How an international student can get a grant by himself?

Typically grants for international students in the U.S. are extremely limited because all government/state grants are only for US citizens or permanent residents (you need to have a green card). Depending on your field though private companies, NGOs and other entities whose funding doesn't come from public sources, will have grants that are open to non-US citizens.
The other option is to apply to grants through your advisor, so he would "sign" the grant proposal under his name but you prepare the proposal. Keep in mind that in this case if anything happens with your advisor he/she is holder of the grant and can decide how to spend the money. For example he might pick another graduate student. Although I imagine in Engineering big private companies might have incentives to pay a PhD student to work on something that will profit them as well.

It is extremely rare for non US citizens to find grants that will support the full duration of the PhD. Another option is Fullbright. Your best option though is to find an advisor who can guarantee at least 1-2 years of salary/tuition to get you started, otherwise you might have to TA to pay for your salary.


How to reference confidential data in reference list

Before you do anything with the confidential data, you should have cleared its use with the company in question. Giving away the data in any form without their express permission could get you into a lot of trouble.

That said, if the report containing the data is a internal company technical report, it should be cited as such in a bibliography. This provides enough information for a person to track it down, although you may want to state that it is not available to the general public.


Is it appropriate as a referee to contact an author after the editor rejected the manuscript?

One important consideration is whether the paper is publicly available (for example, being circulated on the web as a preprint).  If it is, then it's perfectly reasonable to get in touch with the authors and offer suggestions.  You don't need to address the question of how you heard about the paper if you don't want to.  If you do want to reveal yourself as a reviewer, I think it's fine, but I've run across people who disagree about this.

It's much trickier if the existence of the paper is itself confidential.  If for some reason I submitted a paper without circulating it publicly, and then after rejection a referee contacted me privately with detailed suggestions for improvement, I would feel uncomfortable.  It would look a little too much like an attempt to become involved in the research or writing, and I would wonder whether the referee might take offense if I just said "thanks for the suggestions" and didn't engage in further discussion or collaboration.

If you have confidential knowledge about a paper, then you must not even appear to be using it for your own benefit.  For example, you can't ask to start a collaboration or try to find out more about this research.

If there's no public preprint, then it's safest to make contact through the editor, and at the very least you should ask the editor about what you intend to do (the editor may well object, and in any case you need to avoid seeming secretive about it).  Even if the editor approves, you should be careful, since innocent actions may be misinterpreted.


How to write a white paper for a non-academic?

There are basically no restriction on who can write a paper, so, clearly you can. If you have no affiliation, it might be hard to go publish a "free" paper (e.g., a technical report or a pre-print on arxiv), but you can always consider submitting your idea to a workshop/conference. However, you might have to pay the conferences/travel fees (although some conferences might help you, if you can't afford it). You can also submit your idea to a journal, as many don't charge anything to publish. You can of course also just write a PDF and put it on your website, or even do a long blog post.

There is one thing you might need to be careful of, since you might not be used to write academic paper: a good paper is not just a good idea, this idea needs to be validated. In other words, you can't just write: "here is a cool idea I had", you also need to describe how it differs from existing approaches (perhaps your idea has been already published), and you need to describe why it's a good idea. There are many approaches to do so, for instance by presenting your idea in a formal setting and prove that you can mitigate DDoS attacks (probably under some assumptions). You can also run some experiments, and show that your approach mitigated x% more attacks than some known approaches.

If you're interested in eventually pursuing a career in academia, showing that you can explain and validate your work might be as important as having a good idea (because not only you have a good idea, but you can convince others that it's a good one!).

Note that another approach in your situation could be to implement your idea as an open-source software, and if it's adopted by the community, then it's another form of validation.


Finding Post-PhD employment in Mathematics - How difficult?

The American Mathematical Society publishes detailed data about mathematics employment in the United States.  In particular, the Report on New Doctoral Recipients has

  "... information about the fall employment plans of doctoral recipients, a demographic profile summarizing characteristics of citizenship status, gender, and racial/ethnic group, the starting salaries, and other employment information about new doctoral recipients"

The data is always delayed by a year because of response and processing time. The most recent report as I write this is 2013-2014. My own take is as follows.

First, the statistics show that the overall unemployment rate is low: a new math PhD recipient is likely to be able to find a job of some sort immediately after graduation. In 2013-14, 85% of math PhD recipients were known to be employed immediately after graduation, and only 5% were known to still be looking (9% were unknown).  This is partially due to the ability of mathematics PhDs to look for jobs in business, industry, and government, although the majority work in academia.

Second, based on my personal opinion and experience, the job market for postdocs and research-intensive tenure track positions is very competitive (this is true both in the U.S. and Europe, as well as some other countries and regions). You will need to be one of the very strongest candidates in your area to have a reasonable chance at such jobs.

Third, the market for tenure-track positions at non-research-intensive colleges is also competitive, but in a different way. For these, you want to have a strong vita showing teaching skill and research ability in line with the institution where you are applying.  Simply having a PhD and teaching a handful of classes as an graduate student is unlikely to make you stand out from the other applicants.

Overall, because the job market is competitive, if you do enter a PhD program, you need to plan early for the career path you wish to follow. Simply "getting a PhD", and only worrying about the job market in your last semester, is not a good strategy. You want to begin shaping your vita early in your graduate program so that you are in a good position when you graduate.


What to do with gaps in mathematical papers?

If the paper has not been published yet and the gap is brought to the attention of the editor and/or referee, they should inform the authors of the problem and ask for it to be corrected. If the authors don't correct the gap then the paper should be rejected.

If the paper has already been published, anyone else who finds the gap, brought it to the attention of the authors and didn't receive a satisfactory reply has two main formal options that I can think of:

Write to the journal which published the paper. The journal can decide what to do, with an obvious step being to retract the paper. For an important result that was published in a serious journal, I expect the journal to take the matter quite seriously and solicit opinions from experts (which is essentially the same as the "gap referee" idea in your question) about whether such a drastic measure should be taken. In the event of a decision to retract, the journal will issue a statement that it no longer endorses the correctness of the paper, and probably add an explanation of the reasoning behind the decision.
Alternatively, the discoverer of the gap can write and publish a paper pointing out the gap.

In both of these approaches, the existence of the gap has entered the official scientific record and most other researchers in the field will become aware of it, so the risk of people erroneously relying on an unsubstantiated result is reduced, though not completely eliminated. The risk can be further reduced by publicizing the gap through other informal channels such as blogs, seminar and conference talks, emails to groups of colleagues, posts on MathOverflow, etc.


How to judge the quality of academic paper (students pov)?

First, I think that a paper is a "good" paper if you can learn something from it. It doesn't matter what other, more experienced, people have to say. The reason for that is ....

Most serious researchers in various fields, math in particular, write for a certain audience. That audience doesn't include novices. Papers are written for other people at a similar level of sophistication as the writer and who are able to fill in details of argument without it being explicitly provided in all cases. Occasionally this leads to errors as you might guess, but it is the way of it.

But, on the other hand, most researchers also include a fairly complete list of references and perhaps an even richer bibliography. This is where the novice, even a beginning doctoral student, has to start. Read a paper that seems interesting or was given to you by an advisor. When (not if, when) you get stuck, go to the references for older papers that contribute to the ideas of the current paper. Start to read and understand them until you get stuck. Then, ... Do this recursively until you reach Euclid if necessary, or until you understand the current paper you are reading and then work forward through the stack (or the tree, actually) until you understand the paper of interest that started you on the quest.

Take a lot of notes as you do this. Don't depend on memory, especially short term memory to keep you on track.

You may need to do this process a few times until you become more accustomed to the ideas and gain insight into what is going on in that small part of math. The papers contain a lot of detail, but it is the insight, not the detail, per se, that gets you to true understanding.

But the notes you take will help guarantee that the whole (painful) process actually leaves you better off at the end. If you actually learn something, you have made a personal advancement.

I'll note for completeness that some people in science and math do write for a broader audience. Carl Sagan was noted for this, of course, as is Neil deGrasse Tyson. You can learn quite a lot from such authors, but not to the same depth you get from specialists writing for other specialists.


How does a graduate student judge if one is slacking off?

It's a good question, and one that's rather difficult to answer. I'll say a few things though.

being able to judge your own level of progress and evaluate yourself honestly but fairly is a crucial part of your development. After all, you won't have an advisor for very long, but you'll be a researcher for a long time. So it's good that you're asking this question
Research has many phases, and to evaluate your progress it's important to recognize which phase you're in.

in an exploratory phase where you're looking at different topics to see what might be worth pursuing, you should be reading a lot. A plausible metric here could be whether you're reading something every day, and if you're getting a sense of familiarity with the literature (you know citations without having to look up the bibliography, you keep encountering papers you've read before, and so on)
when you are working on a particular problem, do you have an idea that you're trying ? If not, what are you doing to search for the next idea ? do you have concrete tests of whether the idea is going to fail or not ? If you're thinking concretely and constructively, then you'll automatically make progress (notice that I'm not talking about how long it takes, but rather whether you see paths to progress)
when you're writing up work, are you methodically identifying things that need to be edited/cleaned/removed, and are you spending enough time each day working on these. When there's a lot of grunt work to do, time spent is a good measure of productivity.

