How to efficiently use time while preparing for a class?

I want to leave an answer that points in a different direction.  You are a math graduate student (your profile says you are studying analytic number theory).  Your teaching assignment provides you with an opportunity to improve your own understanding of a basic and important area of mathematics.  I'd like to recommend that you take that opportunity and allow yourself the time you need to truly improve your mastery of the subject.

I am a 40ish tenured, full professor.  I also work in number theory, which -- like many parts of modern mathematics -- is a very "cosmopolitan" field, drawing upon many different areas of mathematics.  Over the years I have done research in various aspects of number theory.  While I have some core tools and knowledge that have stayed with me over the years, there are a lot more things that I learned and knew better before than I do now, and there are still more things that I sort of learned as a student and would like to know better -- for my own edification but even directly for my research.

By far the best opportunity I have to learn something is in a course I'm teaching, at either the undergraduate or the graduate level.  In teaching a course I am committing myself to several prep sessions a week for 15 weeks, and there are consequences involved in my slacking on this (i.e., the students!).  There is really nothing else like this.  So I have taken the opportunity to dig in and learn this material many times over the years.

For instance, currently I am teaching a senior level complex analysis course for the first time.  I haven't thought about contour integrals since I was an undergraduate (which would be to my detriment in many parts of analytic number theory, as I'm sure you can appreciate), about 20 years ago.  So I am taking the opportunity by putting in a lot more than the minimum prep necessary to give solid lectures out of the textbook chosen.  At the moment I am a little more than halfway through the course and I have about 50 pages of typed "lecture notes"...of which maybe 25-30% are not actually being covered in the lectures.  Perhaps I spend 3-5 hours a week more than would be needed to get by.

Having said that, of course moderation is key.  For most tasks that you do in academia you have to set firm limits on the amount of time you will spend, or each individual task threatens to take all your time.  That will never do.  In your case, you should ask "How much time do I want to spend digging into MVC in the context of this TA assignment?  How much time can I afford to spend?"  This is a good thing to talk about with your advisor, as it largely depends on what else you are trying to do.

One more piece of advice: no one said that the time you spend on various things needs to be the same from semester to semester or even from week to week.  When it comes to teaching in particular: the first time you teach a class is somewhere from 2-5 times as much work as when you teach it each subsequent time.  So one key question is: what are your teaching assignments going to be in the future?  Will you be TAing MVC again?  If so, then spending more time on it now is justified by the fact that you'll have a much easier teaching assignment later on.  (Pro tip: if it's not clear whether you'll be teaching the same thing again, if you want to, ask for it.)  When I was a PhD student I taught second semester calculus in the fall semester four times, and that was all but one of my teaching assignments.

When it comes to teaching/TAing a course, the real work comes when you have to learn unfamiliar material well enough to stay ahead of the students.  If you wait until that happens, you're going to find yourself having to commit lots of hours on short notice.  So I would recommend tackling it in advance.  As a graduate student, you can learn MVC much more quickly than an undergrad: an intense month at the beginning of the semester could power you most of the way through.  Most advisors will be very understanding if your teaching responsibilities are eating up your time for a few weeks.  (To be really honest about it: who among us has not wanted to go easy on the research front for a few weeks at a time?  Digging deep into your teaching can be a way of recharging your batteries.  It worked for Richard Feynman...)

Anyway, good luck, and sounds fun.  I haven't thought about curvature and torsion in years.  Hmm...


Do STEM professors generally hold training in teaching from faculty of education or not?
No. Even at institutions that privilege teaching over research, it is unlikely that professors would receive formal training from colleagues in the Faculty of Education. Many universities have some sort of support unit (i.e. a "Centre for Teaching Excellence") that provide training to professors as professional development. While there is probably more attention these days towards pedagogical issues, few places make this mandatory (apart from perhaps a few introductory seminars). In fact, there is unfortunately a bit of a bias towards seeing teaching training as remedial.
Why is this? For better or for worse, at many research-intensive universities, research takes priority over teaching. Faculty members wanting to get tenured and promoted need to be well received by their community of peers, often external letter writers, who will focus on research as it's the main way to evaluate a faculty member (i.e. if I am writing a letter from another university, it's hard for me to know if a professor is an effective teacher or not; but I can situate them in the profession much easier based on our community norms).
As comments have noted, most professors learn how to teach "on the job" in an apprentice model, similar to how they learn many parts of their job. Starting out as a TA and then increasingly gaining autonomy in the classroom (until they are thrown in the deep end as a professor, of course).


How to recover one's career opportunities after a period of poor performance

You've got a few problems here, so I'm going to try to address each in turn.

Depression: As has been noted before on several occasions, depression is very common among graduate students and faculty.  The important thing to remember is that you're not alone.  Most universities have counseling centers that are available to students for free - take advantage of that.  Psychotherapy is effective for most individuals, and a trained professional can help you come up with strategies that are tailored for you.

Adviser Troubles: It's unfortunate that your adviser seems to be less interested in your progress because of some poor grades early on.  The trick now is how to make your adviser regain interest in you again - whether that's through more frequent meetings with them (out of sight, out of mind, so stay in sight) or by being proactive and finding interesting research directions to pursue is something you'll have to decide.  As a last resort, consider finding a new adviser - it may mean losing several years worth of work, but if it can rekindle the adviser/advisee relationship, it may be worth it.

Letters of Recommendation: One option is to consider alternative sources - are there professors of not-as-relevant courses that you can go to?  Past internship employers?  For networking - are there career centers or fairs at your school that you can leverage? Think outside the box.  Moreover - don't give up on the professors that you've had so far.  Asking for a letter of recommendation, with an acknowledgement that you may not have done as well as you hoped in the course, but you still learned valuable material may yield at least an "okay" letter of recommendation.  And there's always the possibility that their opinions of you are not as poor as you think they might be.

Boredom: This may be the biggest problem of all.  You can see a therapist; you can meet with your adviser weekly; you can cobble together LoRs - but if you're still bored stiff and have zero motivation to do anything, you've got a problem on your hands.  Generally, I've found there are two solutions to boredom:

Power through and do the best you can do.  As Randy Pausch (late Prof. at Carnegie Mellon) said, "The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people."  Show that you aren't "the other people".
Find something else to do.  Sometimes there's nothing you can do about it - you're bored, and no amount of self-negotiation will change that.  In those times, you just have to find something else to do.  Here that could mean a new research project, or even just a new angle on the current one.

Which solution is the "correct" one is entirely dependent on you.

Summary: My overall point is that it's going to be an uphill battle for you.  If you want this degree, you're going to have to prove it, and ultimately only you can decide what's best for you.

Here's a little inspiration to get you through your day:

  Optimist: Someone who figures that taking a step backward
  after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it's a cha-cha. ~Robert Brault

Best of luck!


This might prove futile, in my eyes. If you mandate something like sensitivity training, say, you will teach those naturally well-behaved little, and those who carry the germ of future mis-behavior to hide it. If you advise students from different cultures, on the other hand, it might help them to learn what is appropriate in yours. So in that case it might be a good idea as some mis-behavior results merely from different cultural norms (a kind and friendly Asian co-student shared a racist joke via email with all my school - because he didn't recognize it for what it was). For anything happening while working with you, you should make it explicitly known that you encourage your students and postdocs to talk to you should one of them feel that they were treated inappropriately by another; that you always have an open door.

Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher emperor devoted to service and tolerance; his son Commodus arguably the most wicked Roman emperor in the history of the Roman Empire. You try to set a good example, but that is probably all you can do. Don't beat yourself up over what happened.


Europe Etiquette : Should I reply to a reply?

I'm here in the US, so I can't speak to how things work in Europe.  But here, I get lots of emails that require answers, which often take time.  When a student says, thank you but doesn't require any further response, I appreciate it.  YMMV.


How to deal with my results being stolen?

How to initiate cooperation with new people and still avoid this
  problem?

You need some basic trust in the people you want to cooperate with before starting to share ideas. In some cases, you might know coauthors of them. Talk to them and hopefully they will drop hints on whether the collaboration was fair or if you need to be careful. I have indeed gotten warnings from other researchers (inside my own institute) regarding who I can trust and who tries to steal ideas. And I also pass on such information (after validating it) to new researchers.

But most important: Before starting any serious exchange of information, define basic rules for all of you. For example, anything which is developed throughout this collaboration must only be published with everyone agreeing to it. Create proof of this via a digitally signed email.

Of course, you might not be able to fully trust ANY person. So take care and create proof of your initial ideas. I tend to create repositories with revision-tracking (via GIT or SVN) of the joint work during collaboration. Everything should be stored therein, for example, any paper that you are writing or simulation data. Even if you get into trouble later on, you can proof, WHEN and WHAT you contributed.


Difficulty getting published in top tier journals?

I've co-authored a paper on a top-journal. The first author was a PhD student. The paper was so strong that it was even on the cover page of the journal.

That was the first paper for both the first author and myself.

But ...

