Should I tell my PhD supervisor that I am looking for an other position?

Morally yes. There are also a number of practical benefits.  How is your supervisor in general as they could be understanding and help you get a new position.  They can also be helpful for advice as they will know what other supervisors/research groups are like, especially if they know the reason you are quitting their group.

If you are applying in a similar field there is a good chance they have met at conferences.  Telling eliminates this risk.

Of course if you do tell it will be seen as you quitting your PhD and your funding will likely be cut (depending on how it is structured).  If you don't find a new position, I have no idea how confident you are of securing a new position, it could mean you get left with no position at all.  Of course your supervisor could also be understanding and let you use that group as a fall back.  It would save them the trouble of hiring someone new.

Finally, and this possibly be first, have you exhausted all options to fix your current PhD such as working with your supervisor to limit/remove the issues you have.  You could potentially switch topics but stick with the same supervisor for instance and work less with the research group itself, my own PhD did not involve anyone else in the same university working on the same topic as me (aside from my supervisor who also worked on different topics as well).

The above is very dependent on the personality of your supervisor and the reasons you are unhapppy though so don't apply it blindly but I would lean towards telling them.


If your advisor has no objections to you doing so, and you believe the courses will be beneficial to your development, you should do so. Note that the courses need not be directly relevant to your current work—they may be somewhat outside the scope of your research, but might represent an area you'd like to explore in the future. However, don't take courses you don't want to just to pad your transcript: it really won't matter much to future employers (except a few non-academic employers who might care what your graduate GPA is!).


How do I specify that I ranked first in a university which has alot of affiliated colleges?

Making a note of the number of affiliated colleges might be fine. But I will suggest including the total number of candidates (students) in your batch that includes all affiliated colleges (if available) within which you've established your rank.


Editor invited after minor revision submitted

I had a similar story recently. It was with the handling editor who will go through the comments and replies and also reviewers new comments. The final outcome was "accept".
So if authors have responded all the reviewers' comments appropriately, then most probably it will be accepted.


After research your question, it appears from multiple universities that the proper way to reference a source in text with ACM format is:

  So we see that Smith [1990] ...

Therefore you should not need to reference the actual article name.

https://biblioteca.info.unlp.edu.ar/uploads/docs/guia_acm1.pdf
https://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/~chryssis/specs/ACM-refguide.pdf
https://www.library.unh.edu/research-support/citation-styles/acm-style


PhD application SOP - include several research ideas or just one?

First, stop identifying yourself as an "older" PhD applicant. Instead, use some terms that come with more leverage like "mid-career." It implied that you're from an earlier cohort, and you also come with real world industrial experience.

Then, this statement:

  I have no geographical ties, so I can go anywhere.

does not help because while it may appear flexible it also sounds clueless. Since you come from the industry, do you really think your industry welcomes any one with a PhD from any country? I'd suggest try talk to your peers and get a sense of where they studied or what degrees and institutions seem to be well-respected by them. You can also browse some related academic or business journals for some ideas on hot topics and prominent institutes.

As for how PhD application works... it's as varying as everyone's favorite grandma's recipe. Some will give you scholarship based on merit, some will require a professor's endorsement to pay for you, some will only consider if you come with a research grant/fellowship... that's why devising application strategies now without a shortlist of schools is just going to waste a lot of time.

Compared to the number of research interests, it's more important to think about if they are relevant to the faculty, well-balanced between realistic and ambitious, insightful in the short- and long-term plans, and genuine/authentic. The magic number will rely on your stated reasons for doing a PhD at that particular institute. A very general recommendation I often give is to diversify into a main thematic interest, a sub-thematic interest, and a methodological interest. I like this layout because it shows the applicant is not a one-trick pony, and yet not spreading overly thin nor easily distracted, and the last methodological interest can emphasize the applicant's flexibility, strengthening the potential as a collaborator.

In any case, do the research. Decide on some schools from different tiers, and start knowing them. Website, brochures, information sessions, booths at business conferences, etc. are all very accessible resources.


How to let a PhD student know that their research is not as good as they think it is

Let's start with the obvious:

  I'm only two years more senior than him.

You have a PhD and he has not. You have written (many) papers before and he has not. You know your craft. He does not (yet). And he can learn faster by listening to well-meaning advice from more senior and experienced people. The age-difference does not mean anything. And it seems that you care for his well-being (and his success) and that probably makes your advice even more valuable than the advice of a more experienced, yet indifferent person.

Given that you are qualified to give this advice, you should absolutely tell him the honest truth. Start by:

  Would you like to hear my true opinion of your paper? You might not
  like it but I think you should hear it. I think it is better to hear
  it from me than some random reviewer.

And then wait for his answer. If the answer is "No, I do not want to hear your opinion and my paper is so much better than most of the crap they publish in SODA, VLDB or..." then let him know the hard way. Nothing beats delusions better than three strong rejects and merciless bashing from the reviewers. You should also probably let his advisor know what you think of the paper and then let the advisor decide on how to proceed.

Otherwise, if the student is genuinely interested in your opinion then take the time to explain not only what is wrong with his paper but how he can make it better. Explain why he should be more diplomatic in his view of previous work. How he can present his experiments better. How to further clarify his contribution in comparison to the previous works, and so-on. But also state that even if he implements all that, his paper might still not have a chance in first-tier conference.

Of course, my answer is based on the fact that you do not directly supervise this student. If you do, he has no choice but to hear your opinion. And in this case, crap or half-baked papers should not go to prominent conferences. That makes everyone (co-authors, advisors) look bad. Of course rejection is something normal but only when you submit something that actually stands a chance to be accepted.


Translated letter of recommendation from employer

Ask the professor to send the letter to the translator with instructions to return it back to the professor. Make separate arrangements to pay the translator. Then the prof can directly send the translation. And the prof can even verify it a bit if needed.

You don't need to be in the document loop at all.


Publishing a paper - not enrolled in university

No, you do not need to be enrolled in a PhD to publish scientific papers. You don't need to be a professor either. It's common, but by no means mandatory. For example the game Arimaa was invented by Omar Syed. He published a paper introducing the game and has never earned a PhD.

As for how to publish - it's no different from those who have PhDs. Go to your target journal's website; it will have instructions for authors on how to submit the paper.


How much are taxes for a postdoc in the United States?

You will be taxed like any other employee in the US, unless you are in the US temporarily and the US has alternative tax arrangements with your home country (see below). Salary is always reported in pre-tax terms. Your actual take-home pay will depend on deductions for things like healthcare, and the taxes in your state. At the new annual ~$47k level for postdocs, you can expect this to be in the vicinity of $2800-$3000/month, depending on your marital status, dependents, etc.

There are many online calculators for you to figure this out, for example HR Block or Intuit.

It's possible that if your home country has a particular tax treaty (link to IRS) with the United States your tax situation may be different. If this is the case, you may want to adjust your tax withholding accordingly, though you may also owe taxes to your home country. If you have taxes withheld that you do not actually need to pay, you can get them back when you file a tax return at the end of the year (typically in February-April), but you are essentially giving the US government an interest-free loan.

The institution you work for should have some resources and can help you with sorting out your tax situation. Local/state laws, countries of origin, your visa type, etc. can all influence your tax situation. The information I provide here is a guideline to know what your approximate income will be to help you make decisions about housing, etc before you start a position, but you should always study or get guidance on the particulars of your tax situation to avoid needing to correct things in the future.


Is having five letters of recommendation for STEM PhD programs (math, specifically) ok?

This can depend on the specific university department. Some may welcome it as supplemental material to your application whereas some may discourage excess letters and tell you to choose the ones that will best showcase your abilities as a student. Don't add things to your application that the department doesn't welcome.

I've generally heard and been told that an additional good recommendation letter will boost your chances of admission,
but an additional generic recommendation letter that does not add anything unique to the other (assuming) 4 letters will only hurt it.

So for a general answer, make sure each recommendation letter is able to showcase different areas of skill rather than them overlapping with each other. Also, make sure to contact each department to make sure that they are okay with having more than 3 recommendation letters.

Hope this helps, good luck!


Should we translate non-english university names?

The first thing to do is to check if the university has any recommendations about this. If none exist, then the second aspect is to consider if the university is well known under one or another form of the name. The purpose of providing an affiliation and proper address is for the sake of communication. Before e-mail and Internet, most correspondence went by post so a proper address was very important. Now e-mail is used, which means the affiliation is mostly to identify the author and the author's affiliation. Web sites are usually bilingual so finding the university or department is possible in both English and the native language. Most will probably use the English translation because it makes most sense if the remainder of the paper is in English. A point to make is that if one uses the native language for affiliation etc. then problems will arise for those not familiar with, for example, Cyrillic, Chinese or Japanese. So it seems the best way to communicate affiliation/address is to use English translations that are hopefully officially accepted by the university.


Early Career Research Fellow Application

For very early career (few years after your PhD), most people will value signs that you are carrying good research independently of your Phd advisor. You gained you PhD, and presumably you did good (because you found jobs since then, you haven't left academia). Now, as an early career scientist, you need to show that you can design, implement and manage your own research projects. Basically, they want to see you as a leader with high potential.