Conversely, students (and researchers!) often become unproductive when:

they don't know what to do next, and don't know to ask, or how to find something to do next
they have things to do next, but are overwhelmed/fearful, and avoid doing them, or fritter away time in busy work (getting the exact right font for the title, for example)

The trick is not to get caught up in doing things at a certain rate, or worry about the large-scale,  but rather ensure that you always have something to do next. If you don't, that's when you go talk to your advisor.


Is it considered plagiarism for a professor to use uncited sources in teaching materials?

Plagiarism involves dishonesty: taking someone else's work and leading others to believe it is your own.

In the case of unpublished teaching materials, I don't think it's assumed that all the examples, etc., a professor uses are original unless an outside source is cited. So I wouldn't strictly consider this plagiarism (though citing outside sources is definitely preferable to not citing them).

It's possible that in your academic culture it is assumed that all of a professor's materials are original, in which case, the above would not apply.


What do universities get from students with valuable research ideas?

Your question is based on a few assumptions, some of which are loose or close to be false. I'd outline some of them:

Ideas are valuable to Universities.  No, they are not. Universities may be interested in hiring people who have ideas and are able to convert them into working implementations and/or academic publications, thus generating prestige for the University and attracting more grant money and more students. But if the University does not have people to get your idea onboard, your idea, however cool, is wasted on them.
Universities can check my findings and officially confirm that they are scientific. No, Universities don't do this. The only `official' routes to recognise the scientific contribution is to publish it in peer-reviewed journal or patent it. Both require much more effort on your side than just formulating an idea.
Professors look through my writing, checks how the simulator works and comes to the conclusion that it, indeed, does what I promised. Normally, professors would not spend time doing this unless they see a clear benefit in terms of publications and grants. This basically means that someone checking your work would expect to become a co-author of this work and share all the prestige (and potentially profit) generated. Think twice if that's what you want.


Do UK universities have a special obligation to advertise jobs externally?

I think you are misunderstanding how academic job searches work in the UK. All jobs, and I believe this is not specific to universities, must be advertised internally first to individuals in the "redundancy pool". If, and only if, there is no one in the redundancy pool that can meet the minimum requirements with 6 months of training can the job be advertised externally. The redundency pool is available to people, I think, from 3 months before their contract ends until 3 months afterwards.

Current employees not in the redundancy pool, can get prompted within the same job family without having to advertise the job at all. At my university there is no system for moves, lateral or upwards, across job families. That said, if you really want someone, you can regrade and reclassify them.


Advice on career move - from industry to academia

Let me be clear: you don't want to move back into academia; you see academia as a stepping stone in a lateral move to a different country. I think this difference matters, because most of the conventional problems that people have when moving back into academia (is my track record good enough? are my connections still active? etc.) don't apply to you, given that you already have an offer. For your ultimate goal it matters little if you are successful or not in your postdoc. Consequently, I am not sure what good advice we can give you: if you want to move to the US, and this is a way to move to the US, what more is there to say?

That said, I can't help but wonder if there are not much more direct ways to achieve what you try to achieve. If you are employable now for an US company, can't you find a job remote and move directly to industry? If you are not employable for an US company, will a postdoc really change this? If you don't mind a pay cut, would an internship not be a better way to get into companies? Have you fully understood the visa implications? What will you do if at the end of your postdoc no industrial positions are forthcoming?

All in all, this seems like a fairly contrived way to achieve your goal. I am not saying it's necessarily a bad idea (there may be industries were "being around" is required for job hunting, although my field - IT - is certainly not one of them), but it feels you should still explore alternatives before committing to this plan.


Professors refusing to write recommendation letter due to change of field

Your professors are in essence, trying to help. They think that their letters would not carry enough weight to help you. They may be thinking about if they'd admit a student from a different field whose letter-writers said nothing about their chemistry experience (and apparently deciding they would not). Professor's time is valuable, and they don't want to spend it writing a letter that they think would be useless.

But once I said I am not applying for a chemistry degree but ECE/CS 2 of my references said they cannot give me the reference for non-chemistry related programs since they know nothing about my programming skills.

I do not know whether you need letters that espouse your programming skills, but the solution is to:

Tell the professors that you have already got a letter-writer addressing your programming skills, and ask them to write about something more specific, like your research experience, or go-getting-ness (etc., etc.). You have a letter that explains why you'd be a good ECE/CS student, right?
Explain why that's not a concern, and then ask them to focus on something more specific.

If they still refuse, unfortunately, there is little you can do.


How many times can you present the same material at different conferences before it becomes stale?

It's important also to look at your audience. If you're likely to be giving the same talk to two audiences that overlap significantly, then the time between talks is less important than the fact that the audiences will perceive the talk as 'stale'.

For example, you might give a talk at a general interest conference, and then a slightly modified version of it at a workshop with specialists, many of whom may not have attended the general interest conference. That would be fine. You might then go on the colloquium circuit and give the talk at venues with only small overlap with the specialist group.

But if you gave the same (or similar) talk to the same (or similar) audience more than once, that would be a problem.


How to effectively supervise grad student calculus teaching assistants (TAs)?

I'm not in math, but I have supervised several times multiple sections of a first-year software design course taught primarily by grad students (usually I also am teaching one of the sections).

Weekly meetings are helpful, at least an hour, especially for first-time TAs
Collaborating on course content (presentations, exercises, quizzes, homework, exams) via the cloud (e.g., Google apps) is great
My policy is to share all my content with new TAs when they come on board, with the agreement that they'll improve and re-share it back.
I try to get extra $ for "tutoring" hours for them, outside the course, so as to make the work less painful. Anything that boosts morale and shows you're on their side is great.
I try to nurture leadership within the group, as turnover is high.
I used to pay (out of my pocket) an end-of-semester team-building social outing (I felt it was worth it, to have motivated TAs). However, when the department chair found out I was doing it, he started covering the cost from then on, if I invited him, too (this has become a normal thing, since it's essential to get and keep for a while the motivated TAs).
If you can approach it as a management problem and apply some management techniques (don't take on their monkeys), it's feasible. Also, I scooped a few good research students (and was able to spot some I wouldn't work well with) thanks to the experience.
My department doesn't rotate this kind of responsibility, since courses are generally "owned" by only one or two professors. We are unionized, and have considered having this kind of supervision recognized formally in terms of teaching load (which it still is not). It comes up every time our collective agreement is re-negotiated, but the % of faculty it affects is small. The P&T committees take it into consideration, however.


How to quote "... (see Chapter 5 above) ..."

Quotation is about honest and lucid representation of the original material.

Just as you would not include an extra irrelevant sentence at the end, you can freely omit an extra irrelevant phrase in the middle.  As you note, the standard way to do this is with ellipses: "..."

The important thing is to make sure that your ellipsis makes no changes in the meaning of the quotation.  If you change meaning, that's quote mining, and is dishonest.  For something like your example, however, where you are omitting a cross-reference that is meaningless out of context, however, there is no problem at all.


Is it appropriate to ask a professor about continuing my degree?

To me it never hurts to discuss possible options. Complex mathematics can be a difficult hurdle to cross and it seems you're making a leap from basic math to university-level math without being prepared for it.

Explain your situation in detail. I'm sure this isn't a first for the head of your department and maybe (s)he can suggest some courses which might help you in catching up with the program.

I'd keep your high blood pressure problem out of the discussion.


What should I focus on before starting a research internship?

You should always make sure your basic understanding is at a very good level in any research project, particularly in the sciences. An important part of science and mathematics is being able to communicate your ideas in very simple terms. I think Einstein said that "if you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough." If all you can do is prove things but not explain what the results really mean or how they connect to the basic components of your field, then you're not really doing science or math - you're only shuffling around symbols on a page. It's a bit like a computer: computers can prove things about math (automatic theorem provers), but would you say they're doing math if they don't understand what it is that they are doing? All they do is shuffle symbols around and come to conclusions based on basic axioms inputted by the user.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't pick away at the problem immediately. You should maybe poke around and get an idea of how things go but if you are put on the spot and asked a basic question and you can't answer it, you'll look like you haven't done your due diligence. You're always going to have some gap in your understanding, even at the fundamental levels, but that doesn't excuse not having any understanding of the basics.