The paper was authorised very closely with some experts in the field. Those experts knew exactly what to write, what to analyze and what not to do. It's a domain knowledge that a student wouldn't possibly have. They knew how to conduct a good research project.
We wouldn't been able to publish to the journal without the experts.
The study was indeed interesting, and attempted to solve some very practical problems. Thus, it was not something you read and throw away. It would cause impacts to the field.
We had softwares, web sites, cool graphics to backup the paper.
There was nothing special in the statistics and methods. Absolutely nothing new. But how it was analyzed was simple to follow and solid. Again, the experts knew exactly how and what to do.

You have better chance if your study attempts to solve important questions. Talk to a professor if you need advice.

Unfortunately I don't see you have much chance if you don't have anything truly interesting.


TextCite: Publication Quotation Manager looks like a thing you are looking for (haven't tried, only googled it):

  TextCite is a program for organizing and commenting textual citations from texts (books, articles, or other published works) for use in producing scientific or academic publications. You can organize by publication, author, category, or outline. It works with bibliographic management programs like Citation, EndNote, RefWorks, and BibTeX, providing important text/citation management capabilities that these programs lack, while still allowing for rapid footnote and bibliography generation by means of your favorite bibliography manager. It also exports to PDF and Word (RTF).


Can I have show two different approaches in single thesis, regarding the same topic?

It is totally normal and reasonable to do more than one type of work on a problem, and to report it in a structure like the one that you have sketched.  Just make sure that your explanation follows a coherent narrative (e.g., how does your work on selection follow from your work on formalization) and it will be fine.


How to explain missing grade on transcript

If the suggestion of Andreas Blass doesn't work for you, then include a note somewhere saying that the professor is late in assigning grades to the class as a whole and that questions about that should be directed to the chair or the dean. Give an email address for that person as well as the name.

You don't need to accuse the professor of anything and there are several valid reasons for grades being late, whether they apply here or not. But the administration can verify your claims and should be willing to do so.

Just state the facts and point to an authority who can verify them.


Is it advisable to give a handout with the slides to the jury of my PhD defense?

In my department, students usually give out a handout with slides to members of the committee. Many seem to find it helpful - they use it exactly as you said:

  to take notes, to follow the slides (slides are projected above my head in the amphitheater) or to go back if they missed a step

They also use it in other ways - for example, if they want to ask you a question about a previous slide, they can refer to the handout to say "Can you please go back to Slide 5" instead of having you flip through the slides one at a time and saying "Stop!" when you reach the one they're looking for.

Some don't use the handout at all.

In all of the defenses I have attended, I have never seen a committee member get distracted by the handout, or read the handout instead of paying attention to the speaker.

So, based on my experience I would consider the handout to have some potential benefits, and very little or no disadvantages.


How to find the money for an Open Access publication fee, if you're a postdoc and you don't have any funds?

I see several routes to proceed, in the order in which I would suggest that you attempt them:

Check if your former or current institution has an organizational affiliation with the journal that will allow you to publish there for free (i.e., the OA version of a subscription).
Ask your current supervisor.  They might be willing to pay despite not being an author, provided that you list you current affiliation as well as your former (which is generally reasonable to do).
Many universities now have an open access "slush fund" to help deal with situations like these.  Check with the department leadership and the libraries at both your current and former departments and see if there is such a fund.
Contact the journal and explain the situation: they may be willing to waive the fee.
Publish the paper in a "traditional" journal that has no fee.


When would be a good time to ask a professor if he will consider being my PhD advisor?

I would tell the professor that you're interested right away, but don't necessarily expect him/her to say yes or no immediately.  Rather than saying "would you advise my Ph.D. research?", just say, "I'm planning to do a Ph.D. and I'm interested in working under your supervision."

You'll probably get a "let's see how this first project turns out", but it will be easier to discuss in the future and the professor will know you are interested.


How to publish superseding results without creating enemies

I disagree with the premise of your question. “Publishing superseding results” is basically the same as what’s known as “publishing”, since all papers build and improve on the existing literature in some way and push some older work slightly toward obsolescence or irrelevance. The extra twist in your situation that you are improving on unpublished work is of hardly any consequence and simply not worth worrying about, for the following reasons:

As others have said, the authors of the arxiv preprint still have precedence and will get credit for making their contribution at the time they did, before your subsequent improvement was discovered. Referees and journal editors should (and almost certainly will) take that into account, within reasonable limits.
In general, when you improve on earlier work you show that it is interesting and relevant enough for other people to follow up on. This is actually flattering to the authors of the earlier work, even if you imagine that it is unflattering (it’s also true that an improvement can sometimes portray earlier work in a slightly unflattering light, but my point is there would still be a separate flattering aspect that I think you are ignoring, and which in most cases will far outweigh any supposedly unflattering aspects).
The publication status of the earlier work is simply not your concern. It is up to individual researchers to submit their work for publication and otherwise promote it in a timely manner. If they fail to do so, they have only themselves to blame, and they should not expect others in the scientific community to delay their own follow up research, at the cost of hurting their own careers and slowing down scientific progress, out of pity or charity.

To summarize, I think the idea that you will make enemies by publishing honest work that you did in a STEM field, regardless of the specific circumstances, might make for a cute plot element in a satirical TV show or novel about academia, but is not a realistic thing to worry about in real life.


Rejected by fellowships, worrying about my future

Most physics graduate students at MIT (and elsewhere) are not supported by fellowships.  Certainly, a fellowship would not hurt, but whether or not you get a fellowship will have very little impact on your future career.  What will matter in the long term will be the quality of your research.

As a graduate student, both your research output and faculty members' evaluations of your research skills will be important.  As you advance further, it will be your personal research quality that will most matter.  Other factors, like the quality of your teaching and presentation skills, will affect whether you get good jobs, but whether you had a prestigious fellowship in graduate school will be basically irrelevant.


in which language should I write my first draft a paper?

Personal opinion from a non-native english speaker:

You should write it as much as possible in english. Start working with bullet points of your ideas and then transfer them to full sentences after you are done. Since most academic papers are in english, it has already been mentioned on this platform a ton of times, that you should get used to the language, i.e. the vocabularies and the way people reason, in your field.


What is a 'classic paper', and when do we refer to a work as a 'classic work'?

This isn't something that is decided based on objective measures - it's a statement of the author's opinion that history has shown the paper to be very important.

If you, in your professional opinion, believe that the paper has had a major influence on an area of research, for a considerable period of time, then you could call it "classic".  If you don't believe that, or you're not sure, or you don't think you have enough experience to judge, then don't use the word.


Copy/paste from the PhD thesis into my future publication

It is not uncommon to hear about thesis that are based on published papers or drafts of future papers. What I have seen for those thesis is that the author puts a footnote at the beginning of each chapter. The note indicates the journal/conference where the information pertaining to that chapter has been published/presented. You could use this as a guide when writing your thesis.

The most important thing is to make sure that you cite properly everything and that you demonstrate intellectual ownership of the information presented in your thesis.


I switched gears in a radical way after several years working in my Bachelor's field, by taking the additional classes I needed, primarily at a community college.  Then I started graduate studies in a strong department in my new field.  The professors didn't distinguish between me and fellow students who had gone to bigger name schools for undergrad.  Chances are they didn't even know.  To them I was just another student, interested in learning, asking good questions, working hard.

The admissions committee members would have known, but I never knew which professors had sat on the admissions committee.  But even the ones who had looked at my transcripts (whoever they were) might have forgotten by the time I took a class from them.

I only had a problem with one professor.  He assumed I didn't know my stuff when he was grading a qualifying exam.  I think the root problem was that he was the one professor in my sub-field that I had not taken a class from.  So to him I was a nobody.  I found this out when I asked to see my exam and how it was graded.  I discovered that he had graded it rather subjectively.

Thus, the one thing I would do differently if I were to go through it all again would be to take a class from that one guy.  He only taught one class.  I sat in on a couple sessions at some point, and found his teaching deadly boring, with very little homework.  So I would have had to go to his office hours and really work to find something to talk about.

But that's what I would do differently if I could.  Note, that had nothing to do with the schools I had been to prior to grad school.

Note that as a former intern, you will be a known quantity to the stellar company.  That can be a real foot in the door.


Using a letter of recommendation from freshman year professor?

In short: if you don't have better letters of recommendation, then you should go with the ones that you have available.

If the best letter you can get is from a non-EE person, I wouldn't rule it out on that basis alone. If the person can comment on your potential as an EE, that would make things better still.


How do I respond to a professor’s email refusing my recommendation request?

You don't need to reply to him at this point, what you should do is to follow his advice and contact the head of department.

You could, if you really want to, reply to him saying thank you for the advice - but this may or may not be received as you expect - far simpler to leave it and move on.


Dependence of EU universities on external funding

They are more dependent alone due to the fact that the EU spends steadily increasing sums on research over the last decades. See the table on wikipedia.

FP9 or Horizon Europe will be around 100 billion, so another increase.

Also, just google "brexit universities britain eu funding alarm" to get some thousand articles/comments how dependent british universities are on EU funding.

Brexit Q&As here


How to stay motivated when working on projects by yourself?

In my experience doing an independent research project, one of the most helpful things has been to remind myself why I thought my project was worth doing. If you can periodically re-excite your interest in the project, you may find yourself wanting to spend time on it. Those have been my most productive times.