So, in general these are the most watched points:

is the candidate able to put up a good and coherent research project, explaining its context and impact
did the candidate publish without his advisor?
did she mentor/advise (or even work with) younger students?
has she created new collaborations?


Appropriate description of image processing algorithm in engineering

Your paper should focus on your contribution to the field, not to the field of image processing (if I understand your question).  Your paper will likely have some form of "approach" or "setup" section or something to the effect.  If this is a novel algorithm, you may choose to describe it there.  A common thing to use is a LaTeX "Algorithm" environment, and provide pseudocode.  If the algorithm is very complex or detailed, consider breaking it into pieces.  If it is truly novel, consider publishing it!
An alternative would be to have some way to publicly access the code, say github or your institution's personal websites, with an explanation there.  Again, a pseudocode algorithm is probably sufficient.
If your paper is accepted but you are asked to revise the description of the code, do so according to the comments.  Otherwise, unless there is a lot missing from the main paper's description of its contribution, your paper will not be rejected or accepted based on this detail.


Can the US general schedule (GS) scale be mapped to academic rank?

I knew I had read up on this before. Don't remember for what, but it was definitely for Academia.

From the U.S. Code § 5104 - Basis for grading positions

I would say that GS-15 would be like department head, GS-14 would be tenured, GS-13 would be non-tenured, GS-12 associate, and GS-9 through -11 to be some varying group of PhDs and grad students.

GS-13

  (A) to perform, under administrative direction, with wide latitude for the exercise of independent judgment, work of unusual difficulty and responsibility along special technical, supervisory, or administrative lines, requiring extended specialized, supervisory, or administrative training and experience which has demonstrated leadership and marked attainments;

  (B) to serve as assistant head of a major organization involving work of comparable level within a bureau;

  (C) to perform, under administrative direction, with wide latitude for the exercise of independent judgment, work of unusual difficulty and responsibility requiring extended professional, scientific, or technical training and experience which has demonstrated leadership and marked attainments in professional, scientific, or technical research, practice, or administration; or

  (D) to perform other work of equal importance, difficulty, and responsibility, and requiring comparable qualifications.

GS-14

  (A) to perform, under general administrative direction, with wide latitude for the exercise of independent judgment, work of exceptional difficulty and responsibility along special technical, supervisory, or administrative lines which has demonstrated leadership and unusual attainments;

  (B) to serve as head of a major organization within a bureau involving work of comparable level;

  (C) to plan and direct or to plan and execute major professional, scientific, technical, administrative, fiscal, or other specialized programs, requiring extended training and experience which has demonstrated leadership and unusual attainments in professional, scientific, or technical research, practice, or administration, or in administrative, fiscal, or other specialized activities; or

  (D) to perform consulting or other professional, scientific, technical, administrative, fiscal, or other specialized work of equal importance, difficulty, and responsibility, and requiring comparable qualifications.

GS-15

  (A) to perform, under general administrative direction, with very wide latitude for the exercise of independent judgment, work of outstanding difficulty and responsibility along special technical, supervisory, or administrative lines which has demonstrated leadership and exceptional attainments;

  (B) to serve as head of a major organization within a bureau involving work of comparable level;

  (C) to plan and direct or to plan and execute specialized programs of marked difficulty, responsibility, and national significance, along professional, scientific, technical, administrative, fiscal, or other lines, requiring extended training and experience which has demonstrated leadership and unusual attainments in professional, scientific, or technical research, practice, or administration, or in administrative, fiscal, or other specialized activities; or
  (D) to perform consulting or other professional, scientific, technical, administrative, fiscal, or other specialized work of equal importance, difficulty, and responsibility, and requiring comparable qualifications.

They're all slightly different, heading from supervisor role to department/division lead role.

This one provides a bit more granularity between each group..


Pose lots of unanswered questions in a PhD thesis chapter?

The posing of "open" questions is quite common in doctoral dissertations, usually in the final "conclusions and outlook" section.

However, your situation is a bit different, in that you have an actual project that is designed to address these questions, but the study is too long for you to wait to include the results in your PhD thesis. Given this, I would basically do what you've said: introduce the basics of the case study you've designed, what it's designed to do, and so on. You just won't be able to present the actual results of the experiments. If this is clearly communicated to your committee by both you and your advisor, then this shouldn't be a major problem.


What can I do when a TA asks me to marry her so that she can obtain a green card?

I am a U.S. citizen and happen to have a foreign spouse, so I've had some personal experience with this.

It could conceivably work if the two of you had known each other intimately for some time, even if you had a George Bernard Shaw, separate bedrooms kind of relationship.  But if you are just acquaintances, it is unlikely the two of you would get through the interview process successfully.  In separate interviews, you would be asked an unpredictable set of questions about your shared personal history.  There are sample interview questions posted online, e.g. https://www.usavisanow.com/marriage-green-card/marriage-green-card-faq/marriage-green-card-interview/ and http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/us-immigration/what-happens-green-card-marriage-interview.html.

In addition, USCIS (formerly INS) would need to see documentation that your finances have been shared and inextricably intertwined for some time.

You could enjoy the fantasy together for an evening, with the Dépardieu film Green Card.

P.S. I have heard about a businessman's visa, which her budget might be enough for, but I don't know much about it.


How likely is it that PhD application is not reviewed by professors if TOEFL minimum isn't met?

I do not know about US schools, but for my UK university the IELTS requirements are non-negotiable. Most of the time we see this right away. Sometimes we screw up and read and evaluate the entire application before noticing. In all cases the student is not offered a place. Other UK universities, especially ones that struggle to fill their spots, sometimes will argue with the administration that an exception should be made. From my understanding, they almost always lose.


How should to-be-published articles be referenced?

The usual way of handling this situation is to use [in press] in the reference instead of the publication date to indicate that the publication is accepted but not yet available. Usually you should also provide soft copies of the to-be-published articles so that the reviewers can have access to them during the review process.

Note that some journals (there is no conference publishing in my field) will postpone the publication of your article until all in press articles are online/published to make sure the references don't need further editing and are correct and useful on the long haul.

Note: Do not use in press if you only speculate that the cited paper will be accepted, only after a firm notification of acceptance.


How much do teaching responsibilities hinder a researcher at a small university?

Yes, you will have a heavier teaching load at most small universities. Such places usually have teaching as their primary mission. Teaching is usually required at large US universities as well, unless you are completely grant funded. But that isn't the only issue.

At a small institution it is much harder to develop a synergistic core of researchers. Even if there are, say five math faculty, they are not especially likely to have the same research interests or be focused on the same field.

Things are a bit easier in the last couple of decades with advances in communication, but you still aren't likely to see deep research seminars in a topic of interest to you at a small place.

Also, note that in the US, most faculty are actually working at smaller, primarily teaching, institutions than large research universities. If you look at, for example, the list of colleges in a given state, say New York, you will find only a few large institutions and many, many small ones. It is a bit complicated since some private research institutions are actually fairly small. In those, the mission is primarily research or it is balanced.


How can I help my advisor not lose face when changing from a thesis to non-thesis program?

Why are you worried about helping save face for this person?  It sounds like they have been nothing but problematic.

If the department is OK with you switching to a non-degree program and graduating, just do it and get out of there.  Based on what you have reported, there seems to be no benefit for you doing otherwise: you're just making a lot of excuses for what is very poor behavior. For example, it doesn't matter if supervising your thesis is "low priority" and your advisor is "very busy"---supervising your thesis is part of your advisor's job.

Given that you are have already engaged both the program director and the Ombuds office and gotten their encouragement to proceed on this path, just go ahead and finish your degree without the thesis.  The only disadvantage you are likely to have is that you're not going to be able to get a good recommendation letter from your former advisor---but then, would you have been able to anyway?


How should I react to emails from unknown (to me) book publishers?

Get used to this: you will receive one or more spam emails for every single piece of work that you will publish, whether thesis, journal paper or conference paper.

The senders are predatory publishers: press the del key as fast as you can!


Is there a non-scientific related activity for students in a conference?

The aftermath:

I just add here some notes about my feelings once the conference took place.

It is a great opportunity to even be remotely associated to such an environment. In such an environment exists the chance to meet people from the academy and the industry. If you have the rights networking skills you (as a student) can score some internship a possible future employment positions both in academia and industry. So in no way this opportunity is not considered a waste of time.

If you are a student volunteer these are some useful stuff one may need:

Typical Conference Questions and other stuff to consider:

Where is the toilet?
What is the WiFi pass?
Have different adapters and converters in hand

port – to- port video adapters
country – to – country power supply adapters

Extra batteries for the presenter
Arrange poster guys based on their order of presentation, put all the posters in a pdf file, on the same laptop (yours or someone else)
Ask demo presenters if they need monitor for their demos
Before the beginnings of the session, strongly recommend speakers to try if their laptop fit with the cables used for connection to the projector


Is it possible to get hired without post-doctorate experience in the chemical/pharmaceutical industry?