Here's another take: if you end up solving the problem you're given, your professor might ask you to write up a paper on the work to be submitted to Journal XYZ. If all you can do is explain the steps you took but not connect it to the things the reader knows, your paper will be completely dead in the water and will likely get shrugged off. A good paper has good results. A great paper has a very good narrative with good results that is very clear and understandable. Even if you don't write the introduction yourself, throughout the paper you will naturally connect results or ideas back to things others have done ("Our approach relates to this work by [authors] in such and such ways," or "Employing a common technique, we have..."). If you don't have a basic understanding of the things in your field, you can't make this connection for the reader (which forces them to hopefully come to this realization themself). This is not a skill you should expect to have immediately; it takes time to learn and hone this skill but it is an important aspect of paper writing.

A personal anecdote/cautionary tale: I started on my current project a few years ago in undergrad. At the time, I had a very rough understanding of advanced mathematics. I knew enough measure theory and functional analysis to vaguely understand ideas and basic proofs but not enough to know what are acceptable procedures and what are not. I neglected the basics - not because of my own doing, but lack of proper supervision - and ended up too focused on my project. It's a bit like putting blinders up: you won't have any understanding outside of your project and can't properly judge the validity of what you're doing. I was rearranging integrals like it was going out of style because I didn't know that I couldn't do that in my situation due to skipping the basics. I ended up with results but they were not acceptable proofs by any means. Since I was so focused on my project, I ended up not having much of an understanding of the basics and looked like a deer in headlights when people asked me about the basic, very technical details of the mathematics I should have been using. Since then, I've more than made up for all of those deficiencies but had I not unintentionally neglected the basics, I wouldn't have wasted so much time (read: years) doing stupid things that were not valid at all.


How to restart an assignment after a long break?

Actually, if it looks like gibberish, then starting over is probably the wisest option. It will get you back in the flow. Put the first "version" aside and just begin again from the description you have of the task.

I'll note that some people doing important work re-write from scratch, maybe more than once, to get what they think is a better result each time.


Advisor ignoring his Ph.D. student after getting tenure

I'm really sorry to hear about this situation.

School officials can not do anything, and changing my advisor after four years of hard work will result in a complete reboot.

This surprises me. Every university differs, but in general you should bring these sorts of issues to your Associate Chair/Director, etc. of Graduate Studies in your department. If they aren't able to mediate with you and your supervisor, or aren't willing to, in most universities that I'm familiar with you should escalate your complaint. Perhaps you have an Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, or if there is a Faculty of Graduate Studies, there is somebody that you can consult there.
Barring this, you should seek advice from either your graduate students association. There may be informal avenues of support that you can pursue.
Most universities have policies around the change of supervisor, as this happens more commonly than you may think.


How secure is it to receive a verbal offer for an academic position in UK?

An email offering you the job is not a 'verbal' offer, and although it's not as binding as a contract, I would certainly consider it secure, particularly from the head of school.

Note that the contract may come via snail mail and if you're on a different continent that could take a while. Perhaps you could try to get a confirmation from HR that the contract has been sent.


Covid gap year and grad school admissions

With the COVID pandemic affecting a lot of ways of life, graduate department adcoms are more likely to be understanding of certain abnormalities in transcripts and such when they review them, at least in the immediate upcoming cycles.  These can include having to take classes P/F, as some schools have switched to that grading model as a result of having to go entirely online.  In general also, I don't believe that taking over four years to finish undergrad will be a liability either; even in normal circumstances, things can happen that graduate department adcoms will also understand, such as major changes, having to retake classes after a dismal year, etc.

That said, you will have a gap in your CV come application time, hence the term "gap year."  While you could take a break and "do nothing," a better use of the gap year/semester would be, as you said, to find work or attempt to do a (preferably research) internship.  Most are in the summer, but there are a few, especially in industry, that will take on students for the regular semester.  You mentioned your home environment is difficult, so especially if the pandemic situation improves enough, why not take the time to try and gain experience that could be relevant come time to apply to graduate programs?  If anything, do something that you could brag about to adcoms or your friends rather than spend the semester doing nothing.

Overall though, I do feel that taking a gap semester/year could be beneficial in this case.  Especially if you have just gone through a relatively stressful semester, you could use a longer break before going back into school.


Is it appropriate to email a professor asking for a possible summer project, through online correspondence?

Given this premise, is it appropriate to contact the professor asking for a possible summer project through online correspondence?

I doubt you'll get a positive answer, but there's nothing offensive about asking, as long as the way you phrase your e-mail doesn't come across as entitled or demanding.  Given that you are concerned about whether it's even appropriate to ask, I'm not too worried about that.

There are a number of reasons why this probably won't work out: supervising a student can be a fair amount of work, online correspondence is an inefficient way to do it, and there's usually plenty of demand from local students already.  However, it can't hurt to ask, and you might happen to ask just when the professor has in mind a project that none of the local students have the time or expertise to take up.

  Also, should I mention that I would be applying to the program next year?

I think you should.  It's a tricky issue, since you don't want to make it sound like that's the only reason you're interested (and learning or doing research are secondary), or like you expect that it will lead to guaranteed admission.  In fact, I'd recommend explicitly addressing these issues, perhaps by including something like this partway through your e-mail: "For context, I should point out that I'm planning to apply to the [university] Ph.D. program next year, and you are someone I have in mind as a possible advisor.  Of course I understand that I may not be admitted, but working on a summer project would be a valuable learning experience regardless of where I end up attending graduate school."


Helping spouse adjust when relocating for an academic position?

The answer depends on the academic ambition of your spouse. If she/he has none, your question is borderline off-topic on this site. In this case, you can look into things similar to the Harvard Spouse & Partners Association, which I personally would only join with a gun to my head, but might be something your spouse is into.

The rest of my answer assume she/he wishes to stay in the academic loop.

From what I saw in several universities in Europe and the US, several universities try to take into account dual career ambitions. Especially if your spouse is a woman, chances are the institution that hired you will consider creating some sort of academic position for her. Look for things like 'gender-equality office' to have more information on the topic.

If there is no such thing, I know that some people attend classes and seminars in the local universities (this is true in universities unlike Harvard, were guest attendance is allowed and free). Some volunteer as lab assistants. Some join local chapters of scientific societies (a good way to meet potential employers or hear about academic opportunities).


Which GPA is more important for applying to PhD programs, graduate or undergraduate?

There are several competing concerns that make this question difficult to answer.

As BrenBarn notes in his comment, more recent information is more indicative of your current skills. Especially if you show significant improvement, which most programs will take into account. Graduate programs will also (hopefully) consist of more difficult classes that are closer to the difficulty level of the material you will be tackling in graduate school.

On the other hand, applications seem to be very comparison-based. Applicants for a year are compared against each other and also against successful (or unsuccessful) candidates from previous years. This is anecdotal, but I know that some programs explicitly group and rank candidates based on their undergraduate institution for their first round of decisions (e.g. the top couple from each top-5 school are always accepted, the bottom third from most schools are rejected). The fact that most applicants to US PhD programs don't have a graduate degree means that your undergraduate GPA may be more convenient for these comparisons, so it might actually get looked at more.

In programs that do this, I suspect that your undergraduate GPA will be more important for getting into the group of applicants that will actually be considered, but that your graduate GPA will become more important after that, as the committee examines the borderline applications more closely. But this is probably dependent on the specific program and their procedures, and I don't think that there is a consistent answer.


Do hiring committees look at a candidate's StackExchange account?

Yes, it can happen, though I expect it is rare.

I was recently asked in a job interview whether I was the Tara B on math.SE.  The interviewer who asked the question is also on math.SE, and we have answered some of the same questions.  I have met him in real life and e-mailed him once to ask for a paper, but I had the impression that he primarily remembered me from stackexchange.  (I did get the job, but I doubt that my SE participation was a significant factor.)

(Incidentally, this also demonstrates that even if you only use part of your name on SE, your account might still be noticed.)


Mentioning that a part of the thesis was done at another university in my PhD thesis

A simple statement such as "This study was carried out at X University under the supervision of Professor A" would probably suffice, but check with your supervisor in case there are any local regulations that you have to follow.

For example, my university requires every PhD thesis to have a "declaration" statement after the abstract, in which you list things like funding sources, collaborators and any publications resulting from your research. Your university may require something similar, in which case you would put this statement there.


I prepared a course, but cancelled it due to lack of participants. How to describe in CV?

I'm pretty sure this isn't the answer you want, but I don't think you should mention it in your CV. You have no proof of the quality of the materials you prepared (since they were never used or assessed and you got no feedback on them), or even that they exist (unless you have uploaded them to a public repository or something; even then you are unlikely to get much credit for them).

Where they might come in handy is during an interview: if teaching is a significant part of the job (particularly teaching in a similar field), you may be asked 'how would you prepare a course' or something, in which case you can describe your experiences - although this relies pretty heavily on you being asked the right question at interview, and evidence of practical experience of actual teaching, and positive feedback from participants, will be viewed more highly if you have it from other projects.


example of mail to send to supervisor after a long period without news

I agree with Solar Mike, at this point formality might not be the most important concern here.