Also, meet up with your advisor on a regular basis, even if it's only once every quarter or something (more is preferable). If it will help light a fire under you, set a meeting a few weeks in advance, decide on something you'll show them/discuss with them at the meeting, and use the meeting as a mini-deadline.

It's all about carrots and sticks. Remind yourself why you're doing it; remind yourself that it won't be so nice if you don't do it. Reward yourself for meeting milestones. Make yourself keep milestones.

Also, if you're experiencing any health issues (mental or otherwise) related to this, don't be afraid to seek help. There are often resources nearby, and you're better placed to do good research if you look after yourself.


How to write an email to a potential PhD advisor that I have worked with in the past

In my opinion, what works best is a personal email (you probably know best how personal is appropriate with that concrete person), with a formal application attached. He might want to discuss your application with some colleagues who do not know you, or with HR. Thus, having the pertinent information will be an advantage.

In the personal email you might want to mention that you enjoyed the common work you did previously, and that you would like to continue / build up on that, now that you finished the MSc.

Say very directly, that you would prefer his research group over others. And then add something like: in case he has any open PhD positions in the near future, your formal application and CV are attached.


What challenges will an international joint PhD program pose to applicant?

I should preface this by saying I am an Australian living in Germany.

There are many many factors that will define the challenges you as an individual will face, and of course it really depends WHICH countries you are going to spend time in, and where you are from originally. A US/UK joint program for an Australian will not be nearly as tough as a French/Russian program for a Korean.

This is due to what I call "Ausländer tax", which is to say foreigner tax, or put better "outsider tax".
Ausländer tax is an financial, physical and emotional debt that you pay by simply living in a country that you are not native too.

For example, I was paying a moderate Ausländer tax for the first two years of my PhD where every month I would buy a monthly tram ticket to get too and from work. This cost me around $60 a month. After two years I found out there was a special semester tram ticket for students enrolled at the university, which is $90 for the whole semester. After paying this for a year, I then found out that student's don't have to pay for the trams at all if it's before 8am or after 9pm - which pretty much covers 99.9% of my travel times. In essence, I'd paid around $1700 in Ausländer tax for just the trams. Financial Ausländer tax is generally easy to spot. I know i'm paying it by not being able to put in a contribution of my salary towards my pension, for example. I know i'm paying it by being unable to renegotiate my energy bill, because no one at Eon will talk to me in English. I know I pay it every time I get a taxi and speak in English, even though I know very well what the rates should be or the route we should take. Financial Ausländer tax is a bummer but can at least be overcome by being rich.

But Ausländer tax also includes things that are a bit harder to measure, and in cases impossible to overcome. For example, as I cannot speak German to a high standard, walking around town I hear essentially white noise 24/7. People in the street will ask me questions and I won't even know they are talking to me. Sometimes they will be quite offended by this, which makes me feel like shit, and then I have to spend the day at work feeling sorry for myself. Elevator trips are particularly awkward, simply because I have nothing to say. This is 90% a language barrier issue, but 10% a cultural issue, because certain rituals differ from country to country. This constant, unrelenting confusion creates stress and can really wear you down. It is like putting a whale in a zoo. Sure it can survive, and it will generate productive outcomes, but for the whale it is a burden. Worst of all, it's not obvious how to improve the situation for the whale.

There are PLENTY of positives to living abroad however, which I believe outweigh the Ausländer tax certainly for the first few years. You learn the culture, you learn new ways of doing things, and this has a real and practical benefit to you. But after a while, perhaps 2-3 years, these benefits diminish, and the cons of the Ausländer tax accumulate.

The only solution to Ausländer tax is to stop being an Ausländer. To totally integrate with the new culture. This doesn't mean you just learn the new culture - that is what we did in year 1 and 2. It means to adopt the new culture. Redefine yourself and drop the overhead of translating in-and-out of a foreign language/culture by making it your primary language/culture. For some people this is much easier than others, and of course it depends on the cultural delta, but many people never accept this as they are either unable or unwilling to give up their original culture.


How to avoid the "need" to learn more before conducting research?

I sympathise completely with your situation, as I went through exactly that thought process when I began my PhD. I am in my second year.

I did not begin my PhD with a tightly defined research question, and I would guess that you are not doing so either. I did have an idea of what general area of research interested me and spent a lot of time looking at  published papers. Sometimes, while reading a paper, I realised that I needed more general understanding of that topic, and then read text books, or attended classes.

I also attended seminars and such like, to get some idea about how other researchers in my general field go about their work. And I volunteered to give talks on quite general subjects in my broad field, on the basis the best way to learn a subject is to try and teach it to somebody else. I have been surprised by how much of that haphazardly gathered learning has turned out to be helpful in my own very specific research - sometimes directly relevant but more often by suggesting ideas to me about a way of looking at a problem.

I thought, and still think, that it would be a mistake to take classes and read textbooks until I was at the frontier of knowledge, because I would never reach the frontier that way.

What I did instead, after reading, more or less deeply,  a few hundred papers, was to realise that none of them really addressed a particular question that I was interested in. Having, almost inadvertently, identified a specific research question, I could then conduct a very intense literature review to confirm, or otherwise, that nobody else had researched that question.

Guess what! I had reached the frontier of knowledge. I am now in the process of seeing if I can push the frontier further out.


What to enter for "current situation" in PhD application if one is unemployed

As someone with experience of post-graduation unemployment, I'd say don't be worried about it. It is perfectly understandable that you finished your degree and are now applying to PhDs without being employed in between.

It would be helpful to know the exact phrasing of the question but if it is expecting a simple one line answer I would just put "Recent graduate" and maybe the classification of your degree (MSc, MA, etc. and the subject).

Think about why they are asking the question. Is it to check if you  are in the middle of a degree or finished? Is it to check your grade? Or what type of degree you have? Or is it to check if you have a job so they need to think about your start date of PhD in relation to quitting your job? There is no shame in just writing "currently unemployed". I did this and I am now 2 years into my PhD. You may need to explain in more detail at an interview and justify why you are not working, but if you have a sensible reason this will not be a barrier.


Is it acceptable to ask for a first review midway through the review process?

I'm interpreting your question as whether it's acceptable to ask for a decision based on the single reviewer report received so far. You could certainly ask but the editor's reaction is probably unpredictable. Some will be OK sharing the report (this gets more likely if the report isn't controversial), others will not be hurried.
The problem with sharing the report is that the decision might not agree with the report. There are all sorts of reasons why the first report might be rejected, e.g. (and this is an intentionally egregious example) if the reviewer says "this should cite A, B, C, D, E papers, aside from that it's acceptable". In that case the report effectively says nothing except ask for some citations. The second reviewer report will likely be the decisive report, and showing the authors the first report is rather pointless (other than to show how bad our journal's reviewers can be, i.e. not desirable).
Even if the first report is an honest and relatively positive report, the decision still might be reject, if the second report is sufficiently poor. In this case I would be more inclined to share the first report with the author before the decision, but I would stress that there is no decision yet.
It sounds like you're considering the case where the first review is damning enough to cause outright rejection. If that's what happened, the journal doesn't need to invite a second reviewer, they can already reject your paper. If they haven't already rejected your paper, then unless the editors are too busy to look at your submission, your paper still has a chance.
tl; dr: "Based on Reviewer 1's report, is the paper likely to be rejected?" is not an answerable question, unless Reviewer 1's report is well and truly damning, in which case they would already be able to make a decision. You could still ask for the review, but not every editor will show you the review.


It's a little bit of a gray area in my opinion. If you just rewrite the sentences but take the structure, statements and references from the review it could technically be plagiarism since it's not your idea or work. If you just take the information and rewrite it is fine. And there's the question: when is it your own "review" and when is it still just the reworded one you've read. You definitely need to cite that review somewhere.

What I would do is combining the key information of all the reviews in your own short review and then add something like:

  For more in-depth reviews see ...

What helps is reading all the reviews and then, in the best case some days later, writing your own without looking at the reviews. That way you won't stick to the exact structure or wording.


How much time/effort should I put into writing a reference letter for an application for a Master's program?

Should I feel bad if I send her a quick and simple letter?

Yes. I cannot stress enough how much this can hurt your student.
I once had a professor agree to write a letter for me, and I learned afterwards that he wrote "Kerkyra was an intern in my lab for 6 months. She's great, she got along well with everyone and did a good job." (I'm almost not exaggerating.) This basically reads as "This person worked with me for 6 months and all I have to say about her is that she's a nice girl", which is terrible.

Which brings me to your main question:

  How much time/effort should I put into writing a reference letter for this former student's application for a Master's program?

You should spend the time/effort that you feel like spending.

If you remember the student and have something to say about her that you feel could help her application (Did she stand out in some way during your course? Did she perform particularly well, or ask interesting questions?), it's nice to do it. It does not necessarily take long to write an enthusiastic letter.

If you don't remember her, or if she was an average student, it's perfectly okay to tell her that you don't know her or her work that well, and don't feel that you could write a helpful recommendation under these circumstances. Since her recommendation letter is optional, no letter is way better than a lukewarm or empty one.


Does your previous university’s reputation matter when applying for a PhD?

