore a better person."

I've gotten a lot more mileage out of "We all suck, so let's do what we can" than pretending that everyone's a genius.


Citing a document without year information

First, if this is a student paper, ask your supervisor; if it's a journal article or similar publication, consult the style-sheet.

I've seen 'n.d.' for 'no date'. For online sources, it's a good idea to include the last access date, like so:

  Brown, Alice (n.d.), On the Flubbication of Foobars, Report, Institute for the Study of Things, Boulder, Co., http://thingsistitute/pub/flubbication.pdf (accessed 6 June 2018).