I just had a big break, and recently returned to work with my supervisors, my first email to my supervisors after months of radio silence was simply

  "Dear professor *, hope you are well. I have recovered and am ready to
  resume my research, I'd like to schedule a supervision meeting soon to
  catch up and plan the next steps. Regards."

For your supervisor, the message is "the student is resuming" and that's it, save the details (reasons why you were away from your study) for a face to face meeting.

Remember your supervisor is always there to support you. Don't over think it.


What are the biggest changes when transitioning from graduate student to professor?

Your question can be answered partly by the different time sharing:

link

Other bigger changes for a professor:

Much stronger independence and responsibility and expected to be successful, while balancing all of this correctly. With all its implications. Being an academic role model within and outside of your group, leading your team, but also leaving room for creativity and self-development to your group members. And this is sometimes still difficult for full professors, some apparently suffering under this pressure or trying to bypass it by shifting responsibility to co-workers, wrong managing of division of labour, scientific misconduct... without this correct balancing probably much less questions would be asked on academia.se?!

Though, in my opinion the most important and inobvious and maybe most argued change is that you are expected to give back to the society and public. It's not like you have won in the job lottery and can lean back more like for industry or civil servants positions and stick to your 40 hour contract. There is a reason why most professors work many more hours a week, it's a lifelong commitment to their job and its duties and privileges. And therefore it is a important life decision one should make before starting to pursue an academic career ending within professorhip.

On the other side, coming up, defining and realizing good/competitive research ideas over decades can be mentally exhausting, also a sabbatical nowadays has become an off-academia phenomenon and in academia typically meant having really time for finding and outlining new research ideas and questions apart from the other time-consuming task above in the graphic.

Soft skills are necessary and helpful like in every other job, but not sufficient. Many universities offer such courses specially designed for students and postdocs and getting such certificates is helpful (project management, academic english,...)

Professors are typically not taught to teach, they learn this themselves and in my opinion every student has experienced this result in a better or worse way. But evaluation of teaching of a applicant for proffesorship is often a crucial criterion to become full professor. Therefore, a proficient language level (if no native speaker) is often necessary and good feedback/evaluations by the students, if the professor is not outstanding in acquired funding and publication track.

This article on a "A year in the life of a new professor" on jumping from lab to classroom is also a good read to get a up to date impression of young professors

Disclaimer: I'm no professor, postdoc on the road maybe to become one...


In places outside the US and Europe, how do I know if the standard is that one applies to a PhD program with a specific PhD advisor already in mind?

1) Find a school you want to apply to.

2) Email the graduate admissions contact person in the department.

3) In that email, ask politely.

4) Say thank you.


Does the source of funding matter in determining academic promotion?

The point of assessing funding is not to ask, "Is this person funded today?"  Rather, it's to ask, "Will this person be funded in five, ten, and fifteen years?"

And the point of asking about funding is two-fold. Over that time period, will this person be performing high quality work that makes our department and university look better? And will this person be bringing in money that can be shared among other workers through indirect costs?

If you think about that, the various sources of funding do have different levels of attractiveness to the university/department. Someone who is independently wealthy and pays $500,000 per year to support their lab, is less attractive than someone who has an NIH grant that pays $500,000 to their lab, because the latter also pays overhead to the department and helps keep the lights on (literally).

Moreover, the independently wealthy person may lose all their money, or may simply unilaterally decide not to use it that way after three years. Same applies to a rich philanthropist (or the philanthropist may turn out to be a terrible person that the department doesn't want to be associated with).

On the other hand, a researcher who has demonstrated that they can get money from the NIH, or the NSF or another long-established government agency, this year, probably has a decent chance of getting more money from them in five and ten years.

So a source of funding that comes from a stable organization, with predictable and open funding plans, that covers overhead, would be more attractive than sources that are less stable, less open, and less predictable, and that cover less overhead.

Such stable organizations tend to be government-run (at least in North America, and I think in most of the Western world), but there are certainly private foundations that are just about as good, as far as promotion is concerned.

I don't know of an objective source that could rank the attractiveness of funding, though.


What are "post-deadline paper submissions"?

You can think of post-deadline submissions as reserving seats on overbooked flights: if someone doesn't show up, you get the place. But in case of conferences, not that automatically.

Some twenty years ago, when conference submissions were handled through emails, post-deadline submissions were not that uncommon, at least in my field. You would have sent an email apologizing for not having been able to respect the deadline, and hoped for the best. If the technical committee found your work valuable and the organizers could find a free slot, either oral or poster, your paper would have been accepted and your submission would have been added to the book of abstracts as a spare sheet with the headline "post-deadline submission". I recall conferences with around 5-6 post-deadline submissions.

With the advent of submissions managed through websites, it seems to me that post-deadline submissions have been progressively less accepted.

  Do post-deadline papers get vetted differently, or do they basically receive an extended deadline?

How post-deadline submissions are handled really depends on the conference organizers, and how much post deadline the submission is. In some cases, they could be reviewed directly by the chairs of the technical committee rather than by the designated reviewers.


Superfluous usually means unnecessary. So the person is claiming that a discipline is unnecessary. Presumably, this is a claim that can be investigated further: does research in that discipline have any kind of external impact ? does it affect other related disciplines ? Is there at least a path from the questions being asked to some future impact ?

In fact these are all good questions to ask about any discipline, whether it's deemed superfluous or not. And these are good questions to ask about one's own research in a discipline.

p.s While this is off topic, there's a common feeling among CS folks that HCI is either fluffy or superfluous. All of these people are also forbidden from using a Kinect, any video game console, a tablet interface, or even a smartphone.


Is it common for a journal to reject a paper after accepting it subject to minor revisions?

Is it common for a journal to reject a paper after previously accepting it?

It’s certainly not common, but it’s also not entirely unheard of or something that should never happen per se. Coincidentally something along that lines happened to me yesterday.

See this from the journal’s point of view: When they consult somebody as a reviewer, they assume them reliable and thus it would be odd to fully ignore their judgement. If this reviewer raised severe objections, it would be unwise of the journal to leave them unaddressed.

On the other hand, if two reviewers gave a positive evaluation of your paper, it seems equally unwise to reject your paper without even giving you the opportunity to react to the third reviewer’s criticisms. I thus strongly suggest that you check the wording of the journal’s decision letter and your paper’s status carefully as to whether your paper was actually rejected or they just want you to address the third reviewer’s comments and decide upon that. If your paper was actually rejected, you might want to consider a rebuttal due to the above reasons.

What seems a little odd is that a third reviewer was considered at this stage. Could it be that this reviewer was asked in the first round of revision and turned their review in only recently for some reason?

Finally, a sidenote: If the reviewer actually argued against your paper because it “implies certain things”, this gives you a strong argument for rebuttal. Even if a paper’s result imply that the first law of thermodynamics does not hold, it should not be rejected on that basis.


Submitting more than three letters of recommendation to a math PhD program

The first criterion, of course, is that if a particular institution's application intsructions communicate that only three letters should be sent, then abide by that. For the ones that say "at least three" or the like:
To be honest, in practice it really depends on the internal details of each university's application storage system and how it lets reviewers view applicants' files—and this can vary wildly from place to place. At my institution, if you have four letters of recommendation, they will all be visible when I look at your file. In other places, their online portal might have specific spots for three letters and no more (I would hope such institutions would make it clear in their instructions that only three letters should be sent).
As someone who has reviewed graduate applications for nearly twenty years, I can tell you that if my file system allows me to see the letters, I will read all the letters if I am interested in an applicant. (Well, I probably wouldn't read ten letters … but certainly four.) If you have reasons to believe that the letters will offer complementary perspectives on your excellence, I would use them all.


Does getting pay to be a subject in an experiment violate an F1 visa in the US?

You need to ask the international students' office at your university, because

It's a delicate legal issue of the type they are trained to navigate, and
The answer may depend on the particulars of how the university handles its students and how your experiment handles compensation, and
The answers to these questions change frequently, as visa and immigration regulations mutate.

Even if somebody on this site could give a correct answer and take legal responsibility for it, it would not be safe for somebody else to rely on it in the future.


In what cases are you able to start a postdoc without a "conferred" PhD?

If the postdoc requires "degree in hand" by a certain date, then there's little flexibility. The actual degree must be conferred by the university.

That being said, a good number of postdocs instead require that all of the requirements for the PhD be completed before a certain date. This usually means that that the dissertation has been deposited, if not defended.  On the extreme end of flexibility, some will simply take the word of the dissertation advisor that the dissertation will be finished by the start date.

Some postdocs will even allow you to start without a degree in hand if all of the requirements for the degree have been satisfied. Some will be satisfied with a letter from the advisor, others will require a letter from the registrar. How strict they will be may be correlated to how many times they've been burned in the past with non-completers.