I always thought that all applicants were treated equally and were judged only by their grades, personal statement and CV.

Applicants from different universities are not treated equally (at least not by my department's selection committee).

Your grades are looked at as a baseline (to filter out obvious rejections or single out interesting cases), and then a discussion goes on about the rest of it (CV, statements, references and research experience). You are missing two key parts (which you refer to in your comments but not in the question body): reference letters, and publication record. You say that you have read your reference letters: have you read all of them? It could be that you are experiencing selection bias - the referees who are comfortable with you reading their letters are ones who generally like you. In addition, nowadays top schools (in computer science at least) may reject your application if you haven't had at least one decent publication.

  I have been told by academics in the past that potential PhD candidates aren’t judged using this criterion.

This must have been a misunderstanding.

The institution the conferred your degree absolutely matters. There is a huge difference between how a top 5% student from a top university and one who hails from a less renowned university is perceived.

This cuts both ways - good universities may produce inadequate graduates, and less reputable ones can produce excellent students. The institution is just a signal of your likelihood to succeed in your PhD.


Relative importance of research publications for grad school admissions (theoretical physics/pure mathematics)

The main thing that graduate school admissions committees are looking for are good researchers. Publishing papers demonstrates such ability; publishing papers in well-known journals is even better. However, it's difficult, as an undergraduate, to publish papers as first author (which is the most important position when one is applying as a student). Typically, they will be working in consultation with a more experienced student, who will be the lead author. In that case, while the credits are of themselves useful, they need to be coupled to strong letters of recommendation from the co-authors, testifying to the student's original efforts in executing the work.

At the same time, one should not totally sacrifice depth in a single area for breadth; grad schools want to see some evidence of concentration, but complete devotion to one area is also too much of an extreme. Try to balance the two somewhat, so that you've explored a few areas, and worked at least one or two areas in depth.


In which countries is cheating in university exams considered a crime?

In Italy cheating in a public university can be punished with 3-12 months of imprisonment.
The relevant law is almost one century old, but it is still valid today.
From https://www.normattiva.it/uri-res/N2Ls?urn:nir:stato:legge:1925-04-19;475 :

LEGGE 19 aprile 1925, n. 475
Art. 1 Chiunque in esami o concorsi, prescritti o richiesti da autorita' o pubbliche Amministrazioni per il conferimento di lauree o di ogni altro grado o titolo scolastico o accademico, per l'abilitazione all'insegnamento od all'esercizio di una professione, per il rilascio di diplomi o patenti, presenta, come propri, dissertazioni, studi, pubblicazioni, progetti tecnici e, in genere, lavori che siano opera di altri, e' punito con la reclusione da tre mesi ad un anno. La pena della reclusione non puo' essere inferiore a sei mesi qualora l'intento sia conseguito.

My attempt at a translation (excuse the convoluted 1925 Italian syntax).

Law no. 475, April 19 1925.
Article 1: whoever presents as his/her own a study, dissertation, publication, technical project, or, generically, a work that is made by someone else, in an exam or selection, prescribed or requested by authorities or by the public administration to confer degrees or any other sort of academic or school qualifications, or for habilitation to the practice of a profession or to teaching, is to be punished with imprisonment from 3 months up to one year. This penalty cannot be lower than six months when the attempt is successful.


This is a very philosophical question involving the overall education system, the area you are living in, the selection process of your students, the culture in your university, and, and, and. Therefore I assume the question will be closed, soon, even though this is a common problem which needs to be discussed.

Sometimes I feel we are in a similar situation at our university since we are accepting candidates with lower grades as incoming students. Some of them are not really qualified for studying at all, and it is just helpful for them to reflect this as early as possible, e.g. by early tests etc. Last year I had two students which quit after three weeks "because they did not expect they have to invest so much time in studying".

The only thing you can do is to decide to work with the students you have. Changing the selection process is difficult, the application behaviour can not be influenced too much, and sometimes the students with bad grades in school can show a great performance in their studies! So don't invest too much time in improving the incoming student's quality.

The next important step is: You are having a curriculum (and later on job profile) whcih requires certain pre-requisites in later courses. As a faculty, you should discuss which is the minimum level the students should have after your course - and this should set the level for passing the exam. It could lead to a reduction of the material, or you can classify some material as "advanced" and other material as "must have". Do not go below this level - the students will like it in the beginning, but they will have trouble in their later studies and in their working place. It's better to force them to do the course again. Be clear about this from the beginning, and if possible tell everyone in advance your expectations and - more importantly - whatfor the material is needed afterwards.

Regarding material and teaching methods I would like to reference to the field of didactics - many universities are having courses for improving the teaching style - take as many of them as you need! It helps a lot, and you are meeting local peers which are in a similar situation.


How necessary is a List of Figures and a List of Tables in a dissertation?

To be honest, with a short dissertation with only a few figures and tables, it probably doesn't really matter one way or the other.

If your institution's dissertation guidelines say anything about it, follow them.  If not, I'd say just include the lists, unless you feel you have some good reason not to.  In which case, don't.  Your advisor should let you know if they believe such lists should be added or removed, anyway.

Or you could just ask your advisor about it to begin with.


How to compile "Comprehensive summary of teaching evaluations," given long teaching record

Your summary needs to present a full picture of your teaching in a relatively understandable format. The exact format will depend on the type of evaluation information you have and the number of students in the class (which will influence the number of open-ended responses you can reasonably provide).

In my case, I created a summary sheet which included a table of courses taught, semester, and numeric averages. Then, for each course, I included an additional sheet with all of the students' open-ended responses and individual scores. Each student provided 3 numeric scores and one open-ended comment/evaluation, and there were 20 students per class. So this information typically fit on 1-2 pages.

If your standard evaluations are easy to understand quickly, then you might just include them as originally produced. But that usually isn't the case. For me, I reformatted everything and also included a hyperlink to the originals (which I hosted on my academic website). You can also include a statement that originals are available upon request.

In your case, because you have old/irrelevant courses, you might elect not to include full versions of those IF the file is getting unmanagable. But be prepared to explain your exclusion criteria.

If you plan on applying to many jobs where teaching is important, it is worth spending a bit of time to get this in order, as this is a request that many schools of this type will make.


Free, open-source substitutes for Mendeley?

The only alternative that comes to my mind is Zotero:

It is open-source,
it comes as a standalone application or as a web-based version with Firefox, Chrome and Safari connectors,
it integrates with Word or OpenOffice,
it syncs with the Zotero server,
it has BibTeX export,
and more.

The Zotero standalone client is cross-platform and open-source (AGPL licence), and it can be run on its own or synchronized with the web version. The web service is free to use up to a fixed storage quota, with paid storage available, and there is an open-source implementation of the dataserver available if you want to roll your own. The local client stores its data in SQLite format so in principle your data is not locked in, but the database is relatively hard to trawl externally; however, since the client is open source there are relatively few future-proofing concerns.


Citing an ISO standard with multiple parts, using Harvard style?

After speaking to university librarians about this and although they could not find any official guidelines, they suggested that within the Bibliography I reference each part of the ISO individually:

@techreport{ISO14230part1,
type = {Standard},
key = {ISO 14230-1},
year = {2012},
title = {{Road vehicles. Diagnostic communication over K-Line (DoK-Line). Physical layer}},
publisher = {British Standards Institution},
institution = {International Organization for Standardization},
note = {Available from: \url{https://bsol.bsigroup.com/en/}}
}

@techreport{ISO14230part2,
type = {Standard},
key = {ISO 14230-2},
year = {2013},
title = {{Road vehicles. Diagnostic communication over K-Line (DoK-Line). Data link layer}},
publisher = {British Standards Institution},
institution = {International Organization for Standardization},
note = {Available from: \url{https://bsol.bsigroup.com/en/}}
}

@techreport{ISO14230part3,
type = {Standard},
key = {ISO 14230-3},
year = {1999},
title = {{Road vehicles. Diagnostic systems. Keyword Protocol 2000. Application layer}},
publisher = {British Standards Institution},
institution = {International Organization for Standardization},
note = {Available from: \url{https://bsol.bsigroup.com/en/}}
}

@techreport{ISO14230part4,
type = {Standard},
key = {ISO 14230-4},
year = {2000},
title = {{Road vehicles. Diagnostic systems. Keyword Protocol 2000. Requirements for emission related systems}},
publisher = {British Standards Institution},
institution = {International Organization for Standardization},
note = {Available from: \url{https://bsol.bsigroup.com/en/}}
}

and then within the text to reference using the years in brackets: ISO 14230 (2013; 2012; 2000; 1999). Noting that even though the years do not correspond with the order of the different parts but when referencing works by the same author the most recent comes first.


How to say that research work was done as part of research project?

Updated to address comments.

If Project XYZ is simply a funding agency or entity that may have provided funds or materials but no intellectual contribution, then you use the phrase "We acknowledge Agency XYZ (Grant #) for financial support" or "Funding provided through Project XYZ (Grant #)." For example, if your work is supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health...

  "Funding for this work was provided by the NIH, Center for Work on Really Interesting Science (#1234567890)..."