Yes, it is definitely possible, as I have students who did it. But it really depends on the type of position sought: position advertisements usually list a “level of experience required”, so be sure to check it before applying, and possible taylor your application/interview in response to that.

PS: Regarding “without using inter-personal connections”, I'm not sure how to interpret that. Surely during your PhD, and your job search, you have met (will meet) people at various places. Why would you refuse to use these people to help your application, or your inside knowledge of position openings in a given company?


How does one reference a conference paper in a cover letter?

Unless the application instructions require you to provide references in a particular format (unlikely but not impossible), your key objectives should be (a) to convey sufficient information to allow the reader to find the work that you're citing and (b) to be consistent in your referencing. Within those constraints, you are probably safe to provide the reference in whatever format best suits your needs.

You may want to:

provide the reference as a footnote (e.g. "… I leveraged a paper¹ …" and then details of the reference in the footnote) or
use an inline numeric or author-date citation (as in your question) and then at the very bottom of the page (after your signature etc) put "Reference: " and the details of the paper.

In choosing a format, you should also pay attention to the norms of citation formats in your discipline. So, for example, if it is normal in your discipline to use author-date citations then do that, but if it's more normal to refer to papers using numeric references (e.g. '[1]') then you should prefer that.


Reference formulas in non-English text books

You should cite the most appropriate references for your work, regardless of the language of the source. (I suspect that even mathematics, many of the most important references were initially published in other languages, such as French, German, or Russian.)

You are not required to cite only English-language sources in publications, especially if the only source you can find is in another language. However, you may have to find a way to share the reference with editors or referees, particularly if the reference is rather obscure. If it's published by a mainstream company, however, then it should not be a problem to verify it. (I should point out that the importance of this depends critically on how central the reference is; a minor result that can be independently verified is not a problem; a core result requires much greater scrutiny.)


If English is not your own first language, then you might first want to ask someone you know with "native" English skills to help interpret the review.

Then ask the editor for clarification of the review, but be detailed about what parts of it you don't understand. Most editors will be willing to work with you, but I can't guarantee that all will. But if you don't ask you won't learn anything.

And, it may take some time to resolve this. If the editor has doubts about the reviewer or the review they may ask for another, which adds to the time.


How to offset poor undergraduate performance in core classes?

I will answer the first question here.

If the course you're skipping is a "mandatory" course in your major, then taking advanced courses to make up for the earlier failures is not sufficient unless you get the necessary approvals to do so. (Usually there is some sort of departmental advisor whom you can petition.) However, I should mention that given your past record, it is quite likely that such a request will be denied.


Many cases are quite clear cut - someone graduating with a physics PhD getting a physics postdoc is obviously fine, for example. Generally, I think the answer is to be reasonable. If you (who's the person most familiar with the details about both your degree and job) struggle to come up with a reasonable explanation as to how the job is related to the degree, using skills developed during the degree, and at the right level, well, it probably wouldn't count. Note that you need to provide that motivation when listing the employer in the SEVP portal. If you're uncertain, or if this is a less clear cut case, do discuss it with the International Office at your university. They'll have a good idea about where the line tends to be drawn.

It's also useful to have a letter from your employer or academic advisor outlining how your job duties relate to the degree. Unlike the brief motivation for the SEVP portal, this letter is for later - either future visa applications (e.g. for the STEM OPT extension) or for being readmitted to the US after travel abroad.

Finally, note that I used the postdoc example since we're on Academia. For nonacademic jobs, and further OPT questions, you might get better answers at Expatriates Stack Exchange.


Etiquette with regard to email consolidation

Do universities/departments ever a formal policy in place about the use of "non-official" email accounts?

Yes, at least in Europe most universities seem to at least frown upon using gmail etc. in professional contexts. Whether there is a formal policy against it will differ from place to place. I would not even be able to tell in my current university, as the thought has not really crossed my mind so far. However, our department head is occasionally reminding people informally that they are expected to be using their official mail addresses.

That being said, whether universities with a formal policy exist isn't overly important for you. You should primarily care whether your university has such a policy, and this we cannot answer for you.

  Do people find it personally bothersome when colleagues don't use their university account for professional correspondence?

Yes, I personally find it somewhat unprofessional, although I have no particularly strong feelings on this. I do occasionally wonder why people who clearly have an official account of my university specifically choose to send emails to collaborators and students via an account like cookiemonster93@gmail.com. It can't be that they prefer the gmail user experience, because, as you say yourself, it is very easy to use gmail also with non-gmail accounts.

However, note that even using the gmail web client as a frontend for your regular university accounts may already be a breach of policy. At least here in Switzerland, universities are not happy about the mailings of their employees being uploaded to Google (but then again they certainly wouldn't use Windows Live either, so maybe your universities care less about data privacy than the ones over here).

  Is there anything I absolutely should not send via a "non-official" account? (There's a good chance FERPA could be involved here...)

I'm not in the US, so I cannot comment on FERPA, but in my university basically everything that has to do with students, assignments, tests, or grades needs to be sent encrypted with the certificate that is bound to our university identity. This also automatically excludes sending it over a different mail address. Every "official" communication needs to at least be sent digitally signed using said certificate, which again excludes other mail accounts.


Updating a Professor on Denying School Offer

Your original phrasing would be interpreted incorrectly, as if you were the professor wanting to help a student. A note would be good, expressing thanks. You can also say that you would love to have the opportunity to work with them at some point in the future. But don't suggest, or even hint, at joint supervision at this point.
After you are in the new program you've selected and have had a chance to meet with your formal advisor, you could raise with them whether including the other professor in a formal way would be appropriate. There are two issues. First all three of you need to agree on a single problem direction and the actual advisor might have their own ideas about that. Second, there has to be a professional matchup that works for everyone, but especially the two professors. You don't know of any existing dynamics already in place and you don't want to step into a swamp inadvertently. The formal advisor might also just be unwilling to deal with additional complications, and might even be insulted that they weren't consulted first.
But even if the advisor isn't willing there is no reason to give up contact with the other professor informally. A semi-annual note, for example, on your progress will keep them in mind of you and possibly open opportunities in the future. But go slow initially.


Desaturation of academic (TT) job market in Mathematics and the Sciences

There are no "easy solutions" to this problem, but here are a couple things I have

Increasing the funding in STEM fields. Essentially, with more money, you can hire more people, and keep the "game" going a little longer. This is what created the Clinton-era boom in STEM jobs in academia - a surplus of money allowed the creation of low commitment soft money positions in Universities. The drawback to this is, of course, that it doesn't actually solve the problem as much as delay it.
Decrease the number of STEM graduates. The replacement of a single tenure-track professor in a field at steady-state size is 1. Even for a field that's doubling in size, it's 2. That's a very small number of graduate students who can actually be expected to find tenure-track positions coming out of a lab. Reducing the number of graduate students being produced stops this overpopulation problem. The problem with this solution is that you have a little bit of a Tragedy of the Commons problem - its really best if everyone else do this, and you don't, resulting in you having a massively productive lab. Right now, much of academia is built on large amounts of graduate student labor, and reducing the number of graduate students would mean figuring out a "new normal" for lab productivity.
Non-academic jobs. This is, essentially, where those students above replacement rate end up - but right now, many people in STEM view this as a lesser position, or a failure. That's not particularly realistic, and the fields would probably be well served by making sure that their grad students were aware of those options, and well-prepared for them. Some fields do better with equipping their students with transferable skills than others (biomed is particularly bad). The problem with this of course is that it's relying on tenure-track faculty to view the path they didn't take as one worth pursuing, and educate themselves on those options.


Is copying lab results a form of plagiarism?

Plagiarism is typically defined in terms of taking the work of another person and passing it off as your own (see, e.g., the Wikipedia page).  It does not matter whether the material that you steal is words, data, pictures, etc.

Thus, I would classify the practice of copying lab results that you describe as plagiarism.  It could also be categorized as other types of academic dishonesty as well, such as falsification of experimental results.


Author on paper overly similar in content to previously published work

First of all, don't worry (yet). No one gets in trouble because a paper got rejected. If it had been retracted, that would be a different story.

Secondly, I would be slightly cautious on coming to the conclusion right away that this was misconduct. Work builds on old work. My latest manuscript was sent back because it didn't provide a proof that was 95% identical to a now 40 year old proof. If the paper is genuinely attempting to present published work as novel work (without mentioning that it was ever done before), that's certainly an issue. But if it's spends 80% of the paper saying "here are the things leading up to our contribution", that's fine. In my case, I resubmitted my paper with the proof, along with saying "this proof follows a nearly identical form as ...".

Finally, if you still feel that the work is, in fact, attempting to pass published work as novel, now you have yourself a situation. There's not really a nice way to handle it, but perhaps you could begin with saying "what do you think of the reviewer's comments about the work not being original?" If they do not give you a satisfactory answer, you can say "I'm sorry, but I don't feel comfortable putting my name on this work". As uncomfortable as that will be, the good news is that they cannot put your name on without your approval. Telling the group that you don't want your name on the paper will very likely burn a bridge, but it sounds like you may have more concerns by keeping that bridge intact.