I don't think there are stats are on how many postdocs (and in which fields) are strict vs. flexible. What I think you'll find is that once a flexible department has been burned by a "postdoc" who never finished their PhD, then they shift to being more strict.

tl;dr: Ask the postdoc program if they are willing to be flexible and if so, which documentation they require.


Is it acceptable to ask another faculty member from different department to review my paper prior to submission to a journal?

Of course, as Enthusiastic Student says, you should check with your co-authors before sharing your unpublished work with anyone.  Once that is done, you can certainly ask.

Statisticians are very often asked to consult on the use of statistics in papers from other areas.  So it's possible that your institution has some system in place for such requests.  You should check with your advisor and/or other people who have done this before.  For example, some statistics departments have a "consulting pool" of graduate students who are available for jobs like this.

Some statisticians may only be interested if they would be doing enough work to qualify for co-authorship on the paper (see When does a statistical consultant become a co-author or collaborator? as linked by Stephan Kolassa).  Or, they may want to be paid.


Do not lie.

You never know who is going to read your application. What if the committee includes a Russian person who is familiar with the Russian system and spots the inconsistency right away?

I would write the actual job title and then describe the tasks you had there, emphasizing that they were research tasks.


As F stands for failing, of course there's a stigma associated with it. How much depends on the course in which it's received. For example, failing freshman biology matters much less if you're in art than if you're planning on applying for medical school.

Also note that different schools handle repeated courses differently. Some schools count only the last grade, while some count both equally in the final average (a zero plus whatever an "A" grade counts as).


The GRE's effectively only good for one thing - getting admitted to graduate school. You will need it if the program requires it as part of your application package. Most US graduate programs do require it. If you study elsewhere then there's a good chance you don't need the GRE.

About whether it's useful study material, note that the GRE is an exam, not study material. You can use the GRE as a benchmark to see whether you're mastering the study material, but not as the study material itself. As for whether it's useful, knowing more things is usually never worse than knowing fewer things. However, will knowing more about undergraduate-level e.g. physics or mathematics help you in your career/research/daily tasks? If you teach physics or mathematics, then presumably so (although at that point you probably don't need the GRE because you are already intimately familiar with the material), or maybe if you work in science communication, provide private tutoring, etc. In most careers though, it will be irrelevant, and you can ignore the GRE.


Is it ok to quote a line from a fantasy book in a scientific paper?

It might well sound unprofessional, but most people would forgive you. If it "connects" people to your topic it might be worth the risk. But Tolkien, in particular, is best known by only a portion of the adult audience. The same is true for Frank Herbert and Robert Heinlein.

But think about what it adds to your work. If it is fairly positive, don't hesitate. If it adds very little, then give it up.

If the work is strong in general then it won't even matter if the cognoscenti roll their eyes a bit.


Stuctured vs Individual German doctoral program

I think there are some basic misunderstandings here to clear up.

You do not necessarily have to have a pre-conceived thesis topic to do a PhD with an individual faculty member at an academic institution in Germany, particularly if you're in the sciences or engineering. This can actually be counterproductive, since usually the faculty member will have funding for a student to work on project X. If you're not interested in working on project X, you're not going to be a good fit for the project, whether or not you had a topic in advance or not.
Having a pre-existing relationship with a potential advisor is useful, but not necessary for a project. Often times, they will be looking for the best individual candidate if no "internal" candidate is available.

The primary difference between "structured" and "individual" programs is that the structured programs tend to be a cluster of related PhD projects with a similar infrastructure holding things together, and potentially a different funding mechanism than traditional individual projects. There may also be some differences in the required duties outside of research (for example, there may be reduced teaching requirements, or even none at all). However, in terms of the long-range benefits, there is essentially no difference, except for listing a special program in addition to the faculty where your PhD was awarded. From a functional standpoint, the degree you'll get will be essentially identical.


My mentor during my master's degree was a PhD student. Does this lower my chances to get a PhD position in good universities?

It is important here to distinguish between what is on paper and what is the day-to-day reality.

As other have mentioned already, it is common for masters students to be supervised on a daily basis by a PhD student. However, I have never heard of a PhD student being a formal supervisor for a masters student. I very much doubt that this is your case, but stranger things have happened.

What is far more common is that you are accepted for masters work at a lab/department/research group etc and the main supervisor (at least on paper) is the group leader. Then s/he may delegate the day-to-day supervision to a PhD student who is (hopefully) knowledgeable in your field. This is especially common if the group leader has a large group with many grad students, collaborations and possibly even administrative duties. None of this is of any detrimental impact to your chances to being accepted as a PhD student later down the line.

If you are in doubt, ask yourself the following questions:

who advertised the position?
who did I have to contact to be accepted to this position?
whose name will be on the first page of the thesis as a supervisor, once the thesis is formally written?
who is paying for the direct or indirect costs of my research?

If the PhD student tutoring you is the answer to all those questions, which I again doubt very much, then it may very well be so that people look at your future application with some hesitation, probably due to how uncommon and somewhat unrealistic this is.

There is however the possibility, if you are doing your masters at a company, that your formal supervisor is a PhD student, who also happens to be doing research at the company. But even then I would probably argue that formally there is a professor at some affiliated university or research institute who's the actual supervisor, at least on paper.


Is it unwise to contact the professor directly before getting admitted to a program in US?

Let me answer this question from the perspective of our school. If a school does things differently the answer you're quoting might be very appropriate, but not in our case.

Our admission decisions are made by our department, and essentially everyone is on the admissions committee - we share the load of evaluating applications. So, there could be great benefit of talking to a professor ahead of time. If one faculty member strongly desires a particular candidate, that student will generally get admitted, assuming they meet our qualifications. (Note that, as a small school, we have enough capacity to take more students than we do because we don't get tons of qualified applications. Also, we almost always have TA funding available for qualified students. But this really varies from one university to another.)

So, this establishes that, at some schools, talking to potential advisors ahead of time can be very valuable. The interest of working with a particular advisor can also (and should) go into the personal statement. I read so many personal statements that you can tell are completely generic, with different school names copy and pasted in. So, when someone says something specific about my research area, I take notice, and I think other faculty do too.

The real issue is that I get so many requests from random students to look at their CV. Many of them have very little connection to my work and are probably mass-emailing professors. This should be avoided.

@Anonymous' answer has the right idea here. A few months ago a student contacted me with a list of publications and a precise statement of interest about my work. We exchanged a few e-mails and I looked at his work. Another student tracked me down after a talk at a conference and talked to me in more detail about the work. These were both appropriate ways to contact me that may benefit the students in the future.


What is the most cited paper of all time?

Nature put out a list recently of the most cited papers in Web of Science.

At the top, with more than 300k citations, was a methods paper:

Protein measurement with the folin phenol reagent. Lowry, O. H., Rosebrough, N. J., Farr, A. L. & Randall, R. J. J. Biol. Chem. 193, 265–275 (1951).


Dealing with irresponsiveness from far-away scientists

First: that situation is common. Actually, that situation is very common. You listed a large number of options that come to mind, let's discuss them a bit:

For me, that's the best.

Reminders don't cost you much, but they can only go so far before you risk being annoying.

I would strongly advise phone or Skype. Don't get me wrong: I hate phone too. It has the inconveniences of both verbal communication (you need to reply fast, and have no time to smith your words precisely) and written communication (you don't see the other person's face and non-verbal indicators). However, it helps if people are unresponsive to email. Also, consider that maybe they like phone better than email (some people do!).
As I said, Skype (or any video-chatting tool) might be a useful alternative to phone. Some people hate it, some people love it, so be sure to ask if they would consider it.

No. You can ask a friend or common acquaintance to poke them, but don't use someone you don't know well. Unless it's their job, of course: if you communicate with a big boss or dean or whatever, it is fine to use his personal assistant or secretary to check up on things or remind him of deadlines.

and 6. It's your choice to make, not much we can say here.

To your (already good ideas) I would add an important one:
   7. Set yourselves (or give him) a goal and a deadline. On one occasion where you actually meet him, use his enthusiasm to set an (achievable) goal, possibly with an associated deadline: decide that you want to present this work at this occasion, or submit to a given special issue that has a deadline in 6 months, or want to have the project finished by September to hire a post-doc with funding from the John Doe Foundation, …
Whatever the deadline is, it will spur contributions from his side. The research environment puts people under a lot of pressure with bureaucracy and deadlines. If your project doesn't have any visible deadline, he will never get it done. So, create one, even if it's more of a pretext. Then use that deadline as a hammer!


What should I do if I discover a typo in the title of my MS thesis after submission

First and foremost, I would strongly advise you to not worry too much about the printed copies.  Printed copies of any literature, not just your thesis, are largely vestigial these days: it is the electronic copy that people looking for literature will be able to discover, and it is the electronic copy that they will be generally capable of accessing.  In my experience, the current purposes of the printed copy are:

Fulfilling depository requirements of libraries, where paper is still the best known method for long-term archival storage (even plain text files rot quickly---ever heard of EBCDIC?).  In all likelihood, nobody will ever access these paper copies.
Giving "trophy" copies to people that you personally know, like your advisor, your family, or other mentors who have helped you.