If project XYZ has defined the research problem/scope, you could say "This research was inspired by Project XYZ" or "This research follows from Porject XYZ."

If Project XYZ is an institute, center, or other entity that worked with you on your project, then you use the phase "in collaboration with". For example, if your computational model was run on at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, you might say:

  "This work was conducted in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center [ref]..."

Lastly, if the intellectual contribution from someone at Project XYZ was large, that person needs to have their name on your paper (with placement in the order according to the customs of your field):

Grad Student who did the work*, Grad Student who did less work*, Grad Student at Project XYZ#, Collaborating PI at Project XYZ#, Your PI*

Affiliations:

*Department of Epic Awesome, University of Cool, 123 Street Road, CityTown,
 ProvinceState, CountryNation, ComplicatedPostalCode.
#Center for Statistical Mayhem, International Project for
 Enhancing Statistical Literacy through Academic Research, 456 Boulevard Ave,
 CityTown, ProvinceState, CountryNation, ComplicatedPostalCode.


Is it possible for a published paper with PMID to not have a PMCID?

PMIDs are given to any paper indexed in the pubmed citation database, and that is any paper in a journal indexed by pubmed. Which is pretty much all reputable journals more than a couple of years old.

PMCIDs are given to papers where a copy of the paper is availible on Pubmed Central. While pubmed and pubmed central have similar names, they are not the same thing.  Pubmed Central is a government run archive service for manuscripts openly accessible to the public. Different journals have different policies on allowing authors to archive copies of the manuscripts on public servers (like Pubmed central). Open Access journals allow archiving. Many closed access journals allow archiving after a certain period, or on payment of a fee. Allowing archiving is not the same as doing it though. While some journals that allow it will go as far as automatically uploading papers in mnay cases its something the author has to do themsevlves. I believe that that NIH requires research funded by them to be uploaded to PMC within 6 months of publication, but the NIH doesn't fund all research in the world. Many european funders, for example, either don't have a archiving requirment, or do, but don't specify pubmed central as the archive (other archives are available).


Correct term to address the "academic publications"

I suggest "(modifier) dissemination" with (modifier) used to make things more specific.  Usually I find the phrase "dissemination of (noun)", and it often refers to a formal release of information, where some semblance of validation of (noun) has occurred.  You might find "result dissemination", "data dissemination", "report dissemination" useful.  Of course, I'm already getting tired of seeing the word "dissemination" used many times in the same paragraph.  I also suggest some synonyms to alleviate developing madness in the reader.


Are undergraduate classes ever used as a means to learning what a PhD candidate needs to learn to earn his PhD?

Short answer: sometimes...

Long answer: see below.

(Disclaimer: this describes a STEM-related experience. Not sure how this translates to other disciplines - like philosophy - where instructor interpretation plays a very large role)

I can only relate my personal experience. In grad school I did take a number of classes, but somehow, even though as an undergraduate I was able to juggle 5-6 courses effortlessly, I found it much more difficult to sit through lecture after lecture and do homeworks.

For certain kinds of material (let's say real analysis, or topology) the discipline of a full length course can be quite useful. But most often what you're looking for is some specific concept or set of concepts from a different area. As you "learn how to learn" better, you quickly realize that the most efficient way to do this is to find some lecture notes, or even find an expert who can explain the key ideas in an hour or so. At that point, if you're experienced enough, you know what to take away, which ideas are important, and which ideas you don't need to understand to get your job done.

Of course, the other factor is time: you're trying to master a body of work in your own research area, and you don't have a lot of time to spare mastering a whole other area as well. But it's surprising how much you can learn from late night paper binges and frantic googling.

And now of course there are MOOCs and other learning aids that help the self-directed learner. So you can pick up things at your own pace.


For Ph.D application, which admission system used in Australia? Is it the same as US/Canada, UK, or EU?

From my experience in Australia, the usual scenario is that a student makes contact with a particular academic at a university. The academic agrees to supervise the student's PhD. The applicant then applies through the official university process. The university process will involve additional hurdles (e.g., grades, English language requirements, past experience writing research theses, etc.). But in general, the applicant starts by building a relationship with a potential supervisor.

That said, some applicants get in contact with the university with an outline of their research interests, and then the university can facilitate finding a supervisor.

And of course, I'm sure there is some variability in the process across universities. So of course, it makes sense to check out the university websites and get in touch with the HDR office of any relevant universities.


It is perfectly fine to write "to the best of our knowledge" -- assuming you really made a thorough search. It is especially important that you look up all research papers that try to solve similar problems and confirm that they do not use the idea you propose (maybe in disguise). If you find something broadly similar, cite it, and discuss what makes your idea different to the one you found.


How do I reference something I've referred to, but not directly quoted. Or do I?

The answer to the question, "should I reference X?", is almost always yes.  It is proper to reference sources used in your research even if you don't use direct quotes and regardless of referencing style.


How do I find the most cited authors given one or more MESH terms?

You could use Europe PMC database to search for publications by keyword of choice using (KW:"XXX") syntax. Then sort the results by times cited and look at the authors of the top publications.
Here is an example for most cited articles by keyword "myalgia": https://europepmc.org/search?query=%28KW:%22myalgia%22%29&page=1&sortby=Times%2BCited%2BDESC. In this case, keyword includes MESH terms and keywords supplied by publishers.

If you wanted to do that programmatically, for example to collate citation numbers for individual authors, you could do that via the Articles API. Here is the RESTful URL for the same query: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search?query=KW:myalgia%20sort_cited:y.

Disclaimer: I work for Europe PMC.


What level of computer skills should a university instructor expect students in a business class to have?

Certainly it is reasonable to expect your students to be comfortable with a word processor and with basic internet research.

However, once in a while you will have a student who doesn't meet one of these, or some other basic skill expectation.

When this happens, you want the student to get up to speed ASAP.  You offered a helpful, practical suggestion for this -- gold star!

If your first suggestion doesn't work, then you may want to go to someone in your teaching infrastructure, such as a dean of undergraduate studies in your department, and let them know about the problem.  That person may take it from there, or give you another suggestion, or advise you that you've done all you can to get the student to remedy the deficiency, and remind you that sometimes the best motivation for change is failure.

Separate from the above, there is something you can do to help the student be more successful, in terms of your own teaching.  I'll give you an analogy.  Suppose a middle school social studies teacher assigns a project, with the instructions that to accompany the text, five hand-drawn illustrations are required.  (This example is taken from recent real life -- incredible but true!) Suppose a student in the class has some sort of difficulty (physical or otherwise) with hand-drawn illustrations.  Would it be fair to reduce this student's grade if the project is missing the five hand-drawn illustrations?  Of course not.  This student needs an educational accommodation, so that he can demonstrate his knowledge, without getting hung up on the form of demonstration.

Your internet-challenged student needed an educational accommodation too.  We don't want the student to get evaluated on her internet research skill if that in itself is not the primary (or even secondary) academic goal of your course.  (Please correct me if I'm wrong -- I'm assuming that internet research skills are a means to an end, not the end itself.)

You can do some brainstorming on your own when you see that a student needs an educational accommodation, and you can ask colleagues, friends and the disability office.  (Not because this student had a disability, but because the folks in the disability office are used to thinking outside the box.)  Once you've got a few ideas as a starting point, it's time to run them past the student to see if she has a preference, or any additional ideas.

I'll do a little quick brainstorming myself, just to get the ball rolling:

Ask for the student's email address, and send her three specific internet links you would like her to read in preparation for each assignment.
Once a week, print out three specific articles you would like her to read, understand and synthesize for that week's topic.
Mix it up.  Sometimes make a small group weekly assignment that requires collaboration.  Make sure everyone has gotten into a small group, and ask the students to let you or the TA know if their group isn't working out, so regrouping can take place.


Statistics for how many different authors post on categories of the arXiv

(Now an answer by request.)

The arXiv supports the Open Archive Initiative so in principle this is just a programming question for

Requesting and downloading the data for all articles in Astrophysics and dumping it locally in a usable format.
Extracting the author information.
Culling the duplicates.
Counting the resulting entries.

If the first step is done right (by putting the information in a suitable database format) the other three will be more-or-less trivial.

Note however that name duplication would be a problem that is hard to solve, especially when some articles are listed with a "last name, first initials" format. Similarly authors who use more than one version of their names on arXiv (I'm guilty of that myself) can cause some inaccuracies to the computation outlined above. The mathematicians solve this "manually" by employing 13 people and making this part of their jobs, and I don't know if there can be a good programmatic solution until at least wide adoption of some sort of author ID (like ORCid) system.


how to write a dissertation acknowledgement that is not superfluous?

Here is what I think about the topic. Acknowledgements section is indeed an important part of any dissertation, obviously, not from a scientific standpoint, but from an ethical perspective.

