Can a MSc after medical school count as the German Dr.med?

Well, your assumption is just wrong. Please read different "Promotionsordnungen" of different universities (they differ slightly), but usually you'll have to finish your medical exams and afterwards you might do your Dr. med.. May require a minimum period of two years for the dissertation.

Yes, sometimes students are staring the required research work during their studies, but this led to the poor reputation of a "Dr. med." compared to the other "Dr." flavours. And yes, often the quality of a medical dissertation is compareable to a good Masters thesis. Nonetheless, formally the "Dr." is one step on top of the "Master".

Nonetheless, you can do clinical research, but you are not allowed to apply as PI for some (many) funding schemes. But of course you can work in research! BTW: I never heard of a fresh medical doctor who succeeded in applying grants on his / her own - so in practice it makes no difference.

I would suggest looking for a position which allows you to obtain a doctoral degree - in your case you might even be able to get two (one Dr. med., one Dr. rer nat (or similar)) depending on whether you are building upon your medical or your neuroscience background. But it will take at least two years.


How can I politely explain to my students that the texts in my course are all in English and it is their duty to read it nonetheless?

I agree that it makes sense to set expectations as early as possible.

I'd just put

  Note that all XXX for this course are in English.

in the syllabus. You should of course be specific as to what XXX is:

Class slides
Required reading
Supplemental reading
Lectures (you could have slides in English but speak the local language during the actual lecture)
Quizzes
Exams

If quizzes/exams are in English, you should also note whether students would be expected to answer in English.

Whether or not you also want to include the reasons for this is really up to how much space you have in the syllabus and whether there isn't anything more important to put there. I'd say that a warning might be a better use for the space:

  If your English is not up to reading/understanding/writing technical documents, this course likely is not a good fit for you.


Does adjunct teaching help a PhD application?

It depends significantly on the particular PhD program you are applying to.

Where I am, teaching experience would be considered a significant positive.  It's not our main reason for having a graduate program, but one reason we have a graduate program (and perhaps the only reason we are allowed by the university to have a graduate program) is to have cheap labor for teaching some of our lower division courses.  We certainly appreciate having better teachers rather than worse ones, and experience helps.  Also, such experience indicates that you are not delusional about the outcomes from our PhD program and are aware that most academics jobs (if you are so lucky to get one) require teaching, frequently lots of teaching, of at least acceptable quality.

On the other hand, at a top ranked program with high-powered research, it probably won't help so much, and some professors may even consider it a slight negative because it indicates you might be interested in devoting time to something that is not research (and there is probably corporate work that is more research-like than teaching as an adjunct.)


Overcoming hostility from a senior PhD student

A friend was in a similar situation during her PhD.

  I am a Ph.D. third year student. In our college for most of the work
  we have to depend on our seniors as our advisor rarely takes interest
  in our research.

There is really only one bright side to this situation: you will have to become a self-motivated and independent researcher quickly. Even if your advisor does not 'take interest' in your research make sure to meet with them regularly to discuss what you have done and what you are planning to do. This keeps them in the loop and aware of your efforts. To get additional input, you can contact other faculty in and outside your institute to get ideas or feedback on what you are doing. Former students from the same lab are also a good resource.

  My senior is always rude to me, and never supports me
  in anything. Sometimes she doesn't talk to me for a whole day, and

As @Dawn pointed out, your senior clearly does not want to be friends. The best you can do is be cordial in person, and keep all important communication over email.

  even sometimes she misguides me.

Attributing this to ignorance, rather than malice, is the most productive solution here. You can take her suggestions/answers/advice but make sure to use your own judgement to verify this - whether from other students/researchers, literature, simulation, etc. This will also help you become a better researcher.

  I feel so low. It becomes so
  difficult to be in a lab where only two people are working and not
  even talking to each other properly. How can I deal with this?

Treat the lab as your workplace. I have seen labs/groups that feel like family, and others that are unbelievably toxic. Focus on finishing your degree and moving on. Ensure that you maintain a social life with family/friends outside your lab, and get lots of fresh air and exercise.


Why do you need to do a postdoc after getting your PhD?

No, it's not like a second PhD, because there's little to no documented requirements, no thesis, no defense, no coursework, etc.

In the 'old days' (prior to the squeeze on academic funding and exponential increase in PhD candidates), one took a post doc primarily to:

Learn a new skill, technique, or method
Dedicate a few years time conducting research to strengthen one's CV without the added stress of teaching and other tenure-track requirements.

Ideally, the post doc came out a very desirable candidate armed with a great research program and toolbox.

Today, a post doc is quickly becoming mandatory for academic-track scientists, as the pool of jobs shrink and the pool of candidates expand. It is not uncommon to find people doing multiple post docs, or people finding themselves in a permanent post doc (or research scientist) position.

While this is somewhat discouraging, the simple fact that funding is scarce and science can be expensive suggests that the ideal candidate has a proven track record and is likely to secure additional grants. Post docs provide one the time and resources to prove that tangibly.


Will self-citation be viewed as self-promotion in academia?

The ethical rule has to be: cite your work if it's relevant, and don't give it preferential treatment over the work of others. In short: use the same criteria for previous references to your work as you would use for citing others. No excessive citation, no self-censorship.


How do I comment the code I wrote for a course I am lecturing in?

I think the Linux kernel is a good standard.

In general, don't explain what are you doing, that should be obvious from the code. Do tell why you are doing it. Let me show an example:

data_padded = pad_with_zeroes(data, 2**ceil(log2(len(data))))
fft(data_padded)

Everybody can see that I am padding it with zeroes, and any engineer student should see I am doing it to the next power of two (modulo bugs). But they may not be aware why are you doing it: a comment should point out that a FFT is fastest when the input length is a power of two.

Also, since this is a very technical setting, add the full names of the algorithms, with alternative names if they are common, and at least a reference using the same definition as you are. Tracking down factors of 2 π can be a pain.


Does citing reviewers' papers significantly increase the chance of the submitted paper to be accepted?

I do not know whether citing the reviewer helps, but I know that the obsession with impact factors has lead journals to ask for citing articles which appeared in the same journal. I had two rejections for "not enough citations", and a friend had an article rejected because "the topic is not within the scope of this journal, which can be seen by the fact that none of the citations appeared in this journal".


Is it ethical for an instructor to "hack" my system as part of the evaluation for my thesis defense?

It sounds like as part of the defense, you gave the examiners access to the system for purposes of evaluating it.

If you gave consent for them to evaluate the system, and didn't place any restrictions on what they can do with it, I don't see any problem with what they did.

You are correct that is generally illegal to just "hack" into a system, but that refers to gaining unauthorized access to a system. That doesn't seem to be what happened here.


Add unpublished but widely cited paper to CV?

One strategy is to do a deep-dive to check up on the quality of those 19 citations.

If you end up impressed: submit your paper to a journal. (The peer review will add some quality or quality control; the paper is less likely to disappear; and the author gets recognition.)
If not: maybe just leave it as is and don't include on CV.