What do teaching faculty do during semester breaks?

In the United States, the "9 month salary" for a faculty member is typically paid out over 12 months.  For those faculty who engage in research or other pursuits during the summer months, the "9 month" designation gives the rate at which their salary can be enhanced through external funding.

So, what do "full time teaching" faculty do over the summer?  Colleagues of mine in such positions generally still look at this time as an opportunity to focus on their professional interests, whether that is doing research or some other field-appropriate equivalent such as writing books, directing theatrical performances, etc.

Teaching responsibilities may also extend through the summer (and may be additionally compensated or not, depending on circumstances). Examples include teaching summer courses, preparing new course material, and supporting student groups' activities (summer is a common time for technical competitions, for example).

And some, in some circumstances, really do just take the summer slowly. In my experience, though, that tends to be the exception rather than the rule, with so many other opportunities and responsibilities at hand.


How are conference TPC (Technical Program Committee) members selected?

They are selected by the conference chair to be on the technical program committee.  People on the technical committee may suggest other people.  Some times they will ask past authors of the conference to be on the committee.


How does a candidate look like when he applies for another PhD program while being enrolled in a program?

Wow. Five or six papers in the first year???? My alarm just went off. I don't know of any field, actually, in which that is possible and have those papers have much merit. If they are good papers, the candidate will be sought after nearly everywhere. But I'm going to doubt without evidence, including who published the papers. (see caveat below)

However, many students change universities in the middle of doctoral studies and for many reasons. Wanting to change countries or even regions of the same country is a common reason.

This person will be judged in the same way that everyone else is: are they highly predicted to be successful in this program and what is the evidence for that. The background coursework will be considered as well as how they did. Any research experience? How good are letters of recommendation, etc.

Those papers, if they exist, would be evidence, of course, but possibly not positive evidence. But even zero papers in the first year is unlikely to be of much importance in most fields. Association with a lab that produces hundreds of papers a year and each paper has hundreds of co-authors would be an exceptional case, of course. But most of those co-authors play a relatively minor part in the advancement claimed in the papers.

Any application should be focused on those positive predictors of success, not the fact that the person is changing and not on the reason they are wanting a change.


What does "Publish or perish" really mean?

For graduate students, it means "Publish or you won't get an academic job."  In many parts of academia, not getting an academic job is considered equivalent to death.

For assistant professors, if means "Publish or you won't get tenure."  In many parts of academia, not getting tenure is considered equivalent to death.

  Lastly, is it possible to be a researcher without concerning about "Publish or perish"?

Sure, of course.

If you're publishing.


Should I review for a new journal whose publisher is unjustifiably listed in Beall's list of predatory publishers?

You need to ask yourself a few key questions:

What is the purpose of your reviewing any article? If it is to be listed in the annual acknowledgement of reviewers for Big, Prestigious Journal X, then don't review this article.  If it is to contribute to the scholarly process (and to pay-it-forward for the next article you submit somewhere) - then proceed.
What is your impression of the journal/publisher? They can't be entirely/purely dishonest, since they have, in fact, sent the article for peer review. (The truly bad actors don't bother!)

Form your own opinion of their offering, and do consider that it can take longer to review a poor manuscript than a good one.  Then, invest your time in what you value.


I wonder if my PhD from Turkey is recognized in Germany or not?

According to the anabin database ("The database provides information for evaluating foreign education certificates and supporting authorities, employers and individuals to classify a foreign qualification in the German education system."), Marmara University is recognized in the H+ category, meaning that:

  Die Institutionen dieses Typs sind im jeweiligen Herkunftsland in maßgeblicher Weise als Hochschulen anerkannt (akkreditiert, attestiert ua) und ausgehend davon in Deutschland als Hochschulen anzusehen. Besonders für Länder der ehemaligen sozialistischen Welt sind auch Forschungsinstitute erfasst, da an ihnen Promotionen und Habilitationen möglich sind.

or from Google Translate:

  The institutions of this type are recognized in their country of origin in significant ways as universities (accredited, certified, etc.) and starting it regarded in Germany as universities. Especially for countries of the former socialist world and research institutes are recognized as promotions and Habilitation are available to them. Since these qualifications are equivalent to universities, research institutions are also assigned to this category. Attention! The classification as H + simply means that accounts which have been achieved in this device can be subjected to equivalence study in higher education. A preliminary decision as to whether the financial statements of these means can be assimilated German university degrees, thus is not connected.

So, it would seem that your qualification is recognised in this sense, but if you are thinking of applying e.g. for a postdoc, you should write to your prospective employer(s) detailing your situation and what this equivalency relates to in terms of your job search.


As a non-academic, how do I find papers that reference a certain article?

Google Scholar can get you quite far.

Go to scholar.google.com and paste in the full title of the paper you're looking for.  Here's one of mine:

Click the "cited by" link (highlighted) and you'll get a list of works citing the paper you're interested in.  Some of these will be papers, some won't, and Google's indexing isn't quite the same as some of the other sources.  But it's close.  For each of the citing papers, there's an "All n versions" link.  Browsing those versions will often get you to a legitimate copy from the author's institutional repository (see the right-hand column), ArXiv, or various other sources; the Unpaywall browser extension can also help track these down.


Unresponsive advisor, job offer in limbo

I'm going to just guess that meeting your tight deadlines will be impossible with an advisor on sabbatical. So you need some short term action that will preserve your position.

You can certainly ask a new employer about starting before you have officially received the degree and they might be fine with that, or not. But it would be more likely to be a positive decision if they had some quasi official assurance that your timely and successful completion is not in doubt.

You might try one or both of the following. Ask your advisor for a letter, assuring the reader (your potential employer) that completion is a pretty much pro forma situation. "We need to dot some i's and cross some t's etc."

Go to the department head and get confirmation of the above and even his/her help in getting that letter from your advisor. The head might also include an additional supporting letter, confirming that your progress is on track, etc.

Many employers would be supportive as long as the situation doesn't seem like it will go on and you wind up ABD or unable to do the job you are being hired for. Of course, there may be some situations in which there are firm, legal, requirements that you get the degree before starting the job, but those are likely rare. But I'm assuming this is an industrial job, not an academic position, which might well have firm requirements to start.

Another option, perhaps, is to ask the employer for a delayed start date. But that request would also be positively supported by the sort of letter(s) mentioned above.


How to keep track of attendance and student-submitted excuses for absences?

There is a sort of a solution using Google Apps, but it's ugly and it's still very much imperfect (more on that at the bottom).

You could create a master spreadsheet (that for the sake of example has the internal ID of "masterSheet") that looks like this:

      A          B         C         D         E         F
1| Name       | 9/1 | 9/1 Comment | 9/2 | 9/2 Comment | etc.
2| Student A  |     |             |     |             |
3| Student B  |     |             |     |             |
4| Student C  |     |             |     |             |

Then you'll create another spreadsheet for Student A:

    A            B                                C
1| Date | Attendance Grade                 | Comment/Excuse
2| 9/1  | =IMPORTRANGE("masterSheet","B2") |
3| 9/2  | =IMPORTRANGE("masterSheet","D2") |
3| etc. | =IMPORTRANGE("masterSheet","X2") |

You'll then make columns A and B (as well as cell C1) uneditable except by you.  You don't necessarily need to type in the IMPORTRANGE() stuff manually, and you do it formulaicly much easier if you have both the master and student spreadsheets go in the same order (although it's possible either way).

Initially, the student will just see

    A            B                                C
1| Date | Attendance Grade                 | Comment/Excuse
2| 9/1  |                                  |
3| 9/2  |                                  |
3| etc. |                                  |

As you put in their attendance grades for each day, it will show up automatically in theirs, but they won't be able to edit it if you properly protect the range.  Now, for their comments.  You'll do the exact same thing, but in reverse, and you'll get:

      A          B         C                           D         E                           F
1| Name       | 9/1 | 9/1 Comment                   | 9/2 | 9/2 Comment                   | etc.
2| Student A  |     | =IMPORTRANGE("studentA","C2") |     | =IMPORTRANGE("studentA","C3") |
3| Student B  |     | =IMPORTRANGE("studentB","C2") |     | =IMPORTRANGE("studentB","C3") |
4| Student C  |     | =IMPORTRANGE("studentC","C2") |     | =IMPORTRANGE("studentC","C3") |

If a student enters in a comment in their spreadsheet, it will show up on yours.

Now, a few comments about this:

It's ugly.  It's awful.  But it basically does what you want.  But there's also a security consideration that will greatly reduce its efficacy to be effectively useless.  Besides the fact that a student could get access to your original spreadsheet by using IMPORTRANGE() on their comment field, Google Apps requires a user to have viewing or editing privileges to the document referenced by IMPORTRANGE().  There are many ways ways to obfuscate, but it will only ever be obfuscation, and not real security.