Even if you have a good memory, I would still suggest to keep track of various contributions that other people made to your research and your overall success during the program. If you don't want to keep track throughout your program, it is IMHO crucial to make such list before finalizing and submitting your final document to the committee. On the other hand, if your memory is not that great, then keeping track of people's help during the program is a must.
As I also was trying to create a nice acknowledgements section for my dissertation, I have seen and read a wide variety of examples, ranging from quite brief and formal to very personal, which read more like a life story (while some are interesting, generally, I don't think you need to strive to make that section so - it should be sincere, cover most of people, which help you appreciate, and nicely written in terms of wording; however, it is not a novel or, even, a story, so I wouldn't at all worry about the being interesting aspect). I think that both extremes (too brief/dry & life story) are not appropriate or good, so I would recommend to write several drafts to create a writeup, nicely balanced in terms of content, people coverage, style and size.
Since I mentioned above the size aspect, keep in mind that some universities limit the size of an acknowledgements section (usually, such limits are spelled out in a Dissertation Guide). For example, at my school, that limit was one page. Needless to say that it was quite a challenge to squeeze maximum relevant information and keep the contents/style readable and balanced.


Where can I publish the draft paper of my masters thesis?

The thing to do is to check your target journal's submission guidelines: what you're looking for, is their attitude to preprints - a preprint is a draft of an journal article, made and distributed before publication.

If they're happy that preprints do not constitute prior publication, you can submit a preprint to a suitable archive (making sure you get the permission of your co-authors first), and this will help establish your precedence.

In the case of your target journal, the "how to submit" page says:

  Posting a manuscript on a pre-print server such as ArXiv or SSRN is not considered to be duplicate publication.

So in this case you're ok to submit your draft article to a preprint archive, to establish that this is your work and not your supervisor's, and it won't damage your chances of getting published in your target journal.

We have a number of other questions about preprints, and you might find lots of useful related information on the answers there.


How do universities verify qualifications?

For entry level positions (postdocs, visiting assistant professors, assistant professors), we usually start with letters of recommendations and copies of publications, including the thesis.

Usually one of the letter writers is the chair of the dissertation committee. That gives confidence that the dissertation is being completed or almost finished.

In one of my early jobs, I did have to send scans of my diplomas, but that was done after the job offer.

There's remarkably little authentication in academia. But that is likely because there is the perception that there is little outright credential fraud and because the consequences are so large.


Personal contribution in N-author articles vs single author articles

There isn’t a precise rule about such things, but to the extent that one can formulate a general principle, I’d say that the credit for an N-author article would almost always be greater - often significantly greater - than a 1/N fraction of the total credit. That is why collaboration is generally a profitable activity - it allows two or more people to leverage their skills and abilities and together create something that is worth more than the sum of its parts: the very definition of synergy.

Another synergistic effect in collaborations is that your coauthors will be going around giving talks and telling people about your joint paper. If effect, you get double (or five, or ten times) the “marketing” or “buzz” about your paper for the same effort on your part: the credit you get is higher simply by virtue of more people getting to hear about your paper. Moreover, when your coauthors give talks about your paper they can say flattering things about you that you probably wouldn’t dare to say about yourself, or that if you did say about yourself people wouldn’t be as impressed by (and it works both ways, you say nice things about your coauthors’ contributions when you give talks about the joint papers of course).

I estimate that close to half of my papers are solely authored, and the others are joint. I enjoy both styles of work, although I think these days I most enjoy the freedom that comes with writing papers by myself. I often reflect about the (small) injustice that comes with the fact that those papers usually take longer to make a splash than my jointly authored ones, for the reasons I mentioned above. Oh well. Not every decision we make is driven by some ultra-rational cost-benefit analysis. Do what makes you happy, and what you feel you are good at. Some people excel at collaborating, others are solitary thinkers.

My experience is with pure mathematics, and applies mostly to papers with 1-4 authors. In math, for papers where the number of authors is, say, 6-10 (which are quite a rarity), the credit might start getting seriously diluted, to the point that I’m not sure how much of what I wrote above is accurate - probably it would depend quite a lot on the specific details of who the authors are and what their paper is about.


Email to all potential supervisors listed on application

Yes, you should keep looking until you get a commitment. It would be unwise to delay. I'm sure the person you talked to isn't expecting you to ignore other possibilities or follow up on them. Otherwise you would have gotten an offer.

Of course, you may be in a place where actual admission isn't in the hands of advisors, but a committee. In this case, no one can properly "accept" you until the larger institution does. So all offers in such places, from potential advisors, are tentative. Other places, the advisors accept and hire students, but even there, until you get a commitment, keep looking.

Of course, you need to be honest, when asked, if you are following up other leads.  They will likely be aware, of course, since they know each other. This can't hurt you, and might even help.

If you are in a position to visit the institution in person, you might consider doing that and speaking to some of these professors. Email is much less effective in this sort of thing.


Submitting to a conference without my advisor's input or approval?

In my view this is asking for potential trouble. What are you going to explain when the paper gets accepted? If you can explain it later, you should also be able to explain it now.

You probably have your reasons why you want to publish as a sole author. The most sensitive part here is that you and your advisor share the same research interest. Even if the work is independent your advisor could be upset because (1) you didn’t inform him, (2) you are working in his field, (3) you did not give him a chance to contribute while he invests a lot of time in your career, (4) you may cause him to feel embarrassed, (5) you could be competing with him.

Personally, I include all my advisors on my papers and I make sure they have a contribution, just to prevent these types of problems. After your PhD you may want to maintain good relationships with your advisors.

If there are reasons you did not mention for wanting to publish as sole author without notifying your advisor, I would indentify those reasons and address them now. For example: your advisor takes advantage of you, you are afraid that he will get or take the credits, you’re afraid that he will not support your individual work, or you’re afraid you will have to adapt and restructure too much. Discuss it openly.

In the end submitting that article as a sole author is your decision (and you are entitled to it) but I would do it openly. The problems you face now are probably less than the problems you may face in the future.


Professor never sent in recommendation letter

Don't explain why, just ask for the letters.  Apologize for short notice and tell the professor it would be "helpful if you could send the letters right away."  (The professor will probably figure it out, but there's no need to make a point of it.)


This varies enormously between people.  I've known some students where it seemed clear that they had a 99% chance of getting a job at a research university (with the most likely failure mode being some major personal difficulty, such as an accident or illness).  I've known other students who I thought had little or no chance.  Most have been in between, of course, with only a few outliers.

There's little value in statistics over large groups, since they can give a terribly misleading impression for any given individual.  (Different departments or advisors can lead to radically different outcomes, and averaging over them is pointless if you aren't choosing at random.)  Instead, I'd recommend doing two things:

Talk with faculty you know to see what they think of your chances.
Look at placement records for particular graduate programs or advisors you are interested in.  There will still be a wide range of outcomes, so you can't learn anything definitive from this, but it will at least give you an idea of the range of plausible outcomes.  You can usually find lists of former students on people's web pages or the math genealogy site, and then you can try looking these students up.  (If you can't find a former student online, then this person is probably not in academia.)


What information should I include in a letter of support for a grant?

A good letter of support, in my mind, should:

Convey a clear understanding of the proposal in question;
Demonstrate that the letter writer is in a position to support the application—in other words, she has the requisite experience to contribute;
Clearly indicate what the writer will do to support the grant in the event it gets funded.

I recently contributed such a letter for an educational grant. I cited my research, which was a fit for the program; and conveyed support for the program as the academic administrator of a summer program as well as a mentor in that same program. I also clearly conveyed my intention to support the program by directly mentoring a program fellow.


Applying for multiple lecturer posts in the UK

how should I react and what should I do if I get a positive response from B after I have accepted the offer from A

This should not happen except in very rare circumstances. The typical UK hiring timeline is the job is announced with a known interview date and an offer will be made within days (sometimes hours) of the interview. They would then expect you to verbally accept the offer within days and then ideally present you with a contract a day or so after that.

The conventional wisdom is that after getting the contract, you should withdraw your other applications. If you verbally commit to A, but A cannot generate a contract in a timely manner, then most people (but not necessarily the people at A) will understand if you accept another offer. I am not a huge believer in the conventional wisdom. A good job offer can be your job for the rest of your life and to turn down your dream job in your dream department at your dream university in your dream city with great resources and salary and a position for your partner for a job you do not want to do with crappy resources and salary in city you hate, in my opinion is not reasonable. To screw over a department because someone else offered you a step higher on the salary scale also does not seem reasonable. In other words, you need to use your judgment to decide what to do.