(I had a similar experience as you describe. Sometimes some less-serious researchers just want to cite something with the right words in the title... not saying that's the case with your citations but it's worth checking.)


"when appropriate" means that you as a submitter are expected to know if including consent forms is appropriate/required for your research. By stating "when appropriate", the journal says it expects to receive those forms if consent is required for the photographs you are submitting.
Whether this is the case depends on the law, institute-specific regulations, and ethics. It is your job to be familiar with these rules if you work with photographs of patients. In fact, you should probably know what the rules are even before starting research where patient photographs are used.


Post-doc position/fellowship application - PhD limited results due to no supervisor support and small research group - explain in positive way

Don't make excuses because you weren't in a big lab. Tell what you did and what you learned, be honest about it.
Important skills that you have acquired might include

the ability to plan, organize and conduct research mostly on your own. Make sure to point out how this will help you in the position you are applying for, e.g. you will be able to plan projects,...
the ability to network with foreign researchers (if you had almost no one in your lab to work with, you maybe exchanged emails with other labs, worked with them,...?).

These are only two examples of something you might learn in a small lab that you often don't learn in a big group. Depending on your situation, there might be other things of course, but try to figure them out. Then, there shouldn't be a reason to feel any worse than guys from a big lab, who might have one or two publications more than you.


Do the authors need to ask for permission from institutes/companies for including their name in acknowledgement section of their publication?

If the agency provides funding, and you are not sure about their policy, you  can always contact the person who administers your grant to find out.

Some private foundations do have specific requests for acknowledgement. For example, I seem to remember that the Templeton Foundation likes authors to include a statement such as "The opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of the John Templeton Foundation."

Your grant agent can surely tell you about this. And they will almost certainly be happy to hear you are publishing something with their support.


Chances of getting into a CS PhD program from a math/engineering background?

High GRE scores open the door (quantitative reasoning and to a lesser extent analytical writing).
Math / Statistics background will raise eyebrows.
Creating a portfolio of projects to show the department that you can in fact code, will get you assistantships.
Be pro-active but not a pest.

When applying to a university, you might want to peruse the various web pages of faculty to see what fields they are publishing in. If you find a field that piques your interest, or that you've done some similar work in, contact the professor directly and seek advice. Be careful though. I get emails all the time with prospective students phishing for assistantships. I can tell when it's a bulk / canned email that was sent out to a ton of faculty just looking for someone to bite.

I would start with a personal tone:

  Hello Dr. ______________ I was looking at your work on _____________ and wanted to let you know that I am very interested in this research topic.

It probably would be even better if you could tell them that you already applied to their university, but I understand that you would go broke with all the application fee's if you applied to every university that peeked your interest.

Briefly explain what your seeking (cool research, with possible assistantship). Be patient, you might not get a fast response, if ever. These guys are busy, and probably getting a bunch of emails as well. Start early. At least a full 12 - 18 months out. This way you can narrow down your choices and not have to worry about application deadlines coming up too quickly.

Communication skills can be big. If your comfortable in front of a classroom, and your english skills are good, maybe looking for a teaching assistant position could increase your chances. This does mean you won't as much research, but at least your getting your foot in the door. This will give you more opportunity to show a particular faculty member what your worth.


Would it be immature to ask my PhD advisor for more background for a paper they've asked me to help with?

This is a fantastic question to ask. It's where your advisor's expertise really has the chance to make a difference, and it's much more interesting to answer than "Why does line 4 follow from line 3"? Long term it's your hope to understand the big picture as well.
The best time to ask questions like this is after you've first taken a stab at it yourself: you'll be in a much better position to understand the answers! As you've done this already, I'd encourage you to proceed.


When applying to grad school: GPA vs Prestige

Honestly, when I'm reading applications I barely notice either one. I don't have to look at GPA 99 times out of 100 because those below the minimum are screened out, and I don't care much about what school you went to because prestige schools have some crappy departments and low-prestige schools have some great ones, and I'm almost never going to know which is which.

I spend most of my app-reading time on the personal statement. Can you write? (Very important in my department; importance to others is obviously somewhat variable.) Can you tech? (Likewise.) Do you understand what you're getting yourself into, and have decent, non-clichéd, at least marginally realistic reasons you're doing it? Do you have skills or an educational or life background we're specifically looking to recruit? Relevant experience?

Go be a worthwhile person with a clue. That's what we're looking to admit, not shiny GPAs or fancy-schmantzy schools.


I have been in that situation as a statistician moonlighting in psychology. I have seen my fair share of voodoo statistics here. (Sadly enough, the original manuscript title did not make it into the final article.)

My opinion is that prior errors do not justify later errors. I call out statistical errors and insist they be fixed, no matter how many authors have made the same error before.

Yes, I see the point that then new results cannot be compared to previous ones. But then, how reliable or useful were those previous results, anyway? Standing on the shoulders of giants is not overly useful if those giants are walking in the wrong direction.

It is always useful to refer to published work on specific errors if this exists - especially published work in venues that cater to the specific field. Psychologists will trust a statistical exposition more if it comes from a psychological journal, rather than JASA. I have lost count of how often I have referred to Miller & Chapman's "Misunderstanding Analysis of Covariance" (2001). Statistics in Medicine also often has articles that explain particular misconceptions. If there is nothing in article form, I sometimes include links to CrossValidated.


A student answered exam question with a method she's working on her thesis. What should she do to keep the authorship her own?

Your friend's concern is pretty far-fetched.  Researchers aren't usually in the habit of mining student exams for research ideas.  Even if the professor was inspired by it, it's quite likely he would want to discuss it with the student anyway, and the thesis issue could be brought up at that time.

But if she is still worried, there's an extremely simple solution: just tell him about it.  Send a short email mentioning that the exam question turned out to be related to her thesis work, and that her answer is based on her research work so far; and that if it's something that interests him, she would be happy to meet and tell him more.  (But it would be a good idea to check with her advisor before that meeting, in case there is some information which is proprietary or confidential or otherwise should not be shared at all.)

Now he knows that it is part of her research, and the feared scenario is averted.


Why is it that adjunct faculty positions pay so little?

The adjunct model seems to be predicated on an assumption that most adjunct faculty are presumed to be employed somewhere else. It's supposed to be a win-win: the institution gets a qualified expert with current, out-of-the-ivory-tower experience; the adjunct gets a chance to scratch a teaching itch, or to work with the university. All this happens for a modest compensation – which turns out to be a bargain for the university, and a little extra pocket money for the adjunct.

I didn't read all five of the articles you linked to in your question, but I did look through three of them. They seemed to be focusing on the depressing conditions for those who are trying to make a full-time living through a collection of part-time teaching assignments. I don't think that's the way the system was ever intended to operate.