What you should do from my experience

Just use Blackboard.  It does NOT take that long to take roll with it.  It is a spreadsheet.  On day one of the semester, I take five minutes and create a column for each day of class, and then don't have to worry about it again (and if you're teaching the same classes, ideally they're on the same schedule and you can either merge the course or clone the course so you only do it once for all three).  Then each day I just hit in 5,enter,0,enter,5,enter,5,enter,5,enter,0,enter (5 is fully present in my personal system, 0 is absent).

All the attendance columns get pushed to the bottom of the student's view (the right of the instructor's view) by using Grade Center -> Manage -> Column Organization.

For students to contact you, make it clear they must use a standard subject line that can be caught and filtered in your e-mail program into a specific e-mail excuse box.  If I accidentally marked them as absent and they weren't, or if they had an excuse, they are instructed to e-mail me using a subject line CC'd to themselves that begins "Attendance:" and that gets filtered into an attendance folder for that semester (you may want them to also add in a section, if you don't have merged courses) where I can then deal with it.  At the end of the semester, I have students verify that I properly tended to any necessary changes in attendance grades and then the one or two mistakes (if any) can be fixed then.

I regularly deal with 120 students a semester (4 sections x 30 students) and have had no problems with this set up.

Unless you have an attendance-specific module in Blackboard that provides the functionality you want, you are going to have problems finding anything that is FERPA-compliant or that is not going to be a giant PITA to use.


How can I oppose my advisor granting gift authorship to a collaborator?

I would start by asking your professor, in a non-confrontational way, why he did this. Perhaps there is some reason that is not obvious to us. Maybe he felt that the paper had a better chance of being published if this third person was involved. (Not saying that he was right to do this, just that he may have had some reason.) You might say something like this:

  Professor X, as you know, I'm pretty new to academic publishing, and I'm trying to understand the process better. I was under the impression that only people who contributed to the research should be listed as authors. I'm curious why Joe Smith was added as an author. Did he make a contribution I don't know about?

If you think you may publish more papers with this professor, discuss your expectations about authorship with him and come to an agreement.

EDIT: Several people have suggested that the phrasing above is still too confrontational. I think they have a point, but I'm not sure we can come up with a phrasing that everyone is happy with. So I suggest that the OP read the comments below for ideas on how to phrase this.


How can I get all my papers under the same Scopus profile?

As Federico indicates, the contact form (“Ask a question”) has a field for suggesting correction to the index:

You can directly send them the papers in question:

  Please attach a copy of the missing or incorrect document, this is essential for us to verify the changes and make the corrections.

While I don't have any direct experience with Scopus in that area, they are generally serious and I think they will act on your request. I have once contact another index provider (Web of Science) with a correction, and they updated the data within a week.


Where to write famous quotes in my dissertation?

I guess if you write a quote that is representative or applies to the whole dissertation, you can have it somewhere in the beginning e.g. after the title page and before the abstract.

If now you want to add a quote that applies to a specific chapter, you can add it right below the chapter title (maybe also aligned to the right side) and before the text of the chapter begins.


Should I include non-English textbooks in the course?

I think you can distinguish between required and optional materials

For required materials (students will be expected to read regularly, have exams on the content, solve exercises from the book, etc), I'd say they should by default be in the "working language" of the university, unless there is a clear educational reason to do otherwise (e.g. the course is studying a foreign language).  In the latter case, students should be advised before signing up for the course that knowledge of the other language is a requirement.

For optional materials, I see no problem with offering materials in a variety of languages, either for the convenience of the students, or simply because it's a good book that happens to be in another language.  Those who know the language can benefit, and those who don't still have everything they need to keep up with the course.


Can research papers postulate a theory without proof or assurance of correctness?

Sure. All kinds of papers get written and submitted all the time. The best ones have strong empirical data or formal proofs to back them up. Others ... are based pretty much on opinions or hot air.

Of course, you are likely actually asking whether such a paper has a chance of acceptance at a reasonable venue. Here, the answer depends on the field as well as on the type of conference or track you are submitting to. In fields such as math, a paper where you are basically just speculating will (based on my limited knowledge of mathematical research) have close to zero chance of acceptance in pretty much all journals. Computer science is often more forgiving, particularly if the idea is interesting enough and the reviewers believe that it will work. Further, in Computer Science there are (even well-respected) conferences and tracks that specifically target position papers, essays, or "reflection" papers (see for instance Onward!, co-located with OOPSLA). For Onward!, no real scientific evaluation is required, however, you will need something to substantiate your ideas (e.g., some proof-of-concept implementations, initial studies, ...).

One non-obvious fact about such "opinion-based" papers is that they are actually much harder to write than ones that are based on hard science. If you conducted a thorough study on a subject, your data will go great lengths for you. Even if you don't tell the story of your research in the best way, if you have good, hard data, your results alone may carry you. If you write an opinion piece for a competitive conference such as Onward!, your writing needs to carry you all the way.


What is the recommended level of detail for published mathematical proofs?

What is obvious to you may not be obvious to others.
Let me repeat a story I told in another answer here. I'll just repeat it, but also note that user Stella Biderman commented that the story may be apocryphal and not from KU at all.

Here is a story (real occurrence) from the University of Kansas about 50 or so years ago. A prof, quite well known and respected, was lecturing in Topology. This meant writing proofs on the board. Occasionally a step wouldn't be filled in with the statement "Of course it follows, trivially, that ...". On one such statement, a student didn't see the obvious connection and so asked. The prof looked at the board and the developing proof for a few minutes. Then walked over to the corner of the (chalk) board and started making notes to himself in a tiny script. He went into totally abstract thinking mode, ignoring the class. After a bit of writing and erasing, etc, he wandered out of the room toward his office. The students followed along, gathering outside the office. The prof started pulling books off of his shelf and consulting them - several books - several more minutes.
Then he seemed to find enlightenment and returned to the classroom. When everyone was again seated he announced. "Yes, of course. It's trivial."

The conclusion is that you should make the connections yourself, and not rely on reviewers grokking it. If they don't make the connection they will comment on it and at least slow down acceptance. It is also possible, as the story above, indicates that you might actually be making too big a step or even an incorrect one.


How to quote a non-English quotation in dissertation?

The quotation is really more for fun than for substance, so you've got a lot of leeway, and even more so because this is in a Ph.D. thesis.  So really, it's up to you whether you translate it at all.

That said, I would suggest approaching it based on the degree to which you like the prosody and meter of the quotation.  If the sound of the words themselves is a significant part of what makes you enjoy the quote, then by all means keep it in the original language, where it will be well appreciated by some readers and challenge the rest.  If the substance is more important than the sound, then it may be better to translate.

For example, I don't know much of German quotations, but if I were using a French quotation, then I would not translate "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," but I would definitely translate "Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c'est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours et toujours leur donner des explications."


How committed should I be to a specific research area before and shortly after I enter a doctoral program?

This is the answer posted by Cameron Williams in a comment. I am pasting it as a CW answer - it's not "my" answer.

  I think the best course of action for most graduate students is to apply to programs that are good across the board in your general field. You may end up not liking something that you thought you'd love for one reason or another (be it tedium, incompatibility with advisors or simply finding something that you love so much more). Don't shoehorn yourself into a program that specializes only in one facet of power engineering because you may end up not liking that one thing. As an incoming graduate student, you're not expected to know much about the field you're entering so knowing whether or not a certain subfield is a good fit for you is not reasonable to assume. This comes with courses/research while you are a graduate student.

  As for how much time you have, this varies a bit from university to university, but you will probably spend a lot of your first year on courses and after that you'll be expected to have an idea of what exactly you'd like to do. Of course it isn't set in stone at that point, but you should be moving in one specific direction.

  And yes, you can be co-advised which can allot for multifaceted/multidisciplinary research.


Can I wait to take my GRE until after my bachelors, thus delaying my application dates for graduate school

You can only do what you can do. The timing of your future education is less important (my view) than that you make a plan to get there.

Make a list of your options. For each option list its advantages and disadvantages. Prioritize them. Don't neglect your family's needs in the list of priorities.

Choose one that has a reasonable path and chance of success. It needn't be the optimal solution. It needs to be a workable solution.


Should I structure my CV in sections for relevant experience to PhD and day job work if the two are unrelated?

I've been applying for PhDs in a completely different field, but was advised to leave employment history out of the CV unless they're relevant to the PhD.


Do citation counts explode like news in social networks and when did this start?

This seems like a naive view of citations. They aren't "likes" or even recommendations to read a paper. They reference things that actually support and form a background for a new work.

So, if citations suddenly explode within a field, and people are working honestly and not just gaming the system, then that field must be pretty hot with a lot of actual research going on.

And gaming the system outside a small working community is pretty hard since a lot of people need to cooperate.

But some fields are indeed hot for a while, with a lot of research, hence citations. But then they cool. Some future discovery may heat them up again and the cycle repeats. An a fresh discovery can often lead to new ways of looking at a problem and that, alone, will generate new ideas and new papers and new citations.

But a small citation count doesn't necessarily mean that a paper is unimportant. It may be incredibly important, but only to a small set of researchers. On the other hand, a less seminal paper might have a high count if it appears in a popular field.

And a there are a lot of people who aren't drawn to popular fields, thinking they will be just a face in the mob.