Never Heard Back on PhD Application but enrolled in MS program

I sympathize with your situation. To help understand your situation better can you indicate whether it is a US university and if you are an international or domestic applicant? Thanks.  Regardless, please see my response below, which is assuming you are an international student applying to a US private university.
There is a fundamental difference between Ph.D. and MS hires. Most international Ph.D. hires are paid (albeit menially) a stipend and their tuition is covered via research / teaching assistantships. In contrast, MS students bear their own tuition costs and in fact are a source of revenue for university departments. Therefore, money is potentially one reason that is causing this delay from their side.
Another delay is simply due to Ph.D. hiring cycles.  Most professors are part of committees they'd rather not be.  Ph.D. hiring is another such committee.  Therefore, many departments have fixed cycles within which they would proceed with the hiring.  Perhaps, you are ahead of the cycle in your department.  You can check this by asking pointed questions.
Additionally, professors in the US have the power to hire Ph.D.s at will if they have money.  Your discussion with a professor is a good way to ensure that your application is given priority.  However, remember that when a professor hires a Ph.D. student, they begin a long journey (5 years on average) during which a strong working relationship will be established between the two of you. Essentially, they are investing in you.  So keep that in mind in your conversations with the professor.  Furthermore, sometimes talking to current Ph.D. students who are already working in that group is a good way to figure out crucial information about the professor such as "do they have money/funds to support another Ph.D.?  What is their nature and their expectation from the incoming student?  How helpful are they with job searching / student placement later? etc. "
You mentioned an individual research project with a professor.  While it is useful to do this as it indicates to you whether you enjoy research, enjoy working with the professor and lab, it can also be a waste of time if you already know you want to get in the Ph.D. program with that professor.  Regardless, if nothin else works, an individual study is a great way to build a relationship and show your talent.
Lastly, I want to talk a little about approach.  Most students, especially those starting out, will likely be shy of asking the direct (and at times tough) questions.  It is important you mindfully not be shy/apprehensive.  However, also try not to come off as rude/impatient.  Communicating via email is an art that is learned overtime.  However, below are some pointers that may help:

Write short emails with pointed questions
Always try to be pleasant, try to not sound irritated, especially on email
If an email cannot be made short enough to be read in 1 min max., request the professor for an appointment. Indicate that a brief meeting of 15 mins will be enough, and get the conversation going
Use departmental resources such as graduate coordinator staff, other Ph.D. students to get a good idea on relevant background matters

I am pretty sure they are not being non-responsive because they think you are not qualified.  If it were that clear, they would have told you that.  I rather think that there is some kind of miscommunication / misalignment going on.  I hope it is sorted out for you soon.
Best luck!


Theorem & Lemma In Short (arXiv Version) and Extended (Peer-Reviewed Version) Papers

Essentially, what you seem to be doing here is to write an extended version of a paper that previously appeared in a different venue (here, arXiv). In this case, it is customary to include all of the relevant definitions, theorem, lemmas, and the like in the extended version.

The reason is that the longer paper - in a sense - replaces the shorter version. Thus, you would include them all. Nevertheless, you must state in your longer paper that it is an extended version of an earlier version of the paper (i.e., the short paper).

Note that you can just cite parts of your arXiv paper without including all of its results. It is probably not wise to pursue this approach, though. An arXiv paper is unreviewed, so the reviewers of your journal paper are more likely to question the correctness of the theorem in it. Since also most publishers do not consider arXiv papers to be a prior publication, there is no copyright or dual publication problem with just including theorems and proofs of your shorter paper.


From your description it sounds like the results have no implications, no relation to other problems, and is not significant in any way beyond that paper. In that case, chances are journals will not accept the paper. A paper needs to convince the editors & reviewers that its results are actually interesting.
Check out Steven Gubkin's answer to another question:

Here is a brand new mathematical theory I have invented just now (in the last 30 seconds):
A Gobleflump is a set together with a ternary operation Star(a,b,c), and a binary operation Spade(a,b) satisfying Star(Spade(a,b),Spade(c,d),Spade(e,f)) = Spade(Star(a,b,c),Star(d,e,f)).
I could now devote my life to the study of Gobleflumps. I could publish papers about extremely regular gobleflumps, and the equivalence between hyperconvex gobleflumps and hypoconvex grendleflops. This might all be legitimate, correct mathematics.
No one will ever care about my lifes work, or probably even read it, unless it makes some connection to existing mathematical theory, illuminates why something disconnected from the theory works the way it does, or solves some existing problem.

... and if no one will ever care about the results, most reputable journals will not publish them, either.


How Good Is A Recommendation Letter For MS in CS From A Workplace If It's Coming From A Mentor?

Unless the MS is very applied, I'd think that an additional academic recommendation would be better. That is especially true if they can speak to different aspects of your work.

But a letter from a mentor should, in general, be fine. It might even be better than one from a manager as the person likely has more knowledge of you and your contributions. The letter from a manager is likely to be a bit pro forma. The recommender should be clear about the relationship (i.e. mentor, not manager).


Today your interests lie in economics, but what if by the time you finish, you're interested in computational biology? Good luck selling Economics → Computational Biology to a graduate school admissions committee. On the other hand, with Mathematics as your base degree, you can cross over to most disciplines including Economics (with your chances boosted by further by internships in that discipline).

The bottom line is: the narrower your major discipline, the fewer your opportunities.


Academic literature on the construction of dangerous things

For the US Department of Defense there is the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). It is like PubMed Central but for DoD documents. Some of the content has been cleared for public release and is open to the public. Much of the content, however, has not been cleared for public release and access is controlled by a DoD employees common access card (CAC) and the network that DTIC is being accessed from. Not cleared for public release is not the same as classified/secret/top secret. Access to classified material is again CAC controlled and requires a dedicated computer on a protected network. I think, but am not sure, that DTIC is the gateway to much of the classified literature within the classified network.


How do I deal with my mentor giving first authorship of my project to a graduate student?

From what you describe, confrontation might not necessarily net you what you want (first author position), given the relationship between your advisor and the graduate student. If you don't confront him, at the very worst you still have a co-authored paper and a strong letter of recommendation, which is not too shabby. I understand it is unfair but undergraduates generally have very little bargaining power to begin with.


How to overcome lacking teaching experience for admission to Master of Education

Does inexperience teaching totally defeat one's chances of admission to an education program?

No.

I have direct experience in your situation: I entered a MEd teaching program at a top-5 U.S. university with zero teaching experience.  I did have five years of military experience, and I emphasized the leadership skills I gained from that, as well as the personnel management skills I learned. My college grades were mediocre (3.2 GPA in Electrical Engineering), GRE scores were decent but not phenomenal, and I entered the program to be certified in high school physics.

  Is there any way to convince them to see past the inexperience? How does one overcome this?

You are in the enviable position of wanting to teach math, and STEM teachers are highly sought-after and needed right now. That isn't to say that you won't be competing against highly-competitive peers, but for what it's worth you will probably be competing against fewer peers.

To overcome the lack of teaching on your resume, you should highlight any experiences you have had working with students or children (e.g., did you TA a class? Were you a camp counselor? Think outside the box to find something relevant, but don't stretch it too thin -- e.g., lifeguarding probably wouldn't quite fit the bill, but mentoring junior acolytes at your church might). You should certainly discuss why you enjoyed the tutoring, and how that informed your decision to pursue a teaching career.

Furthermore, you need to demonstrate your passion for teaching -- talk about the middle school algebra teacher who opened your eyes to the beauty of mathematics, or the calculus teacher who gave you the first real taste of a formal proof. Talk about why you love mathematics, and how important you think it is for upcoming generations to get quality mathematics teaching.

The admissions committee needs to see something special in your application that will make you a great teacher, and personal experience means a lot -- do you have 26 cousins that flock around you during family reunions to hear stories (you're a great story teller! This is a fantastic skill for a teacher!). Did you wake up every morning in tenth grade salivating at the thought of fifth period trigonometry class? (you've got legitimate passion! [and may be the only person in the world who loved trig at that age...]).

MEd programs are one of the few programs where I believe a well-written personal statement can truly make a difference in your application, so make it good. Have one or more people read your statement and give good criticism. Write it one week and re-read it a week or two later, and edit it if you don't see the passion coming out. Ask your reviewers to look for passion (or, rather, ask them after they've read it what they thought, and if "passion" doesn't show up in any reviews, re-write it).

Your letters of recommendation are extremely important, as well. You should make sure your letter writers know that you are applying to teaching programs (not research programs), and that's what you would like them to focus on. You don't want a letter that says, "X is a brilliant mathematician who can focus intently on minute details of complicated mathematical proofs for hours at a time. He has the potential to produce award-winning mathematics."  What you want is something along the lines of, "X was one of my most passionate students, who has a knack for coming up with succinct, meaningful explanations for complicated mathematical topics. I routinely saw him during office hours where we had enlightening discussions about the course. I learned as much from him as he did from my own teaching."

Your interview is obviously important, too. I suggest preparing something to teach for five minutes (high school level--if I were preparing something, I might choose compound interest -- you can teach it in about five minutes to a willing audience, and you end up with the beautiful definition of e in the end), and practicing it on someone. If I were interviewing candidates, I'd ask them to teach me something (maybe something particular), and if you have something in your back pocket that you've practiced, you'll be ready for the question if it appears. Be prepared to discuss why you didn't have the opportunity to teach (what did you do during your summers?  Were there TA opportunities that you could have taken?). Obviously, do a lot of smiling and be as personable as you can without going outside your normal personality. Have a very succinct answer to why you believe you will be a great teacher -- 30 seconds that will wow an interviewer. (one further tip: if you have an interview with multiple people, remember their names and address them with their names during the interview--this can make a very good impression).

Good luck!


Is it true that it is easier to obtain a PhD in Europe than the US on average?

Short answer: No.
Long answer: Determining the minimum bar for which a PhD can be awarded is a bad exercise. If you are merely working towards the minimum you will not successfully complete a PhD.

One thing to note is that PhDs in the US tend to be open ended (to the extent you can continue to get funding) while in Europe they tend to have fixed durations. This means in Europe the bar comes whether you are ready or not while in the US you get to chose when you  defend. Neither is easier, just different.