Where I teach, I'm an adjunct, and I love the perks. I get to use the campus gym, and I get access to campus library resources. I have a passion for teaching, but I don't get to do much teaching at my full-time job. The extra money hasn't made me wealthy, but it's led to a few lifestyle improvements and splurges for my family. $9,000 isn't enough to live off of, but it goes a long way when you want to renovate a kitchen, take a vacation, or help pay for a wedding.

Moreover, where I teach (a state university in the U.S.), the adjunct rates are not set by the department. The going rate is the going rate, take it or leave it.

My brother once asked me how much my adjunct job paid per hour, if I factored in prep time and grading time. I told him that I never bothered to calculate that, but it didn't matter, because I enjoyed my duties too much to give it up. I'm fortunate in that I'm not doing this for the money, so even the relatively low pay is very much appreciated. I enjoy the challenges of teaching, the chance to experiment with new pedagogies, and the chance to make an impact on the future.

Let me put it this way: Teaching two nights a week for fifteen weeks? $3,000. Staying up until midnight grading final exams? Zero extra dollars. Getting an email from a student from two years ago, telling you about how she's using stuff from your class at her new job? Priceless.


How to prove that a paper published with a particular English transliteration of my Russian name is mine?

As a possible solution if you are still worried about it: Get an ORCID account.

They basically created an ID, a DOI for researchers. If you link your publications to your ORC-ID, you don't need to worry if your name is very common (e.g. John Smith) or if someone misspelled your name.


Is there a website where I can post my CV where potential academic employers can find me?

Academic employers in my experience don't go looking on websites for candidates. We post jobs to our own websites, advertise in professional society magazines, and on certain mailing lists and LinkedIn. We get so many applicants this way, that actually searching out candidates on our own is frequently unnecessary.


As already indicated in my comment, you can use a symbol such as an asterisk to denote the work at hand. Then, explain the meaning of this symbol in the table caption where you should have the space therfor.


Joining a professor's research group that is full

Yes, it is a good way to get to work under him. By taking the course, Prof. will get to know you. However, you should do well above average in his course to increase the chances of joining his research group. I'd suggest that around mid-point of semester you mention that you still want to join his group on Spring. There is no point on hurrying things up yet, specially because he already said that his group is full.


Is it possible to use Reddit as a source?

I would shy away from using reddit.com specifically, as the website has even less clout than Wikipedia (which at least attempts to source their material). If the author was a reporter, his job is on the line for being factual. On reddit, there are no repercussions for posting mistakes. Unfortunately, you might have to rely on newspaper articles for this one.


Introduction slide of myself on first slide (after title page) in faculty job seminar

I've always found that successful applicants to positions (myself included) are able to work their biography in to their discussion of their research. Rather than have a potted CV slide, casually mention the important aspects of your CV as you present relevant parts of your research and your research plans. When this is done well it is very effective.


"Educational review articles": How find these

I've seen them called 'tutorial reviews'. Since you say you're in chemistry, see for example Chem Soc Rev's tutorial reviews, as they call them here:
http://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/about-journals/chem-soc-rev/
Here's an extract from how they define 'tutorial review':

Tutorial reviews are concise, authoritative overviews of important contemporary topics in the chemical sciences. They should appeal to advanced undergraduates, the general research chemist who is new to the field, as well as the expert. They provide a solid introduction to the development of a subject, the latest breakthrough results and their implications for the wider scientific community.
Accessible: To advanced undergraduate students and beyond. Tutorial reviews are often used in advanced undergraduate and Master’s studies.
Authoritative: An essential introduction to the field will lay the foundation of knowledge in the area with approximately 25 seminal citations, serving as a springboard to further reading, followed by the most important recent advances.
Jargon free: Specialist terms and symbols should be defined and fundamental ideas simply explained.

I guess that's what you're thinking of?


How is a Coursera exam typically conducted?

Having not used Coursera, I do not know what tools they use. However, I have been a part to online exams from both the student and instructor perspective using the Blackboard learning management system. I suspect that features like many (if not all) of the ones Blackboard supports are present in Coursera.

Time limits - The instructor has the ability to set a time limit to the exam (which discourages web browsing to find answers). The instructor can also choose to force the student to complete the exam in one sitting or allow students to leave and return.
Flexible scheduling - The exam does not have to happen at a specific time, but may be accessible over a time period, perhaps 24 hours or more. The instructor can still enforce time limits and so on.
Lockdown - The implementation of Blackboard my institution uses comes with Respondus Lockdown (there are other products), which prevents students from navigating away from the exam once it is started. These products can also prevent such things as minimization of the window, opening new tabs, etc.
Proctoring - I have proctored an online exam for another instructor. I had to enter my credentials and a code before the student could start the exam, and I had to enter a different code when the exam was completed.

Features like these give instructors flexibility in offering the exam to students around the world, while still making it harder to cheat.

They will "cheat", however. No online course management system can prevent the student from using their text, notes, or another computer or electronic device to look up answers. The best defense against infractions of this nature are well-written tests (the kind you might write for an open-book or take-home exam).


How to approach admissions when applying for a Master's without Bachelor's degree?

Within the UK all degrees will have entry requirements for a course, and I expect this is the same throughout Europe although I suggest you check for yourself. As I dont know the exact situation for the entry, ie university or country, I will answer in general terms.

Typical entry requrements are based on a progressive points system, where your previous qualification accrues you a certain number of points and these points can be used as validation of your suitability to be on the higher level course. Within the UK, we use UCAS Tarrif Points to acheive progress through the undergraduate (UG) phase and the UG degree award for suitability of Postgraduate progression. Note: Some UK Universities also offer access through the UCAS Postgraduate scheme, although this is not widely used by all institutions.

In non-typical situations as yours where you do not have the preceding qualification level, so therefore, do not have the correct number of points or potentially the preceding degree award, you can demonstrate your suitability by evidencing that you have professinally worked at a very high level. Then usually, the university will conduct their own assessment of the qualifications you do have, the level of your subject knowledge, the relevance of your work experience and your academic potential. It might also be that you have to submit a pre-entry assessment of some sort, so a demonstration that you can perform to the epected academic level. This non-typical route is more common in situations where the applicant is considered a "Mature Student" ie has had time in the workplace and is returning to education.

So, to answer your question directly, I would contact the admissions office of the relevant universities you are interested in and be clear that you would have to take a non-typical admission route, and enquire directly as to what their requirements would be in this regard. It might help to have examples of your work already in mind, case studies perhaps, that you can discuss with admissions, but bear in mind they will be non-specialists and will have to refer your query on to the course managers or similar.

HTH.


Hiring a professor to review doctoral thesis

Do you know the old saying that you can have something done 1) cheap, 2) fast, and 3) good - but you can only pick two of three? That applies here.
There are not many professors available for hire for something like this. If you can even find one, I would suspect that they are not very good. Good researchers are generally busy people, who would not want to commit to proof-reading some strangers' thesis. Unless, of course, you are willing to pay a large amount of money. I am not at professor level myself, but I am qualified to read a thesis and provide comments. If you wrote and asked me, I would probably say no, because of the obvious ethical problems. But if I entertain the thought for a moment, I would ask my standard rate for external consultations which, depending on who is asking, is 2-300 €/hour. If you are willing to pay something like this, then it is a matter of sending someone you know to be good an email and asking. Expect many people to say no before someone accepts.