Neither of these really needs correction: the library depository copies are likely write-only artifacts, and the trophy copies are going to people who already know you and are likely to laugh and sympathize with you over your typo rather than hold it against you.

What I think is worth getting corrected is any electronic version.  For that, you need to talk to whoever is in charge of maintaining the electronic depository at your institution.  Often, this is the librarians, and they will generally have a procedure for fixing errors---your error will by no means be the first or the most severe that they have dealt with.


How to teach a class that I've never taken?

It will be a huge timesaver if you can get lecture notes from someone who has taught the class before.  There's a big difference between understanding the material well enough to solve problems and answer questions and understanding it well enough to find the clearest, most succinct way to present it.  If you get someone else's lecture notes, you will only have to attain the first level of mastery, rather than the second; this will save you a lot of time.

Before the class starts, you should sit down with the syllabus (presumably you can get one from someone who's taught it before; typically, the first time I teach a class, I don't change much unless I have a good reason to) and try to understand the structure ("story arc") of the class.  What are the big ideas?  For example, in Calculus I, some of these are: limits, derivatives, integrals, applications.  That gives you a sense of where you're going and helps you to know what may be important.

Don't feel like you have to know every little detail perfectly.  The stuff that will likely stump you will be the obscure corner cases.  The stuff that most of your students will struggle with will be much more basic, like the limit definition of a derivative, and precalc and algebra.  If a student asks you a question that you can't answer right away, learn to be comfortable saying "that's a great question"; it's a little outside of the scope of this lecture, but I'd be happy to talk with you about it after class.

Thinking on your feet in front of an audience (especially about unfamiliar material) can be really tough.  Most of the time, you can avoid it.  Usually the student will be happy to talk with you after class.  The reduced pressure of not being in front of the other students will help you to think more clearly.  If you still can't answer the question after a reasonable amount of time, say "This is a good question.  Let me think about it some more and get back to you in class next time."  At that point, feel free to ask your colleagues.  Often one of them will have encountered the question before, and will know the answer off the top of their head.

tl;dnr Get lots of help from colleagues who have taught the class before.  Typically, it won't take much time from them, but it will save you a lot of time (later, when roles are reversed, be willing to do the same for someone else).  You don't have to be perfect.  If you have decent lecture notes, and you really engage with the students and answer their question, you'll be fine.


How does the PhD experience differ for paying students?

There are usually 4 ways to pay for a PhD in my experience in the US:

Out of pocket with your own money or with loans
Get a fellowship or scholarship
Be a Teaching Assistant
Be a Graduate Research Assistant

None of these are necessarily mutually exclusive. TA and GRAships usually come with a whole or partial tuition waiver or payment of tuition. Fellowships and scholarships may come from the university, another government entity (e.g. the US National Science Foundation or Department of Energy), or a private source.

In my estimation, a GRA or fully-funded private fellowship is the best way to pay for graduate school for those whose focus is research because there are no teaching or grading responsibilities to take time away from working on your research. If you intend to go on to a professorship, starting with a TA for the first few semesters or years may help you learn something about teaching, but I wouldn't have wanted the TA responsibilities during the time I was writing up my dissertation.

Myself, I had a GRA with my full tuition paid plus a small privately endowed fellowship administered by my university which supplemented my income. Also, at the time, having a GRA position gave me health insurance. TA and GRA jobs are usually limited to 20 hours a week during the long semesters in the US since you are likely to be in classes at the same time. My advisor frequently upped me to 40 hours per week during the summer and winter breaks to supplement my income further.

Paying your own way, whether with fellowships, loans, or your own personal savings means that you aren't being paid by the advisor. A GRA position may be required to focus on a particular research project that funds the existence of the position. If the money comes from their start-up package or a private source, then you may be given much more freedom in your choice of research work, but either way, the GRA position is a job that allows the advisor to direct your work much more than if you fund yourself.


Hypothesis for an Engineering Oriented Research Thesis

The hypothesis-model is good for research where you want to understand how something works, but I think it is ill-suited for capturing the full scope of engineering research. After all, in engineering, you're primary goal is not to learn something about how the world works, but rather to change how the world works! So, instead of a hypothesis on how something works, I'd put up existing gaps in the ability to do something as a working basis. That will then put a focus on your research result as an extension of technical capabilities. In order to evaluate your research results, you would then have to show that your results actually close the existing gap.

Of course, also engineering research needs to understand something about how existing things work in order to be able to create something new. Hypotheses are suitable in engineering to clarify these preliminary things. In your case, you state that "the existing 'role-based access control' of MS-Windows does not solve some problems" - that sounds like a perfect hypothesis to test for. But verifying this hypothesis is certainly not the key step in your research, and maybe it has already been done previously. That's why I'd recommend not to focus on a hypothesis as the basis for engineering research (though one might use them to clarify preliminaries), but focus on identified gaps in current technical abilities.


What does "ADM" stand for on an article submission information page?

In this context, ADM probably means "administrator."  In other words, those are likely the people you are expected to contact in case of questions and problems with the submission site.


Position of infixes of names (e.g. “van”) in bibliographies

Unfortunately, it's complicated.  The proper organization and alphabetization of names is dependent on the identified nationality of the person in question.  Thus, a German "van" name is handled differently than a Dutch "van" name.  It may change further again upon immigration, e.g., Americans of Dutch or German origin typically follow English conventions or even remove the space.

Here is a nice guide to navigating these muddy waters, as well as a question from the German Language SE.


Should section 3 still be labeled as section 3, given that it will appear in a different issue?

No.  Since the journal/magazine has decided to publish your work in two parts, you should make each part as self-contained as possible.  Number things in a way that will not confuse someone who only has part 2.


It can be a very real problem later on, when you will be looking for a job and potential academic employer, or just colleagues, will want to check on your academic record. Changing your name to make it unique might also bring you a lot of trouble later, as your employing institution will not easily access your publications (knowing you by a different name than the one appearing on you publications).

However, it could very well be that, given the practice of your field of research, you could avoid changing the spelling your name. Usually, journals will take your second (and possibly third) name into consideration, and use it for all indexing purpose. At that point, your abbreviated name could simply be unique, no matter how common your first and last names!

For instance, John Andrew James Smith would be abbreviated and indexed as JAJ Smith, for which even PubMed does not even returns a hit! (PubMed covers most of life and material sciences)


Quarantined at home because of COVID19 - how can I do engineering research productively?

You can try to fill the gaps in your knowledge and skills. For example, learn some techniques that are commonly used in your field. Even if you will not need them for your immediate project, there is a chance that they will be useful for the next one. For example, if you do engineering, you are likely to need to write some code, so you can improve your software engineering skills. Your colleagues may give you some more ideas on what is useful to learn.

If you feel sick of reading papers alone, you might try to reach to other junior students and form a virtual study group where you discuss and critically analyze recently published papers. You may actually come up with some ideas for research project based on the discussions. Good luck!


How can I avoid having a specific teacher?

I think there are two parts to answering this question. First, you should make sure that the teacher is incompetent and not merely unlikable. Second, if the teacher is incompetent, there are a number of options available to avoid studying with them.

With respect to the first point, it is important to note that a teacher can be unlikable, and perhaps even appear ignorant (to students), while still being great at his or her job: making sure you learn things. For example, group work and peer instruction are known to be effective teaching strategies. At the same time, they are also quite unpopular with students, and some students even take the view that the instructor is not doing their job when these strategies are applied (even though the outcome may be very good). Professionalism and teaching style are very personal traits, and I've not seen any evidence that they have strong impact on student learning outcomes. It sounds like maybe your personal dislike of the instructor is clouding your judgement about whether they could be an effective teacher. A teacher has only one job: making sure you learn things. If they can do that job effectively, then it shouldn't matter whether you like them or not.

Talk to students who have finished the course, and find out what they've learned. Often its only after such a class is complete that students realize they've learned a lot. If you know you'll get a lot out of the course, then you should probably take it even if you don't like the teacher.

On the second point, if the teacher really is incompetent, and former students are in strong agreement on this point (and they really don't seem to have learned anything about the subject), then you do have some other options:

Many schools will let you take online courses from other universities for credit. For a chemistry course with a lab, this may not work out, but otherwise this might be your best bet. You can shop around, find an instructor that you like, and still get credit for the course.
If the instructor is genuinely incompetent, you could speak with the school administration, and make a formal request for a different instructor. Often your request will be ignored, but I have seen this result in a new instructor being assigned once. Again, it is important that you make sure this is an instance of incompetence and not unlikeability. This is a serious step, and could have implications for the instructor's job (especially if they lack tenure).
You might be able to wait it out, and take the class with someone else. At the university undergraduate level, this can be the easiest solution, provided that the course is not a major prerequisite in your program. At the high school and grad school level, there may not be an alternative instructor in that subject area, so this may be infeasible.
Attend the class, but plan to use external resources to study. Consider forming a study group at the start of the semester, and meeting several times a week to talk about class material. Use online courses like those offered by MIT's Open Courseware, or any of the MOOC companies, to supplement the lecture material, and shop around online to find the best textbook at your level for this topic. You can make sure that you've learned the material well, even if your instructor is unable to help you learn it.