But research in general is hard. Facebook requires little actual intellectual effort. A paper in Nature requires quite a lot.

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” ~~Albert Einstein


What is the best way to add the results of the Master thesis in the Latex report

The full data is the main outcome for the organization, but it's not an important part for your report. Of course you can show examples/samples, but what matters in your report is to explain clearly:

The motivations: why is this data generator needed? What can be done with it that couldn't be done before? This probably requires explainining the context of the work: what this organization does, what is this domain, why does it matter, etc.
The state of the art: which existing methods are used for this kind of problems in general? What are their advantages and disadvantages?
The method/process: how does it work? Provide all the details necessary the system. If you made particular implementation choices, explain why this choices and not another option. Is it related to existing methods? If yes compare to these methods.
The outcome: analyze the results in detail with statistics, graphs or whatever means helps the reader understand the characteristics of the data. It should be a synthetic overview, not a dump of the full dataset. Prove that the obtained data satisfies the requirements, for instance by comparing to other datasets. If relevant show the impact of your implementation choices through some examples.

The point of the report is to explain your work to somebody who is not an expert in this particular problem. Presenting the reasoning that you followed is much more important and interesting than the data itself.


Is there a good alternative to the CRAAP test?

Is there a good alternative that is commonly used in academia,

Most of academia does not need a formal test for checking the quality of sources, so no, there is not.

that won't make people assume this is some form of immaturity on my part?

Just leave the acronym out.  Acronyms are rarely useful and even less likely to be necessary.


Is there an open source tool for producing bibtex entries from paper PDFs?

I use Zotero which in itself is a system for handling references, it comes as both a plugin to Firefox and as standalone. I use the standalone version to extract reference information from pdf and then export to, in my case, BibTeX .bib format. There are possibilities to export to other formats as well.


Generally, and as many questions here on Academia.SE reflect, collaboration typically does not grow from blind-mailing people that you have never spoken to and which, presumably, have little to no idea who you actually are. The fact that many of them thought you are interested in leeching of their funds is not surprising, because that's what a lot of these blind mails boil down to.

Dawn is on the right track in a comment - before you can have collaborations, you need connections. A common way to establish connections is by going to conferences and chatting with people - initially not even necessarily about common work, although the discussion often tends to go there fairly naturally.

Optimally, you would have started this process long before you were an Assistant Professor - in fact, arguably one of the key tasks of an academic supervisor lies in introducing their students into their academic network, exactly so that they have an easier time bootstrapping future collaborations of their own.

Even if you have no real network right now, you can probably still fix this, but you should see this as a marathon, not a sprint. You will need to go to a number of conferences, talk to a lot of people, and and generally be present in the community for some time before your name starts to come up naturally when people think about who to collaborate with on a given topic.

However, once you have started to be somewhat known in the community, even as fast as after your first conference, you can still approach the people that you talked to there with concrete ideas for collaboration. Be prepared that especially initially you may need to put in a bit more effort than they do, particularly if you collaborate with somebody more senior than you. This does not mean that you should do all the work and just put them on the paper, but if a collaboration is your idea it is often assumed that you are also driving the project and ask your collaborator(s) for concrete, actionable input.


Are relationships between faculty and graduate students at different universities acceptable?

Short answer: generally yes.

Long answer:

It is commonly understood that consenting adults are in general free to enter voluntary romantic relationships with whomever they choose, except for people over whom they hold professional authority. Thus, a professor may not have a relationship with her or his own student. That’s a big no-no anywhere I’m familiar with.

As for graduate students in the same institution but in other departments, whether a professor is to be regarded as being in a position of authority over such a student is a matter of interpretation; opinions about this seem to vary considerably, and I think it would be a mistake to characterize any particular opinion as being “commonly understood”.

As for a professor having a relationship with someone who is a student in another university, there may be specific circumstances where that would be problematic, such as if the student is applying for a postdoc or other position in the professor’s department. Even this doesn’t make the relationship taboo, it only means appropriate measures must be taken to ensure the professor isn’t exercising any decision-making authority over their significant other’s application. But generally speaking, other than those specific exceptional circumstances, this doesn’t violate any rules, and isn’t frowned upon by reasonable people.


Can I become a tenure-track prof in one dept (biology) and teach in a different dept (math) with only one PhD?

TL;DR: no.
Long answer:
I was for several years the chair of a mathematics department and during that time oversaw teaching assignments for the 200-odd courses offered yearly by my department. I can recall only one case in which my department allowed a faculty member from a biology-related department who did not have an advanced degree in math or a closely related area (eg physics) to teach a math class (I believe it was calculus for biology students). Even this arrangement raised some eyebrows — mine, and possibly other people’s — but the circumstances were a bit unusual so it was allowed to happen, for reasons I won’t go into.
With this background, I can say with reasonable confidence that what you are proposing is impossible. Perhaps you can reasonably expect to be allowed to teach a math class once or twice in your career if that’s something you have your mind set on doing, but as a regular part of your job, at a normal university? No way.
Even setting aside your lack of qualifications to teach math (an objection which one can imagine you overcoming under some hypothetical, if rare, circumstances), the fact remains that departments hire faculty among other important reasons to fulfill their own teaching needs. If you are in department X, you will be teaching the classes that department X offers - that’s why they are hiring you; so it simply doesn’t make sense for a neuroscience department to allow you to regularly teach classes of another department, except under some extremely rare and unusual circumstances.
Now, if you get a second PhD in math, or publish several years’ worth of postdoctoral research work in neuroscience that can be plausibly described as serious applied math so that you can credibly start calling yourself a mathematician, then your plan might start making a bit more sense. In that case you would probably want to look for positions that involve a joint appointment between a neuroscience department and a mathematics department — such things are not common, but they exist. Your teaching load will then be split between the two departments, likely in roughly the same proportion as the proportions of your position that are assigned to each of the departments. It’s still not likely that you will be allowed to teach only math classes, but it may be not too far from what you have in mind.
Edit: you also wrote:

I would ideally like to have a research career in neuroscience and teach lower-division math courses.

Another thought that occurs to me is that your expectation that you will only teach lower-division classes is also unreasonable, independently of the discipline. Professors are expected to teach at all levels: lower division, upper division, and (where applicable) graduate; again, that’s sort of why you’re hired in the first place, and that’s what sets you apart from an adjunct or lecturer. You seem to want to do the high-level parts of a professor’s job - doing research, running a lab etc - when it comes to research, but only the most low-level parts of the job - teaching the sort of beginning math classes that your former university allowed you to teach with only a BS degree - when it comes to teaching. That’s simply not how it works: no university will waste a professor’s position on job duties that can be performed by someone with much lower qualifications than a professor. That would very obviously not be an efficient arrangement for the university, either economically or pedagogically.
If you don’t want to teach anything more challenging than the least challenging thing that there is to teach, you may want to ask yourself if you actually want to be a professor at all.


Generalization should be encouraged to extend scope, thereby making academic papers more widely applicable. Perhaps the OP is actually interested in another question: It is unclear what the OP means by generalizing, I don't see a relation with understand[ing] the difference between fact and opinion and try[ing] to express things with different levels of certainty. Maybe the OP is interested in

  find[ing a] way to differentiate between fact and opinion...It would be great if someone can explain the difference between these two things.

Let's look at the definitions (from Google) of those terms:

 Fact. A thing that is known or proved to be true, e.g., hedgehogs have fleas.

 Opinion. A view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on
 fact or knowledge, e.g., hedgehogs should drink milk.

So, facts are true, whereas the validity of opinions are unknown.

The first example is also from Google, the second is a widely believed opinion, which is false.


It's common that the listed prerequisites do not necessarily encompass all the knowledge that is needed, or useful, to succeed in the class.  Sometimes this is sloppy design or laziness about updating the formal prereqs.  Sometimes it's because Course B needs only a small amount of material from Course A, so rather than make Course A prerequisite (which reduces students' scheduling flexibility), they assume that if necessary, the student can study this material on their own.  There are other possible reasons.

The professor will usually know what courses a "typical student" would have taken before this one, so they might assume that students know the material from those courses, even if they are not prereqs.  If you are following an unusual schedule, or changed majors, or transferred from another institution, this can lead to trouble.

So if you are in any of those situations, or otherwise suspect that this might be an issue, the best approach is to talk to the professor before you enroll in the course.  Tell them what courses you've taken, and ask if they think you have sufficient preparation for the course.  They might recommend that you wait and take some other specific courses first.  Or, they might suggest that you study certain topics on your own before the course starts.

However, it is also an important skill to be able to fill in gaps in your knowledge on the fly.  Comparing yourself to the other students is probably not useful.  But if you feel there are a lot of necessary things you don't know, make a plan for how you are going to learn them quickly.  The professor can usually help you with this.  Accept that you may feel you are behind for a while, but after a few iterations, you'll have confidence that you can catch up.

This is likely to continue to happen in grad school, perhaps more so.  In a graduate program, the students have usually come from a wide variety of different undergraduate programs.  Grad courses may assume knowledge that is often learned in undergrad programs, but any given student is almost sure to have some gaps.  Again, part of success in grad school will be learning to fill in those gaps for yourself.