How do I determine which of two International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2018) is genuine?

Looking a little closer, the IEEE conference in San Francisco is the one that has prior proceedings, and it has an "Important Notice":

  Note that any other similarly named conferences are fresh starters beginning this year and operated by a different organization in Seattle, Washington that has nothing to do with IEEE.

The thing I can't immediately tell is whether the Seattle conference put on by "Services Society" is real or fake.

That conference says in relation to its proceedings:

  The Proceedings of ICWS 2018 will be published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) by Springer International Publishing AG. Currently the Abstracting and Indexing services covered by Springer’s data feeds for LNCS proceedings include ISI Conference Proceedings Citation Index (included in Web of Science), Engineering Index EI (Compendex and Inspec databases), DBLP, Google Scholar, IO-Port, MathSciNet, Scopus, and ZBlMath.

I did confirm that the Seattle conference is on the list of upcoming Springer Proceedings. Springer published several prior proceedings related to ECOWS 2004 and 2006, the conference the Services Society conference traces its history to:

  the International Conference on Web Services (ICWS) was first conceived in June 2003 in Las Vegas, USA. Meanwhile, the First International Conference on Web Services - Europe 2003 (ICWS-Europe'03) was held in Germany in Oct, 2003. ICWS-Europe'03 is an extended event of the 2003 International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2003) in Europe. In 2004, ICWS-Europe was changed to the European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS), which was held at Erfurt, Germany.

The IEEE conference says it goes back 12 years.

The Services Society has been a registered non-profit organization in the U.S. since at least 2011, according to this IRS lookup. The Principal Officer on that registration is Zhixiong Chen of Mercy College (the mailing address on the registration matches his office address).

He mentions on that same profile page:

  President of the Services Society, a non-for-profit organization, promoting collaboration between Academia and Industrial practitioners on Services Computing and delivering relevant open course modules, sponsoring with IEEE conferences like IEEE Services 2010

So, my best guess is that Services Society is related to some entity that had been involved in running the initial European Conference on Web Services; that conference perhaps became affiliated with IEEE and the name ICWS; Services Society had some minor affiliation with the IEEE ICWS; and now it is running a separate conference of the same name. (In fact, according to an announcement in IEEE Xplore, the Services Society ran the 2009 School on Cloud Computing with the 2009 5th IEEE Congress on Services (SERVICES 2009).)

What I do not understand is why, if that's the case, IEEE would say there is absolutely no link between the two. The poorly sourced ICWS Wikipedia page claims that ICWS is run by both Services Society and IEEE.

It is possible that the Services Society conference in Seattle will have a legitimate conference, and it does have a satellite conference in Shenzhen, China. However, it is definitely NOT the IEEE ICWS.

If the Chinese Computer Federation conference list does not specify that it is the IEEE ICWS conference, then there is some possibility that the Services Society conference is acceptable to them. In that case, since both the organizing committee for the Services Society Seattle conference and the IEEE San Francisco conference have members at Chinese universities, perhaps if you email them they could help you understand which one is recognized by the CCF.


Can I include the schematic and layout I designed on Altium CircuitMaker in my thesis?

Your colleague is plainly wrong: You put on your thesis the outcome of your work with the tools you have used, regardless of whether they are applications worth thousands of euros or free ones (that are worth thousands of euros anyway).


Can I email a professor from a different university about a proposed course project?

I would say go ahead. Just make sure that you ask your question clearly: describe the approaches you tried and what you have stumbled upon. Professors are usually delighted to see the interest in their subject, and moreover, such questions from students help to improve their courses. The professor might not necessarily reply to your email due to lack of time, but you lose nothing by trying.


Developing a framework publication - if I have developed a new method for data extraction, can this be published in a peer-reviewed journal?

Such kinds of paper are quite common in the field of GIS, usually branded as a "feasibility" study (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5075756/). If there is a question to be solved, and you have a proposed method to solve it, yielding useful analyzable data, there should be a home for it.
I'd first check with a research librarian in your network. They can provide you with a list of possible candidate journals (e.g. do you want agricultural journals or GIS journals? Etc.). Then, comb through the list by visiting their website and browsing some sample articles, make a decision on a few as your targets.
You can also consider non-academic (may not be peer reviewed but can reach a wider audience) channels like those GIS software user conferences.


Ir. means a masters degree in Engineering.

source : Belgian Education :)

I added a "reference". This Prof. Dr. Ir. received a M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven), Belgium

Also, from wikipedia:
Belgium

In Belgium, there are two types of engineering degrees:

"Burgerlijk Ingenieur" /"Ingénieur civil" or "Master of Science in Engineering" (abbrev. "ir.") - 5 years study (3 BSc. + 2 MSc.)
"Bio-ingenieur"/ "Bioingénieur" or "Master of Science in Bioscience Engineering" (abbrev. "ir") - 5 years study (3 BSc. + 2 MSc.)
"Industrieel Ingenieur" or "Master of Science in Industrial Sciences" (abbrev. "Ing.") - 4 years study (3 BSc. + 1 MSc.)(3 BSc. + 2 MSc. in 2013-future) (for the Flemish Region)
"Ingénieur industriel" or "Master of Science in Industrial Sciences" (abbrev. "Ing.") - 5 years study (3 BSc. + 2 MSc.) (for the Walloon Region)

link


I think X would accept being my jury member but would it be a weird situation to call her, as once she rejected being my new advisor..

I don't think it would be weird. This is exactly why people usually decline "politely" (as in: "I'm too busy" rather than "I don't want to") - it leaves the door open for future interactions.

I think if your advisor suggested her, and you think she is a good jury member, you can definitely approach her (or have your advisor approach her, depending on how this is commonly done at your institution).

As a sidenote:

  plus he doesn't know of course that once I approached her to change my advisor..

Depending on the conversation you had with X, I wouldn't necessarily rely on this being the case. Have you asked her explicitly about keeping your request confidential? Otherwise I would assume that standard operating procedure is to talk to your current advisor about it before answering, especially if they are good friends.


Just going to start my PhD, found new professor with more exciting project, what to do?

Have you talked with Dr. B at all yet? You need to know if Dr. B would even be willing to take you on at all, and if so whether in a partial or full advisor situation, before raising the subject with Dr. A. If he wants to take on some or all of the duty of advising you, you can also ask Dr. B to advise you on the path to take with Dr. A.

There is not really a good way to say "Your subject is only second choice for me" and it could cool your relationship with Dr. A for a long time to come, so you should be sure that it is worth it before taking this step. Once you are ready to do it, and depending on the available choices, you could lay out the options to Dr. A and seek his input (would he agree to a shared project or not? and similar questions). His answers will then inform your final choice.