My first authorship is being turned into co-first authorship, what can I do?

First, try to calm down and don't react hastily.

Your situation is very frustrating, but it is not horrible. Let's say that the current author ordering would be the final one. You would be what's known as a co-first author. While it would be slightly more advantageous to be the sole first author, in my experience being co-first practically will not have a significant negative effect on your CV (BTW - are you a grad student or postdoc?). This is important for you to realize - the worst-case scenario that you mention is upsetting, but definitely not a disaster.

Some additional points:

You can try explaining your perspective to your professor. If you originally decided that you would be the sole first author, you should definitely remind him/her of that. Do this politely, of course, but show your professor this is a big deal for you. This could cause the professor to reconsider, depending on his/her personality.
Instead of being the sole first author, you can consider being co-first but listed first. This doesn't make a big difference, but people might associate you with the paper more easily (Whatshername et al.).
Consider that regardless of the number of figures, the other author might deserve being co-first. For example, in many papers an experimentalist produces the data and a computational person analyzes the data and produces most of the figures - and they would often be equal co-first authors (even though each of them could think of themselves doing "most of the work"). So I do not know all the details of who did what, but it does not sound completely implausible that the other person did work which justifies being co-first.
Regardless of what happens, I suggest you talk with your professor about how to get a more satisfactory outcome next time (if this is relevant for you). Discuss authorship in advance and what happens when things change.

Good luck!


Use of data that may contain future ethical complications

Suppose that you are afforded an opportunity to examine data that was,
  on the surface at least, collected legally and ethically, but that may
  contain hidden ethical dilemmas. What precautions, if any, should you
  take when working with this data?

There is no simple way to answer this kind of general question, but thankfully most institutions in the academic world are equipped with ethics committees whose job is exactly to answer such questions. They provide general guidelines and can be asked specific questions, their role is to guide researchers through potentially difficult questions and to set the boundaries. Depending on the specifics of your case, they might for instance ask you to take additional steps to protect individuals privacy, or even tell you that the study that you are considering is not ethically acceptable. Their expertise gives you legal and moral clarity in an area where you are not the expert.

On a related note, in large research projects it is usually a requirement to plan for this kind of ethics expertise and oversight.


Is it okay to get a letter of recommendation from my employer who is a scientist but not an Ph,D?

When reading a letter, the specific academic qualifications of the writer are not that important, judging their knowledge is. You say he works in research, so presumably he can gauge your technical skills (unlike, say, some administrator that just handles your payroll).
Furthermore, if your boss has enough experience supervising people, he can give a better assessment than someone who only has had one student.

In any case, you already have two letters from experienced professors. A third from a more junior person that has worked closely with you is still valuable, and not everybody has worked with three different professors. So you are fine from two different perspectives. It is up to the reader if they want to ask for them, or read them, or not. My girlfriend, for example, gave both her supervisor and a postdoc for an industry research job, but they only asked the professor and she got hired.

One caveat: the recommendation letter culture in academia and industry is very different. Make sure your boss is aware of that. A letter saying:

  Eren has worked in my group in COMPANY with the title POSITION between 2015 and 2018.

may be what is expected in industry, but it is a field of red flags in academia because he doesn't have anything nice to say about you.


if Y had not intention of working with me then why did they accept me?

There are many ways to unpack this:

maybe Y did want to work with you, and then things didn't work out: funding, or mutual incompatibility, or interest changes. Stuff happens
Y could recommend you for admission as a competent student without feeling there was an implied guarantee that you'd work together. Maybe there are others in the department with similar interests.

As has been said on this forum many times, an advisor-advisee relationship is more two-way than one might think. There has to be a mutual fit otherwise even two perfectly reasonable people with mutual interests might not click.


Gaining research experience after undergrad

Cold emails are almost certainly going to be ineffective. The recipient doesn't know you or know anything about you other than what you say.
If you really want to do something, then get into a graduate program.
Failing that option, talk to one or more of your undergraduate professors about your needs. Perhaps they have something that you could work on with them.
But your previous professors hopefully also have contacts in academia elsewhere and they can recommend you to a colleague and it will be more likely to be acknowledged. If I get an email from you, I will probably ignore it. If I get an email from a previous contact/colleague who is recommending you to me then I will certainly follow up on it, even possibly by setting up a chain of recommenders.
As far as "credit" goes, I think that depends mostly on what impression you give in any project you attach to and what the PI of the project is willing to say about you. A line in the CV is fine, but a recommendation from an academic may carry much more weight.
You don't say what your long term goals are in the question. I suggest that you think about that. Where would you like to see yourself in five years? Ten?


Is there any difference between one-year MScs and two-years MScs?

I am not sure about your field, and it also probably varies by university, but generally one year MScs are just course based, professional degrees that offer little to no funding (Meaning you pay out of pocket). Two year degrees, on the other hand, generally are thesis based degrees, are often funded (not as often as PhDs). Sometimes 2 year MScs are also course based, but I would look at credit requirements. Some schools offer programs where you can do the equivalent of a 2 year program in 1 year (non thesis based).

In my field, Earth Sciences, a 1 year or 2 year non thesis based MSc is generally reserved for people who want to teach in High school (USA) or their company wants them to brush up on some new techniques in the field. Those who want to go on to a PhD program, or, get a high paying industry job (in oil/gas) tend to do thesis based degrees to be competitive.

So more credits = better degree. Thesis = better degree. In general, of course.


Should recruitment committee give lesser weight to Interdisciplinary Publications?

Your key statement is "Either the recruitment committee is not suitable or such candidates are not preferable." But this starts from the wrong point -- you complain that the recruitment committee is unqualified or has the wrong metrics, but this complaint will not help you get a job. You need to accept the fact that they have their criteria and that you won't be able to change them. It is an entirely irrelevant question (for your purposes) whether these criteria are useful in advancing the stature of that organization, the community of computer scientists, or the state of science altogether.

In other words, you need to dissociate yourself from your philosophical objections to the questions they ask, and just come up with a good, even-keeled answer that goes back to the core mission of computer science as understand by the hiring organization. For example, if they ask you why you published in the Journal of Computational X, then you should say "During our research, we did some fundamental development of algorithms and data structures and evaluated how best to map them to the currently existing programming languages. This was core computer science work, but we wanted to show that what we did was also applicable to a broader range of sciences, and so we took our work and mapped it to some problems in X. It was important to us to demonstrate our CS work to other disciplines, and so published it in JCompX."


What is the correct etiquette when one would like to include the alternative proofs supplied by the reviewer

I would think that if the referee shared an alternative proof in their comments to the author, their very reason for doing so was so that you could include it in the paper.  What else would be the point?

I don't think you need to ask for permission.  It would be sort of like asking for permission to take a mint from that little bowl by the door of a restaurant - that's what it's there for.  You can ask if you really feel it's important, but it creates a slight amount of extra work for the referee and the editor who has to relay your communications.

If the alternative proof is such a major contribution that you think the referee ought to become a co-author, then of course that is a separate discussion.


Peer assessments critical of nervous speakers: better to redact or send as-is?

Don't confuse peer assessment, which affect grades, with peer feedback, which needn't. The comments are useful as feedback and, since your students are probably inexperienced at such presentations need a lot more practice to become skilled at it. "You seem nervous" is useful to hear, but nervousness shouldn't affect grading. In fact, being effective in spite of it is a good thing.
I once had a student who stuttered so badly that he was difficult to understand. One of the requirements in the course was that each team member had to be part of the project presentation. He did what was necessary.
And, I think that peer assessment should be filtered through the professor rather than applied in a mechanical way. If a grading related assessment is unfair, the professor needs to moderate it. And students should also get feedback on their feedback so that they learn how to do it better. Your students are probably inexperienced in presentations, but they are also probably inexperienced in giving constructive feedback.
And when possible, feedback as well needs to be filtered as necessary. Some happens outside the professor's view of course, but the feedback needs to support learning both for the giver and the receiver.


Chances of getting accepted into a conference with conflicting reviews

It's important to understand that conference acceptance decisions are not just a matter of adding up review scores.

There will be a discussion amongst the program committee members to weigh up the points raised by the reviews. The goal is for the PC members to reach a consensus.

If the PC decide that the negative review is not good (e.g., it seems like the reviewer doesn't understand the paper, or it raises silly objections), then that will be ignored and the paper is likely to get in.