Just go ahead and publish. The Chinese mathematician has not contributed to your work in any way other than saying that your results would be interesting. In fact, in my eyes it would be entirely inappropriate for this person to be your coauthor.
I would suggest though to also discuss this with your PI to make sure she/he agrees.


What's the correct way to cite a paper cited by another paper?

In APA style, you can write, (e.g., see this APA tutorial)

  Featherstone et al 1900 (as cited in Thomas and Cullen 2002)

Of course, in general you should try your best to read the original and cite the original directly.

Someone in the comments asked:

  "In such case do I need to list original paper also in reference section or only the recent one I am referring to?"

The reference to the original article is the more important reference to include, but you should include both in your reference list.


I hate taking lectures, can I still survive in academia?

I can sympathize. I'm extremely susceptible to "Power Point" hypnosis: 10 slides in and my head is staring to nod, 30 slides and I'm in danger of snoring. This isn't limited to dull talks, or the amount of sleep I got the night before, it's apparently a quirk of my physiology.

However, part of your education is learning to exercise your skills in suboptimal conditions. Schwarzschild wrote three important papers on gravitation while serving on the Russian front in WWI. Attending lectures may not be optimal for you, but is it really such a huge hardship?

If you stay in academia you are probably going to need to listen to talks at conferences, listen to presentations by your students, and attend seemingly endless faculty meetings. There are equivalent obstacles in the non-academic world. By all means, arrange your days and your study environment as you find most effective. But learn to work with the fact that world is full of friction, and learn to cope with the minor inefficiencies it imposes on you.


Are student evaluations of teaching assistants read by others in the faculty?

You should expect that your teaching evaluations will be available to any faculty members in the department.  The lecturer for the class will certainly have access (and this is important for you, if you subsequently look for an academic position; your evaluations will help them to write you a letter of recommendation addressing your teaching).  Other faculty members may also see the evaluations.  In my department, any professor who wanted to see a grad student's teaching evaluations could get them.  Most faculty members are not going to be interested, but whoever makes the teaching assignments may well review your scores.  Other people may also look at your scores, for various reasons; for many years I reviewed all the grad students' teaching evaluations in my department, to look for evidence of any systematic problems.


There are no such online databases that could track down origins of ideas. To understand why a citation is used you have to read the paper. To get to the bottom of an idea you might have to follow several pathes of citations.


Are there any examples for an ArXiv publication nurturing or preventing plagiarism?

If you publish your paper on ArXiv before it is published in a peer-reviewed journal, others may steal your work and publish it peer-reviewed before you do and thus take the scientific credit. It’s difficult to attack those people since the ArXiv is not peer-reviewed.

This assumes that peer-reviewed publications determine scientific credit, which may be true in some fields but isn't universal.  In mathematics, it is not relevant at all for assigning credit.  Peer-reviewed papers are of course more thoroughly checked, but they do not give you any additional intellectual credit, so this difficulty does not even arise.  (In particular, for assigning credit an arXiv paper beats a published paper with a nontrivially later submission date.)

  For example, has a peer-reviewed journal ever withdrawn a paper because it plagiarised an ArXiv paper? Or are there well-known cases of “unpunished” plagiarism of ArXiv papers?

This is a difficult question to answer, because how could you tell?  If the plagiarist doesn't copy any text, but rather just takes ideas, then it's virtually impossible to prove that anything was stolen.

In mathematics, it works like this.  If someone publicly circulates a paper, then there's a brief window in which people who have made the same discovery independently have a chance to announce this fact and claim a share of the credit.  They should do so more or less immediately upon learning about it.

By contrast, if too much time elapses, then the community doesn't count it as simultaneous discovery, but rather at best rediscovering something that was already known (which gives far less credit to the rediscoverer).  There's not a clear cut-off for the timing, but I see it as follows: days later is definitely OK, weeks later might be OK, months later is generally not OK, a year later is definitely not OK.

The biggest weakness in this system is that there's a window in which it's possible to steal someone's ideas and claim you came up with them independently.  This is certainly uncommon (indeed, claims of independent discovery are uncommon, regardless of whether they are true or false), but it's hard to know for sure how rare it is because of the difficulty of proving plagiarism of ideas.  Most claims of independent discovery are obviously true (because there's a manuscript that couldn't have been written so quickly, or there's a history of talks or discussions with other researchers, or there are nontrivial variations on the ideas and applications), but every once in a while someone makes such a claim without clear evidence.

Even when there isn't much documentation, I'm inclined to believe claims of independent discovery.  Faking this takes a lot of chutzpah and effort, it's not something you can get away with repeatedly, and it's an awkward situation you wouldn't want to put yourself in unnecessarily, so it seems reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt.

In practice, I don't think the real danger is outright theft, where someone who wasn't working on this topic at all notices a new paper and says "That looks nice!  I think I'll steal it."  Instead, the most worrisome situation is when someone was actually working on similar ideas, but hadn't really finished sorting out the details.  When they see the paper, they immediately recognize some of their ideas, and the remaining details feel so natural that they say "Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind.  This paper is merely fleshing out my ideas."  They honestly believe that they had practically completed this work, when they might have been somewhat further than they thought.  There's a whole continuum here, from people who are basically right in their beliefs to those who are completely wrong, and it's not clear where to draw the line.

Of course I have no idea how often someone claims independent discovery based on exaggerated beliefs (again it's basically unprovable), but I imagine it happens occasionally.  It's certainly unfortunate if it takes place, but it's not nearly as bad as outright theft.  The worst-case scenario is having to share credit with someone who is less deserving.


You need to make an effort to get and understand the work related to yours. That is the only way you can make sure you are building on them, not misunderstanding. If you cite it, it means to me (as a reader) that you did use that work to reach your conclusions. You might get away with citing indirectly stuff you didn't check in detail, i.e., "Smith [19], summarizing previous work by Adam [1], Eve [2] and Noah [3, 6], states that...".


How to email professor with group concerns about class?

I think e-mailing him essentially what you wrote here is fine. You are respectful and understanding of everyone involved, and have legitimate concerns. I think an e-mail would be very likely to get a favorable response.

I think it is fine to e-mail from your institutional account, but if you prefer anonymity I think it is also fine to sign up for a Gmail or Yahoo account or something and e-mail from that.

Probably best not to mention names.


Most journals are now owned by one of the big three for-profits (Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier).
There are other journals that are owned by non-profits like the American association for the advancement of science (AAAS owns Science) or specific scientific societies. The American Physical Society publishes all the Physical Review journals. The American Institute of Physics does Applied Physics Letters, Journal of Applied Physics, Review of Scientific Instruments, and many others.
A few are owned by large funding bodies that are pushing some desired change to publishing (like HHMI which owns eLife). Things like arXiv are generally managed by academic institutes and funded by private money (the Simons Foundation and CZI are both big funders).
The high profitability of academic journals means that the for-profits are really squeezing the society journals, but AAAS and eLife are still doing fine.
There are some differences by field, but this applies to most STEM fields.


PhD: admitted with TA with 5h a week, is it standard?

"Contact hours" is standard jargon in academia for formal class time: hours when the instructor/TA and all the students are scheduled to be together.

So this basically means you will teach 5 hours of classes or discussion/recitation sections per week.  This does not count the time you will need to spend preparing your material for those classes, grading homework or exams, holding office hours, working in tutoring labs, responding to student questions via email or online forum, meeting with the instructor or course coordinator, and so on. (Although you are in "contact" with students during office hours or in a tutoring lab, the term "contact hours" doesn't include informal face-to-face time like this.)

Once all this is added up, I'd guess it will be around the 20 hours per week that you expected.

This does not seem to be a special offer.  I would guess it's the normal offer that all the accepted grad students receive.  (In any case, decisions to make someone a "better" offer, e.g. less work for the same money, would normally not take into account their age or marital status - most universities would consider that inappropriate or even illegal.  Such decisions would instead be based on academic merit and potential.)

As you consider this offer, you'll want to find out what's actually expected of TAs in this program, and how much time and energy TAs typically have to devote to their duties.  Most math departments invite accepted grad students to the campus for a 1-2 day visit to help you explore what they have to offer.  This would be a good time to ask about TA duties - ask the graduate coordinator about the official duties, and ask the current grad students what they actually experience.  Sometimes there is a difference between the two.


Problems in coping with my PhD Supervisors

I would suggest you to write a preliminary research findings report to both of your supervisors.

In the report, explain what you have done in the past two years. State the facts. Don’t point the fingers.  You describe what you have tried and why they failed. Don’t make it too long. Refer the details to the notes and the data stored somewhere else. The final section of the report is your plan to tackle the problem further.

The purpose of the report is to let them be aware of the efforts you have spent. It documents the lessons learned. With the report, your supervisors and you would have more understandings about the problem you have been working on for two years. Bear this in your mind, it is likely you would know more about the problem when you write the report.

The report will answer their questions, Are you really interested in your problem? Yes. you wanna leave the course? No. But you need their help to finish it. If they tell you they can’t help you after they read the report, then it’s time to either change the research problem or find yourself another supervisor(s).