Manuscript and journal submission author order differs?

Things happen. Online manuscript systems can be confusing and frustrating. If you are not paying attention, mistakes can be made. Assuming the PI did the submission, I would mention it to the them. Something along the lines of

  I noticed the order of authors is different between the title page and the submission form. I believe the title page of A, B, C is the correct order. If it is, we should make sure we fix the submission form before publication. If the order is now B, A, C, I would like to discuss the change.

I would do this in person and in a friendly manner. If B did the submission, things are messier, but I would still mention it to the PI directly. If C did the submission, you can email them directly noting the discrepancy.


Is there an issue with splitting up papers already posted on ArXiV?

No, you shouldn't replace the old paper with the new one.  Replacements are supposed to be revisions, not "very different" papers.  The replacement that you propose would not only revise your contributions; it also looks like an attempt to erase your coauthors' contributions.  The change in authors would almost certainly raise a red flag with the moderators (through arXiv's auto-moderation software), and I expect most moderators would reject the replacement.
Submitting a new paper whose text significantly overlaps an existing arXiv preprint will also raise a red flag with the moderators, but as Dan Ramras suggests in a comment, explicitly acknowledging the overlap will convince most moderators to accept it anyway.
(I was an arXiv moderator for over a decade.)


Where to apply for MSc depending on GPA?

Even at the Masters level, graduate admissions are just not that simple and one-dimensional.  GPA is not directly comparable between schools, since different schools have different qualities and different ways of calculating GPA (often even within a single country: GPA is computed many different ways in the US).  Expect your entire record to be scrutinized, along with whatever recommendation letters, essays, etc. that you are also asked to provide.

In short: nobody can tell you where to apply unless they know both you and the programs that you are applying to very well.


Advisors can do this. (So can students.)  I would ask for some reason (money, competence, personality, etc.)  Not an interrogation or a debate (for now).  Just listen, don't argue and take notes on what he says.  Heck for all you know, his concern may be valid and may change your behavior with a subsequent advisor.

You should also go to the department chairman to discuss your options.

The situation becomes more serious the more time that you have spent with the professor.  If there has been a fair amount of time and you are at least semi-competent, his colleagues may pressure him to just work with you and get you past the goal line.  Every situation depends on the particulars (or even how the department behaves).  But alternately, if you are a "problem child", the professors may back up their colleague.

I would not expect some Roman judge standard of fairness, but I would certainly look at your options and talk to department chair, alternate advisors, and maybe even the grad school.  If you are a decent candidate and things are early, it may be simple to just move to an alternate advisor.


What advantages and disadvantages should I consider in deciding whether to publish my academic book traditionally or self-publish?

Should I publish it traditionally or self-publish?

Why do you want to publish at all?  You answered

  I write the book to store down my research results and to spread my new knowledge. To make money is not the main aim, but it would be nice.

Given that: the answer is that you should certainly not self-publish your work.  You can store your results and spread knowledge by having the material freely available on the internet, as I believe is already the case.  The arxiv is one nice place to put work, but it is not the only one: you could put in on github or any number of other repositories.  You can just put it on your own website and make sure that google indexes it.  That means that billions of people can access it at any time.

Let me be clear with you: you are not going to make money self-publishing works of mathematics that you have not been able to publish traditionally.  It is exceedingly rare for any mathematical text beyond the undergraduate level to make a profit that is worth the time taken to write it.  (Maybe a few of Serge Lang's books qualify; probably not.)  If you go self-publishing rather than traditional publishing, you will lose money, and what you're paying for is the vanity of being a published author.

The bar for interest by the mathematical community is much lower than the bar for the type of public interest needed to generate any real sales.  The thought that you have "My ideas are too bold for the mathematical community, so I need to take matters into my own hands; they don't know the value of my work as well as I do" is not only crankish but actually specifically damaging to you: it makes you ideal prey for predators of various kinds.  You told us in a previous question that you literally fell prey to a diploma mill and thereby lost money.  The same mindset that you have now is going to cost you more money in the future.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but this has been going on for several years now, so I feel I should be plain: no one in the world has found your work to be of significant mathematical value.  This means that, with probability slightly less than one, that your work does not have significant mathematical value.  But in the unlikely event that your work does have value, you're not doing what is necessary in order to show it.  Mathematical research is not about simply writing down structures that generalize other structures and proving results about them.  You have to solve old problems or pose new ones that are of interest to the community. Bold statements of superiority would be a positive thing if they are specific and factual: for your work to be "superior", it should solve at least one problem that others have posed.  If you've done that, please explain yourself properly and then your work can be published in the mathematical mainstream.  If you haven't: please start to be honest with yourself about the value of your work.  Your livelihood is at stake.


Include year range in the Google Scholar query

Click on the left "Custom range..." or add to the end of the URL:
&as_ylo=2016&as_yhi=2017
as in:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=richard+feynman&as_ylo=2016&as_yhi=2017


I doubt that this would be a problem, provided that you don't cheat. But your work will probably be put through a plagiarism checker and get a score. How that is handled is up to the instructor.

But if you really need assurance, then do the work under the eye of a mutually trusted individual who will attest to your following the rules. A proctor, in other words.

Some people need such assurance, I think, perhaps because they aren't naturally trusted for some reasons. But for most people it isn't needed. Paranoia isn't essential in normal relationships. Cheating, when caught, is usually pretty obvious.


"This is very interesting as a project" What is the next step to obtain PhD position?

The second step is to submit a strong application: Good grades from a good department, a compelling statement of purpose (which reiterates your interest in your target advisor), and strong letters of recommendation that address your research potential in personal, specific, technical, and credible detail. And then write the professor to tell her you've applied and reiterate your interest.

As long as you're building a strong application, you should send it to several other schools as well (minus your interest in that particular advisor, of course).
There is absolutely nothing you can do to guarantee admission to  your first-choice program, so you need to cultivate other options as well.


Are there any good strategies for conveying the true significance of the results that look obvious post factum?

The best approach may be to address the issue head-on: include a paragraph in the cover letter, in the introduction or discussion sections of a manuscript, and explicitly in the conclusions section of a talk, that sets up a "straw man" critique. Something like: this result may seem obvious because of (expectations in the field; the beguiling simplicity of the final proof; the incorrect assumption that the problem was already solved; etc). But actually that assumption is flawed (and say or show why). Our result is not obvious because (state reasons).


Is it possible to overcome poor undergrad performance with a masters at a much lower ranked institution?

As Roger Fan says in the comments, great recommendation letters would probably get you into a top program.  People at any decent research school will know people at top schools, so their letters can be trusted, and most of your faculty should be experienced enough to compare you with grad students at top schools.  (This is assuming you're at a reputable research-oriented state university, such as the main campus of a state university---there are some branches of state schools where I would not put much trust in the letters of recommendation).