Private Git repositories for students, that don't become public later

Update January 2019: GitHub now has free private repositories.

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories. I use it for this purpose.

You can also host your students' repositories yourself on your own server with Gitlab (the community edition is free). This option has the advantage that you aren't asking your students to trust a third party with their data. I sometimes use this option, too. It's very easy to set up.

However, having students' work in repositories that don't automatically becomes public doesn't obviate the need to create new projects - students can still opt to post their work publicly. (This is true even if you don't use Git in the course at all.)

Personally, I typically use Bitbucket and ask students to keep their repositories private for the duration of the course (so as not to make cheating too easy), but they are free to make them public later. Part of the appeal of project-intensive courses to students is that they create something they can show off to potential employers. I want my students to have the option to make their work (which is often very impressive, and which they have put a great deal of effort into) public, so that they can enjoy this benefit.  I occasionally see students publish their repositories, put a link on their résumés or LinkedIn profiles, and then continue to improve their projects for months after the course is over, which is extremely gratifying.

I would consider it a disservice to students to prevent them from showing off their work after the course is over or after they graduate, even if I could prevent this. My university does not claim ownership of intellectual property produced by students in the context of uncompensated coursework (unless there is an explicit written agreement stating otherwise), so unless their projects also include material which I hold the copyright to, I couldn't stop them from publishing their work even if I wanted to.


What to do if a professor confused me with another student in a letter of reference?

I am flabbergasted that the Professor here would not take the initiative to correct his own mistake.  Writing a letter of recommendation for the wrong student ---and making negative remarks that do not apply, that cost the student a graduate position--- is a huge stuff-up.  Any decent marginally-competent person would be mortified at making this mistake and would immediately take action to correct it, without having to be asked.  (It might be too late for the admissions process that occurred, but the least the Professor could do is to write to the affected universities and correct the record, so that it doesn't negatively affect you in future applications.)  It is good that he told you about the error, but that is really insufficient without him taking some further action to correct the error.

If this Professor has not already taken it upon himself to correct his error by writing back to those universities, to at least correct the record, then he is a total deadbeat.  You should consider putting in a formal complaint to your university.  This could also be legally actionable as negligence, breach of contract, defamation, etc., and it reflects terribly on the university that the student would be the one to have to take the initiative here.

If you are more forbearing than me then you should take Strongbad's excellent and sensible advice of approaching the matter gently, to get a good reference for next time.  However, if you are as pissed-off about this situation as I am reading about it, and you decide you want to go full scorched-Earth, here is an alternative course of action:  Speak to a lawyer and get him to write a letter to the university putting them on notice that their negligence/defamation has caused actionable damage to you, and that you expect them to take action to "mitigate that damage".  (They will know what this means.)  Make an appointment with a senior administrator at the university (e.g., their legal counsel, vice-chancellor's office, etc.), and turn up with a senior support-person (e.g., a lawyer, or if this is too expensive, at least a middle-aged person who knows how to handle these situations).  Reiterate that the university has been negligent and has defamed you to other institutions, and this has caused actionable damage to you.  Ask them for suggestions of how they intend to go about mitigating the damage to you, and make sure these are accompanied by guarantees.  Advise them that if the damage to you is not mitigated by a successful application in the next round of grad-school entry, you will be left with no choice but to make a formal complaint to the relevant university Ombudsman and take legal action to recover damages.


Is it mandatory to have published papers while applying for PhD?

No.

However, if you have any research experience (working in a lab, research you've done for classes, undergraduate thesis, capstone project, etc.), you should highlight that on your application, both in your personal statement and on your resume / CV.  More importantly, your letters of recommendation should discuss your potential for research. Your recommendation writers should know this, but it would be worthwhile to highlight this in any material you provide to them when you ask them for recommendations, and when you discuss it with them. Trust me, the more information you can give your letter writers, the better their letters will be. I explicitly ask students what their goals are when I'm writing letters of recommendation so I can tailor them appropriately, and you should make sure your letter writers understand that you're applying for a PhD and what your research goals are.

  I was like more concentrated towards practical experience and have't had any publications.

If by "practical experience" you mean that you worked on an unsolved problem, then that counts as research. If you simply re-applied knowledge in order to learn how to become proficient in that field (e.g., you programmed a microcontroller to turn lights on and off via voice commands), then the research angle is harder to spin.  But, do the best you can to highlight on your applications why you believe you have the preparation to do quality research.


I am preparing the presentation of a co-authored research, who owns the copyright?

German copyright is very different from UK or US copyright. In German law, copyright always belongs to the author(s), and cannot be given away. What you can give away are the various rights of use.

The question here thus should be whether your university has a right to use your presentations, potentially even an exclusive right to use them. In the case of computer programs, §69b of the German copyright law explicitly states that the employer has the exclusive right to use the work.

I am not sure whether a lawyer could argue that your presentation is a computer program - maybe he could if it is a tex file :). Otherwise, as F'x writes, it depends on your work contract. If there is not an explicit statement in your work contract that the university has the right to use any copyrighted works that you authored during your employment, they will generally not have such rights. In the typical employment contracts at German universities, such statements are not included.


How to integrate partial version control, data exchange and research assistants?

I've run into similar problems in collaboration with biologists, and found that a two-technology approach is best.

Large-scale experimental data is shared via one or more BitTorrent Sync folders.  The experimentalists can just drop their files into the appropriate place in the folder, and they get synchronized with the server and everybody else's copy (like DropBox, but private, free, and unlimited size).
The analytical tool-chain, research products, write-ups, etc. are maintained in your preferred version system (e.g., git).  This is then integrated with the experimental data just by giving a pointer to the appropriate directories.

This has the advantage of maintaining the data separation that you need, keeping the scary version control software away from the experimentalists, and also avoiding juggling massive globs of data in a version control system that was never intended to support this.


Do exercises in a theoretical reference book need to be solved when doing research?

You are definitely looking at the wrong factor here. The question for you should not be "Should I solve the examples?", but rather "Do I understand the technique well enough to confidently apply it to my own research?".

If the answer to the second question is yes, you don't need to waste your time on doing more examples. If the answer is no, you need to study the technique more before applying it, and doing the examples may or may not be a good way to do it. However, in the second case, doing the examples cannot be "too time-consuming", as you will need to spend more time on learning the technique anyway. At the end of the day, it isn't about "solving as many examples as possible", but about understanding the material well enough. As a young researcher, you should be advanced enough to tell when this is the case.

That being said, the way how you phrased the question makes me wonder to what extend you actually understand the technique. Specifically:

  I started the reference book in the middle, while the exercises may require some previous chapters' techiniques, which I may not know and may not be directly related with my current research.

Of course one needs to know the concrete example to be sure, but if you are unable to do the examples because you have not read the previous text book sections, it seems to me that your understanding of the overall area is not all that great yet.


How do I politely decline a professor who's really keen on having me for a PhD position?

I would just reply that you thank him for his interest but that it isn't possible to work together at this time. But suggest that you would be honored/happy to stay in contact for the future if your fields of interest intersect.

Over the long run you want to build up a set of contacts like this and you have an opportunity to start it. He might be a future source of advice on your research or your career. But such contacts need to be nurtured.

I would, however, hold off on such a reply until you have a firm and accepted position elsewhere.


A splinter meeting is a relatively small meeting that takes place at a larger event, such as a conference. It is likely organised by someone besides the conference organisers, and while it's typically related to the topic of the conference it may be much more specific in focus. For example, I've been at psychology conferences where splinter meetings have been held for users, or potential users, of pieces of technology that are used in research.

A similar idea is that of satellite meetings/conferences/workshops which are smaller, more specific events held in association with a much larger, more general event. They take place before or after the larger event (not during, like a splinter meeting might). Often in different locations and usually with different organisers. They are, however, often promoted to some extent by the larger event.


Is it okay to restructure a literature review to fit a broad topic?

The answer to your title question, “is it okay to restructure a literature review...” is yes. There is no one uniform way that literature reviews must be written. What is important is to make sure that your literature review does its job, which is to do a comprehensive review of the publications on a particular topic.

The only worry with the structure that you propose is the ability to do a completely comprehensive review (which is a difficulty in writing any given literature review, but is especially troublesome in your topic). By simply discussing papers and not cross referencing them within topical discussions, your literature review turns into a data-dump instead of a review. It is not necessarily bad to have a broad topic, nor is it bad to discuss and “rinse and repeat” through several papers, but it is essential that your review is well-structured and does not arbitrarily choose the pieces it is reviewing.

Restructuring is fine, but do not compromise the quality of the review because the topic is broad.


I'd say that you must learn not to take things too close to your heart. "Fear" appears when something hurts our self-esteem. The key is to realize that in most cases it should not. Say, a reviewer rejects your paper, providing very harsh comments. You feel like jumping between a cold shower and a frying pan, but you should't. Reviewers don't know you personally, they are only doing a job of bashing your paper if it's not good enough. If you paper is not good enough, it doesn't mean that you aren't good enough, so your self-esteem shouldn't suffer. (And it especially shouldn't suffer if a reviewer is wrong.) Accept criticism and continue.