On the other hand, it may be that the negative review makes a compelling argument or identifies a flaw that the other reviews missed. In that situation, one negative review can sink a submission.

The key thing for a selective conference is that you need someone to champion the submission and make an argument for acceptance.

In short, it's hard to tell.


Recommendation letter from advisor with different research interest

I think it depends on exactly how long you worked with these two individuals and what you accomplished. You want strong letters, so if you worked with both of them long enough for them to assess your basic research abilities and potential to develop into an independent researcher, I think the fact that they don't work in your exact desired field won't matter much. The fact that all three topics fall under the same Economics umbrella probably makes it even less of an issue.

It is true that sustained interest in a field/topic is usually a positive. However, I think you and your recommendation letters can spin even short-lived interests into a positive thing if you demonstrate that your prior experiences in A and B were valuable from a research skills development standpoint, while also helping you narrow your research interests down to topic C. Switching topics after you start a PhD can become difficult (especially the longer you wait), so admissions committees may look favorably on any prior work that helps you discover your research passion.


Job prospects after completing graduate studies in Geology

Your question has several parts and may be considered too wide for this forum. From what I can see you have a question about your own motivation, which only you can answer. Doing a PhD is a hard job and you need to be motivated to do it successfully. Motivation does not have to be to love your task but also to do it for a goal further on. A PhD is furthermore not just an academic path-breaker. In a PhD are a number of useful skills that are sought after, which include critical thinking, writing, presentation, analysis, synthesis etc.

A second part of your question deals with the job market. To my knowledge geology PhDs do not seem to have problems finding jobs. There is demand for PhD level candidates within both exploration and environmental sectors of industry and government. Being from Sweden, it seems a very high percentage of our students do very well. I do not have any statistics for geology but have numbers for Physical Geography and in that field about 7% had "unknown" jobs whereas the rest had employment in academia, public sector, private sector, NGO, and a small proportion in other fields but all relevant to their education (y-scale is in number of PhDs, QG = Quaternary Geology; PG = Physical Geography):

Statistics from the University of Minnesota Geology department shows similar numbers (now, two data points is not much but I think this provides an indication of the value of a PhD in the field of Earth Sciences):

Adding to my second point is a point of social skills. With a higher ranking job, come skills beyond the factual content of an education. I already touched upon the skills but if I look at graduates who really have succeeded, in the sense they left academia and got high-paying and interesting, challenging jobs, most have been able to present themselves very well and this part is not to be understated.

In the end, the possibility of success in job searching after doing a PhD is definitely there but it will without doubt also depend on your own interest in pushing and present yourself and the quality of your work/skills and work ethics.


Master thesis possibly does not work out as expected

First of all, you can relax about the fact that you won't solve everything. In research, it's the default case that you will solve some of the problems, and leave plenty of others as future work. (There's a great inspirational comic about this truth.)

As a criterion for selecting the remaining problems you want to work on, I recommend to select the ones that will help you to a tell good overall story in your thesis. For example, it's better to deliever a program that works in certain cases and under certain assumptions, rather than a program that never works, but could possibly work if certain remaining problems would be solved.
Make sure to have the facts on your side. For example, prepare a table with the specific tasks you solved/tried to solve, the time you spent trying to solve them, and the specific issues that made the tasks hard to solve.


Can I have both original experimental research and systematic review in one paper?

Your paper should have a complete convincing argument leading to your conclusions. If as the author you think a (perhaps unusual) systematic review of the literature strengthens your argument in an important way then include it.
Perhaps you could make it somewhat shorter than systematic.
You could include a statement in the paper or a cover letter to the editor explaining briefly why this material is necessary.


Summer research opportunities for undergraduates

Are there any opportunities at your European school?  During the year or during summer?  Funded or unfunded?

You really don't need to do groundbreaking research as an undergrad.  Just doing something (some exposure) is plenty.  Your grades and scores are much more critical.  FWIW, I didn't have any research as I was working and playing a sport. Schools were fine with that.

When you get to grad school, there will be plenty of time to dive deep into research and to distinguish yourself by how well you do at it.


Students generally prefer to have the lecture slides beforehand, and you should let them make their own decisions about whether having the slides out during class will help their ability to concentrate.

On my first day teaching a class, I posted the lecture notes after the lecture, and I immediately got several requests along the lines of "can you post the lecture notes beforehand instead."

If you want engagement from the students, you should earn it by being a better lecturer.  Don't try to demand the students' attention by giving them fewer learning tools.


Is there any guidance on how to properly cite when using the alphabetic style from BiBLaTeX?

Numbers 1. and 2. sound perfectly fine to me and are a matter of your personal style. 3. sounds a little unpolished to me and an editor or copy editor might smooth it to one of 1. or 2.


An important information is missing from my paper under review

Since it is a crucial piece of information that alters the content (and possibly the result) of the paper, the most fair would be to contact the editor and explain the situation so that the reviewers (which seem that did not catch the missing piece) make a better and more informative decision.

The new version should be refereed. I think just adding supplementary material on an accepted (but possibly flawed or at least weaker) version is not suggested.

So: Contact the editor. S/he probably let you submit a new version which will go to the usual review channels, probably with the same reviewers. As for the page length, probably you will have to squeeze in everything, which means a lot of re-writing.


Is it bad etiquette to come to office hours that aren't for your particular class?

I don't think the professor minds too much, but you should of course be prepared for him to decline if he chooses to. Though I myself could hardly care less, I have colleagues who would definitely think unsuitable (because it's not how it's planned).

However, I think the other students might mind, as you noted, if they began to see it as you “stealing” time from their limited allocation. As always, sharing is no problem unless the resource is scarce :)

So, in short, I don't think it's a big problem, given that you are mindful of others.


Relative importance of journal citations compared to classroom performance by academic field

It doesn't depend on the field as much as the position. Consider three faculty members, all epidemiologists (my field):

One works at a school specifically focused on Masters of Public Health degrees. Research is done at the school, but as the MPH is primarily coursework based, with a single small project at the end, most faculty have a heavy student load.
One works at a major research university in a 50% hard money position, which comes with a teaching load of one graduate level class per semester.
One works in a 100% soft money research institute that does not offer any classes, and whose students come from other departments.

Note all of these could be at the same university.

Their tenure evaluations will weight things very differently. The first will probably be judged primarily based on their teaching ability, while the last likely hasn't taught at all, and may have actively been discouraged from doing so.

Where field comes in is what kind of positions exist, and in what proportion. For example, in the liberal arts, there are a large number of positions that are teaching centric, while medical schools often have a vast number of faculty whose positions will never involve teaching.


Issues when splitting one long paper into two papers

Yes, it can be problematic if content is repeated verbatim in different sources, as it can be viewed as "self-plagiarism." The excellent Retraction Watch blog has an article that outlines the Committee on Publication Ethics's (COPE) views on the subject of when self-plagiarism merits retraction. In their proposal, the kind of reuse you're talking about could easily be considered plagiarism, even if it were cited as a quotation of the other paper.

The reuse of plots is also problematic—you'd need to make sure that reuse is allowed by the publisher of the article which appears (or which is accepted) first. If not, you can get yourself into trouble in that way as well. (Ultimately, this is how the fraud in the Jan-Hendrik Schön scandal was finally exposed.


What should I do if my advisor insists on being first author, in violation of my field's conventions?

I have unfortunately seen these kinds of shenanigans before, so: know you are not alone, whatever cold comfort that may be.

This situation has no "pro," and has the following significant "con:" you are not getting the credit you deserve for your work. In fields where author lists are not ordered alphabetically, order is used to signify the author's contributions to the paper, and first-author papers are much more important for things like hiring and promotions.

I suggest the following steps.

1. Talk to your advisor

Maybe this is just a misunderstanding, or there are other variables in play you're not aware of (unlikely, but possible - see this question).  Have a conversation with your advisor to see if you can clear this up.

Here's your opener:

  I thought that in IT, usually the student who did most of the work is the first author and the advisor is the last - this is the case in all the papers I have read. Why do you propose a different order?

2. Run, don't walk

This behavior is typically an indication that either

your advisor is completely unaware of conventions in your field (charitable interpretation), or
your advisor is aware of the authorship conventions and is deliberately violating them to your disadvantage, which is extremely unethical behavior.

In either case, this means that your advisor is simply unsuitable to be an advisor, to anyone, and you should find another one as soon as humanly possible.

3. If all else fails

If you are stuck with this advisor for some reason1, be prepared for a very bumpy ride. This is not likely to be the last stunt he/she pulls.

However, you can at least try to argue your case: there is some advice on the subject here, although that question does not specifically address the case where the advisor is demanding first authorship for him/herself.

1This site is full of students who insist on staying with a completely unsuitable advisor, for one reason or another. I suspect Stockholm syndrome.