As for you question about a great thesis, yes that help get you into a top school, but the most likely way this would happen is because a great thesis will generate great letters.


Adding the full text of the articles that I manually added to Google Scholar

The question is somewhat unclear, it seems like you want either abstracts/PDFs to appear in Google Scholar results or guidelines on how to add a missing citation. I'll address both below.

Help Google Scholar find full texts and PDFs

You should upload your paper to your website (e.g., e.g., www.example.edu/~professor/jpdr2009.pdf) and link to it from your publications page (e.g., www.example.edu/~professor/publications.html). Make sure you follow Google guidelines:

  the full text of your paper is in a PDF file that ends with ".pdf",
  the title of the paper appears in a large font on top of the first page,
  the authors of the paper are listed right below the title on a separate line, and
  there's a bibliography section titled, e.g., "References" or "Bibliography" at the end.

Source: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html

Manually add a missing citation

From your Google Scholar profile page, select "add"

Then select "add article manually" and enter your publication details.

Source: http://www.technocrazed.com/manually-add-your-publicationarticle-to-google-scholar-step-by-step-guide


Are there usually interviews for postdoc positions?

Assuming that you're a mathematician (seeing as how your question migrated from math.SE), I believe that you get interview if you applied for:

European institutions
tenure-track level positions at liberal arts colleges
lower-level research universities who want to gauge the applicant's interest (was the applicant applying to this position as a safety, or is he/she genuinely interested?)
(only sometimes true) positions where research and teaching are equally valued, or where teaching is valued more highly
(only sometimes true) if a particular researcher is hiring postdocs out of his/her own grant


Should I give a symbolic "thank you, and goodbye" gift to an abusive supervisor?

I don't know much about Chinese culture, so take this answer with as many grains of salt as necessary, but it seems like the best thing to do here is find out what is the minimum socially acceptable gift you could give the advisor without it burning bridges with your lab and the other people you work with, and then give that. If you can get away without giving anything, so much the better.

If you do find yourself socially obligated to give some kind of gift, when you give it perhaps you could emphasize to the advisor how much you're looking forward to doing your own, independent work as a polite way to discourage any further involvement.

Even if this person demands honorary authorship over your work after you leave, it will be much easier to tell them no when you're not working in their lab. The worst they could directly do to retaliate is refuse to give you a reference or letter of recommendation to future employers, and someone who gets their authorships by abusing their students and not doing any actual work is unlikely to be able to do much damage to your reputation anyways.


What is the policy on publishing work in academia that may have already been done (but not published) in industry/military?

It is fully acceptable to work on, and to publish, results on topics als researched in secret by companies or security agencies. From an academic point of view, there is nothing wrong with that, and neither from the point of view of stealing intellectual property. (But I'm not a lawyer!)  Whether those companies or agencies would be unhappy with you publishing some great new technique for breaking cryptosystems - probably not, but unless you believe in conspiracy theories, this is likely not be an issue.  (They might try to hire you, though.)
There have been precedents, e.g., on the best algorithms to factor numbers, or some cryptographic algorithms.  (I'd have to dig out references for that.)


Manuscript accepted date is just one day after revision -- How to interpret?

These dates hide the intermediate revisions that have had happened during the whole process.

One possible time line could be:

Received 8 November 2016
First revision (Major) 12 February 2017
Second revision (Major) 18 March 2017
Third revision (Major/Minor) 17 April 2017
Accepted 18 April 2017

In few journals, two dates are also mentioned like this: Received 8 November 2016, First Revision received 12 February 2017, Second Revision Received 18 March 2017, Accepted 18 April 2017. It might also happen that the article gets accepted after first revision itself, if the revision is suggested as "Minor". Major revisions are usually followed by peer-review, which takes time.

It is mostly journal specific.


Number of Papers published in area of work

I would recommend the following sources of information to get some statistics on your specific research topic:

Scopus (as you mentioned)
Web of Science
Engineering Village
IEEE Xplore
Science Direct
ACM Digital Library
Taylor and Francis
Google Scholar (Need to be extra careful in cross-checking where the information comes from as it might include sources of information other than academic papers)

Out of the six options, I would prioritize the usage of Scopus as it is easy to search for documents and get summary statistics. You need to do some extra manual work when searching in other databases as others are not very user-friendly as Scopus.


What is life as "Head of Department ____" like?

I had the great (mis)fortune of being a department chair for four years. This was at a small, not prestigious, liberal arts college. We use the "weak" chair model as mentioned by Bill Barth (which I think compromises such things as chair evaluations of faculty: pan someone, even fairly, and they will get the chance to return the favor). I was an associate professor when I took the position, it was my turn. I did get a course reduction, from four to three courses per semester, along with a minor stipend (I could have made more, with less time commitment, teaching five courses). There were the expected administrative duties: making schedules each semester, purchase orders, budget, etc. Since the position had no real power, I was a glorified secretary to the department. All but one of my facult were former chairs, but they all came to me with every little problem as if they had no idea of what to do. Finally, I reminded them they were former chairs and if they had some request that needed my approval. then they should get the necessary forms, fill them out, and bring them to me for signature. This solved that problem.

However, it always seemes there was something to take care of. As an example of how frustrating things can be, I arrived at my office one day at 8:00AM with three things I wanted to do. I left for home at 6:00PM having done none of them.

I was just beginning to solidify a research program when I took the job. When I was done, I seriously considered leaving academia. After a few years of decompression, I revived my enthusiasm for research and am getting back to speed, but those several years off, complicated by some family issues, really hurt me from a professional standpoint.

Now that I've related my horror story, I should point out that there are some people at my school who honestly enjoy being chair. Nonetheless, I would caution anyone to think long and hard before taking the plunge.


Must a Masters thesis involve original research? Can it be merely a review of some recent research direction?

I do not know whether you can do a thesis formally without a supervisor. However, even if it were possible (which I doubt), this is a "Really Bad Idea" (TM). There are very few students who have such a powerful grasp of the topic that they might be able to do an MSc level work without a supervisor, and even they may profit from learning from a more experienced person (Feynman comes to mind who had to learn how to write papers to avoid them getting rejected).

A review of work may be sufficient if it creates a synthetic view of the field, but, again, this is something that only your supervisor can help you decide.

Ultimately, I think the department is responsible to find you a supervisor. They accepted you for the programme. If you have acquired the qualifications entitling you to go forward with the thesis, they have to solve this problem. That being said, the question is why you cannot find a supervisor. Do you have the wrong interests for that department? Or is your profile not strong? If the latter, supervisors may not be enthusiastic to take you on, but then this would not be good starting point to aim for a PhD, though, and definitely discouraged.

Since you do go for the PhD, I therefore assume you have a strong profile and your department should be able to help you.