If you fail, often it means that you aim high, so it is normal to fail. We aren't in school where all problems have ready answers. Many directions are dead ends, and we must realize that it's OK to hit a dead end from time to time.

In a sense, it is equally important to practice humility. A huge number of talented people establish start-ups, record songs, write novels and draw comic strips. Most of them fail, this is just the way it is, and we shouldn't think of ourselves as exceptions. Accept that failures are as inevitable as gravity (so, once again, don't take it too close to heart). It is also useful to understand your limits. We all have stronger sides and weaker sides, and even our stronger sides in most cases won't get us a Nobel prize next year. Aim high, but stay realistic with your goals.

In short, be passionate about your topic, but try to keep your inner self "protected". It should not suffer when you are hurt as a professional (due to failures or criticism). It is hard, but doable to some extent.


I am of the opinion that as long as you disclose that he is your brother, you can still get a LOR from him. This is one reason why most universities generally want at least three or four letters of recommendation. (Maybe not specific for the sibling case here, but more broadly just the various nepotism cases).

Assuming that your brother would be qualified to write you a LOR if he did not happen to be your brother, I personally would not be too worried about having him write you a letter of recommendation. He does need to focus on the facts and not speculate on future potential or future outcomes too much. If he states the actual outcomes you have accomplished in the lab, him being your sibling becomes somewhat less important.

I would have something at the top of the letter and in your statement of purpose that very briefly discloses your relationship:

  Professor Jadir Grupta is my biological sibling [unless you are adopted I guess]. I have asked him to write a letter of recommendation based solely on the merits of my work in his lab.

Your brother could write something similar:

  @taurus is my biological sibling. I am providing him a LOR based on his academic work in my lab, not on the basis of our personal relationship.

Every LOR I have ever written is for someone that I am biased towards liking. I could even recommend some of them more highly than my own sibling or spouse or child. At the end of the day, most every LOR is coming from someone who could show nepotism towards the candidate.


Does in an Academic Environment freedom to create and search exist?

There are of course many facets to both your question and any answer anyone could come up with. But yes, in general it is true that academia is not product-driven but curiosity-driven, and so you have more leeway in the directions you choose.

It is also true that academia is a place where by and large hard work and creativity is rewarded.

I do think it's worth also discussing two undercurrents I can read between the lines of your question. First, you seem to suggest that in industry/outside academia, creativity and hard work are not rewarded. I think that, as a rule, this is not correct. It may of course be that your current workplace does not encourage this, but in many large companies, being good at what you're doing and coming up with creative solutions is most definitely rewarded, both in terms of money as well as career steps. It is of course true that you are more constrained in the direction in which your creativity should be directed, simply because in a company you have a product that needs to get to the market. But if you're better at coming up with solutions to problems, people will eventually notice and it will be rewarded.

Second, you seem to suggest that you do not appreciate the aspect of peer evaluation in your current job. (You do say that it is, in particular, the face-to-face aspect, but I'll take the liberty to generalize.) I have three things to say about this: (i) Peer review works, it leads to better software/papers/etc. (ii) Academia is all about peer review: Every one of your publications will be peer reviewed, and you will have to learn to accept the judgment of others on your work. In many cases, this judgment will be anonymous, and it's not always gratifying to read reviews of your work. Moreover, your job evaluations (and potential for a new job or a promotion) are all predicated on getting positive peer evaluation feedback. You will have to get used to being judged in academia: We have a lot of freedom, but not to the point where you can do whatever you want without being judged. (iii) Empirically, the most successful people in any area are the ones who embrace peer feedback, take it to heart, and think critically about what they did wrong and how they could do better in the future. The ones who have difficulty accepting criticism are often the ones who stop growing and improving, and it will eventually show in your ability to do the next career step. As a consequence, I would recommend you find ways to make your code review sessions productive: If it's the personal style of the reviewer, then talk to them by saying that you are eager to get feedback, that you want to learn and get better, but that this-or-that about the interaction doesn't work for you.


A reload button does not show up anymore.

Also, this problem is likely related to storage of pre-print versions in sci-hub databases. From what I know, sci-hub only uses credentials on the first request for a paper. At that moment, it also saves a copy of the pdf and that copy is what is given as a result on subsequent requests.

So, I guess a solution to this problem has to involve updates to sci-hub's database.


Can we get a PhD in mathematics without publishing?

It is typical in the U.S. that mathematics Ph.D. students do not publish anything at all prior to earning a Ph.D., I think even at the elite places. Publication per se is not such a high priority, nor over-literal gauge of accomplishment, as it seems to be in some CompSci and Engineering disciplines (at least in the minds of some people).

That is, to be clear, especially for people who've thought, or been indoctrinated to think, that the measure of the value of something is the prestige of the conference or journal or ... in which it was published, the idea in mathematics still does seem to be that the thesis advisor and thesis committee decide whether the candidate has done sufficient work to earn the degree.

Seems a sane system to me, especially given the acceleration of freneticism elsewhere.


Is it bad to publish only in specialized math journals?

I don't think that "generalist vs specialist" is the right question to ask.  Rather, I think that you should think of journals as being in various tiers of quality.  Notice that I'll express some opinions on specific journals below, and other mathematicians might disagree with them.  It is worthwhile to talk to a good number of senior people to help get a sense as to what tier various journals occupy.  I don't think that impact factors are what really matters here, but rather the subjective opinions of whoever will be evaluating your cv (at least in the US, this is mostly other mathematicians).

Some subject-specific journals are really excellent (e.g. Geometry and Topology, Algebra and Number Theory, Journal of Algebraic Geometry), some are decent but not excellent (I think that the Journal of Algebra fits this bill), others are pretty terrible (I won't make a list here so as to avoid starting a debate).

It is true that the very best generalist journals (Annals, Inventiones, JAMS, Acta, Publications IHES, Duke, JEMS) occupy a higher tier than even the best subject-specific journals.  However, it's not clear to me that the excellent but not top generalist journals (eg Math Zeitschrift) are clearly better than the best subject-specific journals.

You should try very hard to have your papers in the best journals that you can get to accept them.  Editors at strong journals are used to getting papers that are not directly related to their research, so you shouldn't stress out about sending your papers to them.

As to your final question (about how many papers in one tier are needed to get the equivalent quality of one paper in a higher tier), the correct answer is probably "infinity".  When I evaluate someone's cv, I am trying to figure out how good their best work is.  One paper in the Annals trumps any number of papers in lesser journals.


Author without institutional or professional affiliation

This is an unusual situation, but when it arises giving your personal address as the "affiliation" is an acceptable approach. (Whether you will get a different reaction from journals and reviewers after doing so is another question...). Note that many journals still refer to this field as the "address" rather than "affiliation", which answers the question for you ;-)

I've seen personal addresses used in papers several times in various fields; most frequently in avian ecology, a field with a strong tradition of independent local researchers. However, it crops up in various places to a smaller degree.

In some cases, I know it's a retired academic continuing to publish (without an "emeritus" status) while in others it's almost certainly "spare time"-type research. I can't speak to how common it is outside the sciences, but I've seen a number of history papers with what are almost certainly personal addresses on them, so it's certainly a known practice there.


Funny you should ask, because I'm currently answering this question as I take breather from a project involving just such a family of experiments and variations.

In my own self-organization, I typically distinguish two types of such variants.
If some variants are "dead" and would only be referred to on rare occasions for historical purposes, then they get checked into version control and deleted from my working set---they can be exhumed by the powers of SVN/git/Mercurial when needed.

For the "live" versions, some experiments get grouped thematically and some chronologically.

Thematic is for when I'm it's a purely computer-based experiment (which can be re-run arbitrarily), e.g., "overlay-network", "random-network", "unit-disc-network"
Chronologically is for when my computer-based runs are based on real data from a physical system that can't be regenerated, but only replicated, e.g., "2013-05-09 Alphavirus", "2013-06-09 Alphavirus run #3", "2013-07-02 Repeats of Failed Samples"

I maintain a strong distinction between several types of files, which must never mix:

Core code: there is precisely one version of any core code system, maintained by version control.  If I need to maintain variants, they have to be set by option flags, not by forking the codebase (that way lies madness).
Each thematic/dated directory gets a README file, whatever notes are neecessary and (typically) two subdirectories: experiments and analysis
Experiment scripts for a thematic cluster live in the experiments directory
Each batch of experimental data lives in its own subdirectory of the experiments directory where its script lives.
Analysis contains scripts to process the experimental data.  Often there are two layers: one to process raw data into results, and another to plot the results.  This is because extracting results is often time intensive and figures are frequently tweaked.  If there are a lot of results files, they get their own subdirectory too.
Plots, living in a subdirectory of the analytical scripts directory

I also typically maintain a few master scripts which allow me to re-run large swaths of experiment / analysis when the core code is improved or a bug is found, which happens more frequently than one would like.