You can use the Advanced Search for this, specifically the 'All fields' option in the dropdown menu. Set that value to the abbreviation/code for the subcategory, e.g. cs.ai or q-fin.CP for your examples. These seem unique enough to not pick up many false positives, and will (unless you specify otherwise) also pick up crosslisted papers. Refine the query as desired.


If you want to start a company using data from a source you do not own, and via ideas you developed as part of your research, you have to contact your university’s legal department.

You are not the only stakeholder here. In addition to the hospital (obviously) who may have a claim to ownership we have

Your university
Your PI
Your funding agency
Other collaborators

In addition, medical data is highly sensitive usually and at least in my university more care is needed. Did you obtain IRB approval for example? To illustrate: hospitals have to obtain consent from patients in order to release their data to third parties. If the consent was for research purposes only then you can’t commercialize it.

Good luck!


Is a letter of recommendation from a suicide line worth anything in academic career in STEM?

If you have a PhD, a letter that does not describe your teaching and research ability is not helpful for applying for academic jobs.
So no.


Can editors review a manuscript and make a decision if they cannot find any reviewers?

The editor certainly has the power to reject an article without having it reviewed.  If they can't find a suitable reviewer, this is probably what would happen, unfortunately for you.

In some cases the editor might have the authority to accept it without an outside review, but this would depend on the policies of the specific journal.  Anyway, if they were planning to do this, they probably would have already done it.


Universities are often very aware of the equity issues facing academics (usually women) who have career gaps due to family responsibilities such as maternity leave. A two-year hiatus is not ideal, but rather than trying to hide it in a CV, it might work in his favour if he lists it explicitly in his CV, e.g.:
2014-2015: career hiatus due to family care responsibilities.

If he can be clear about what these caring responsibilities entailed, all the better, as people reading it will be more inclined to believe he is not bullshitting. E.g.
2014-2015: career hiatus to to family care responsibilities (primary carer for our baby, now in day care) or (caring for a terminally ill father) or (unavoidable primary care for a mentally ill sister, now recovered).
It will probably help if he can make clear that these care responsibilities are now over, but if not, it is still worth being up-front.

If your friend can add to this by showing evidence of relevant activity during the hiatus, this will help too. Activity could include publishing papers from his PhD or adding to his skills by completing Coursera courses.

While looking for an academic position, your friend should also, if possible, improve his CV by working in a voluntary position in a research group -- perhaps the group with which he did his PhD or someone to whom his PhD supervisor can recommend him. This can usually be listed on the CV as an "adjunct" or "visiting" academic position. While acting in such a voluntary position, he should make sure he impresses the people he is working with to get favourable reference letters and should aim to be doing publishable work.


We cannot tell you what the best decision is, but I get the feeling from your post that you already have some course of action in mind: politely decline, with your arguments, and if he insists too much, find another advisor. I would agree with that being the best solution for you, but only assuming that your assessment of the situation is correct.

Don't take it badly, but I have seen it happen before. An established researcher gives advice to a newcomer (or more junior researcher), who disagrees and concludes that such bad advice can only be motivated by self interest. That sure is one possible explanation, but another might be that the advice is (partly or fully) correct, but the student doesn't recognize it (yet). Take a second look at his advice... There can be good reasons to suggest nonstandard notation: trying to make the paper more appealing to the community of another field, by using their notations. Or making the case that existing notation doesn't properly cover the cases considered. Or maybe what you consider standard notation actually isn't, and you are currently using a notation used by a prolific research group (bias in your reading list).

I am not saying that it is your case. I'm only saying that you should seriously consider it before taking any action.


Are there any studies on how lecturer review sites such as Rate Your Lecturer affect student choices?

This is necessarily incomplete, but I do recall a few studies on the correlation between ratemyprofessor.com rankings and student evaluations. Two such studies are:

Hotness and Quality
Student evaluations and RMP

These are disappointingly old though (2006/2007)

There's a more recent study from 2011:

Researchers and RMP

As for other studies, your google is as good as mine :)


Should technical research papers contain a 'Proposed solution' in them?

In general, and particularly for a workshop, the answer to your title question would be "yes". The basic principle behind a workshop is that participants go there with some work-in-progress, discuss their ideas and next steps, and get early outside feedback. If you don't even tell what your ideas are, what is there to discuss? "Here is what others have tried, end of story" isn't really a great discussion starter.

Of course, survey papers exist, but a publishable survey is not just the Related Work section of a regular paper. Good surveys, such as those published in ACM Computing Surveys, are lengthy and comprehensive treatments of a subject. Workshops are not the right venue for such papers.

There is also the added problem that your approach of publishing the state of the art report first, and then writing another paper about your actual idea, sounds a lot like finding the Least Publishable Unit, a practice that many take offence with.


Sign application cover letter with "PhD" or not?

In the U.S. mathematics departments I'm familiar with, writing "Ph.D." after your name would not be disastrous, but it would be a bad idea.  It can look insecure, like you are worried readers will assume you don't have a Ph.D. if you don't remind them frequently, or pompous, like you feel having a Ph.D. is an important distinction that must be emphasized, and I see no upside to balance the risk of appearing insecure or pompous.

To clarify, I don't think merely listing "Ph.D." after your name would undermine an otherwise great application.  Nobody is going to take it that seriously.  However, it can be tricky to get the tone right in academic job applications, and some applicants inadvertently write things that could be read as insecure or pompous.  (Indeed, it's natural to feel insecure, and it's easy to come across as pompous if you try too hard to convince the reader that you'd make a great hire.)  The danger is that the reader might piece together several small things into an overall negative impression, maybe even subconsciously.  From this perspective, it's safest to eliminate issues you can identify, even if they wouldn't be decisive by themselves, just in case they might reinforce other things you're unaware of.

Note that conventions for the post-nominal use of "Ph.D." may vary between countries or even universities, as well as between fields.  This is a matter of culture, and you'll need to figure out what the culture is like where you are applying.


Will I destroy my career if I published a paper with a serious mistake?

Congrats on your paper. No, it wouldn't destroy your career but it would be awkward and embarrassing. It could potentially hurt your career if the mistake was the result of obvious sloppiness, gross incompetence, and worst of all, outright dishonesty. But for the first two of those, the damage would very likely be containable and if you keep doing research, after publishing another paper or two that had no mistakes, no one would remember this minor incident.

With that said, your advisor is correct that it's best to avoid publishing papers with mistakes in them if at all possible, so do make a sincere effort to check everything to the best of your abilities before submitting the paper.


What query language is most common for e-journal searches?

Academic databases are built for people who have no idea what a 'query language' is. I agree that the world would be a much better place if everyone knew a little bit of SQL, but it's not like that.

The only exception that I know is Zentralblatt, an academic database specialized to mathematics which includes a sort of text-based query language.

Every other academic database that I have worked with uses custom-made input masks where you can select manually fields to search on and logical operators; they look like this example, again from Zentralblatt.


What is behind the "Indian Undergrad Research Experience"-spam?

I graduated from a premier Indian university more than a decade ago and have sent out such emails. Let me try to put this practice in context.

Like many universities around the world, Indian universities have a semester system and a three to four month summer break in-between. Many Indian universities (but not the IITs) have a compulsory summer internship that must be completed in the summer before the final year. These internships can be done either in industry or academia. Therefore, it is common for Indian students to apply for internships. Until the late 1990s, most students used to apply for such internships within India.

The situation changed in the late 1990s because a couple of European universities (EPFL for sure, but I think that there were others as well) started a summer internship program for Indian students (almost exclusively from the IITs). The primary reason was to attract Indian students for graduate studies; at that time most Indian students went to English speaking countries. I participated in such a program in the early 2000s.

These programs did not result in any mass emails. The department of the Indian university used to send a list of student CVs, and the department at the European school would select from that list.

However, once students realized that European universities accept students for internships, they started applying en mass. And most, if not all, of them got offers, typically from universities in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Singapore; but also occasionally from the US and UK. (At least, this was the situation at my time). Initially, only IIT students were doing this; slowly everyone else also started applying.

At our time, some of us applied because we wanted to experience the research environment in Europe, others applied because they wanted a paid vacation. Some were meticulous in their search and wrote personalized letters; others simply sent out a form letter to everyone. My understanding is that most students (at least from IITs) still get such internships, so the practice continues.

Note that the universities which started this practice to attract Indian students were successful. They saw an increase in the number of students from IITs who applied for graduate studies. I have friends who went to study in a non-anglophone European country because someone had gone to the same university for an internship and had had a positive experience.

I don't know if more European universities have started this practice or not; but I know that recently Canadian universities (rather a Canadian funding agency) started a university internship program for international students from India, China, and Brazil.


What are the obligations of a principal investigator?

My question is, which responsibilities cannot be avoided by a PI without necessarily producing severe negative consequences? If after a cursory examination, a PI's career seems to be going well, which responsibilities can we be certain that they have not neglected?

In my (extensive) experience with large labs, the only responsibilities that a senior professor can never delegate are networking, certain types of review work (e.g., reviewing for well-respected grants) and certain committee / administration / board work. Basically everything else seems to be fair game.

I find it interesting that your prime example are grant proposals - in many groups in my field, writing grant proposals is mostly a postdoc responsibility, so that is certainly not a duty that is never delegated. However, that might be an european speciality.

I would say your question is actually standing on ill assumptions. You assume that successful profs. are distinguished from no successful ones via the things that they still do themselves. In practice, this is generally not correct. In my experience, most large labs work well because the prof. has a track record of acquiring good people to do things for her/him, not because (s)he does so much her/himself. Further, successful profs. are able to establish mutually beneficial relations with those good people. That is, if you want long-lasting success, you cannot expect e.g., your postdocs to just write grant proposals for you all day because you told them to. You need to find a model how it is actually in their best interest to do so. All successful profs. I know are supremely good at binding strong people to them via the power of mutual interests.

Now, all of this is not to say that a prof. has to delegate everything, or that any given professor even wants to. I know many successful professors that would never delegate some aspects of their job (for instance teaching), either because of a sense of responsibility or because they just honestly like doing certain things themselves. This is just to say that I have seen almost anything being delegated in different large groups.


What to do when someone does not respond to your email?

First, forget your embarrassment and go see your professor for help. That is his job. If he asks why you did poorly, give him the most honest answer you can and see if he can provide some suggestions to get over the block. Your difficult with PDE is pretty common as it takes a new way of looking at things after calculus.

As for the tutor, two days is very little time to make initial contact. So, you can ask again, in email, about current topics. But once you do make contact it may go more smoothly. But grad students are pretty busy.

But, I also urge caution with any tutor. Make sure that they don't give you so much help with things that  you don't actually learn yourself. The best thing they can do is give you some exercises and watch as you solve them, with you expressing your thoughts on what to do verbally. The best tutor will give you only minimal hints when you get stuck, and not show you how to approach every problem.


Asked to referee a paper on a topic that I think another group is working on

No. Jugde the paper based on the currently publicly available knowledge. The authors are not to blame for future knowledge.


What does it mean to be "former PhD student"?

That would be a valid interpretation provided the statement is about oneself. More likely they attended for some period of time and left before finishing. There are many reasons for leaving, some personal and some academic. You can't draw conclusions about why they left from a simple statement. But, most likely, they have no intent or no possibility at this time of returning.

However, as user JeffE notes, if it is made about another it is more likely to mean that the other person was once the writers student. In this case it is most likely that the person did finish the degree successfully, though it is possible not.

A third possibility is that a person starts their study at University A, but completes it at B. Even in discussing themselves in a conversation about A, they might use such phrasing.


How to deal with advisors who seem to not like me?

In my experience (which, beware, is in pure mathematics) a faculty member has very little incentive to describe undergraduate research done under their supervision in negative terms: it is hard for the reader of such a letter not to view the student's failure as their failure.  Also in my experience (which, beware...) it is quite common for an undergraduate working over a short period (like the summer) not to end up contributing anything much to the larger research project, so that even this outcome need not be described in negative terms: after all, the student still got the experience.  I am aware that in the laboratory sciences a student is working on a piece of "the real project" much more so than for student research in pure mathematics, but still....would an experienced PI really give a critical piece of their project to an all but unknown person?  Again, if they do so and it works out badly, it seems to reflect badly on them.

All this is to say that I find it unlikely that you will get a negative recommendation.  What you risk getting is a recommendation that is not positive enough to help you with your graduate school applications.  If that happens, and if as you say you did good work over the summer (both your grad student supervisor and your PI are much more experienced in this regard than you, so without further information we have to at least contemplate the possibility that their judgment, rather than yours, is correct), then yes -- you probably did end up in a bad group.

What can you do?  Well, you booked an appointment with your PI, and I think that's wise.  During that appointment your goals are (i) to the extent that seems reasonable and reasonably polite, make your case that you did good work over the summer and (ii) suss out your PI's opinion of the work to see what kind of letter you will get.  Here I will observe that if you are overly aggressive or defensive on point (i), that might hurt you on point (ii): the PI may not want to give their honest opinion if they have already had to argue with you too much.  If it turns out that the PI has a not very positive opinion of your work, then indeed you may not want to get a letter from them.  That's a bit of a shame, but the lack of it should not really hurt your application, and an equivalent way of saying that the PI's opinion of your work is unreasonably low is that all your other academic work will be evaluated much more positively by others...so go with these other, better recommendations.

Anyway, all this is just one summer: if you stick around, there will be others...Good luck.


Should I tell my professor that I may need surgery in the middle of the semester?

Short answer: Tell him now.

Longer answer:
As pointed out in the comments, go find the office dealing with such questions and contact them. You don't need to resort to legal rights immediately, just tell them your story and get some advice on how to proceed. They might also know things you didn't consider yet, e.g. some regulations on how much of a class you are allowed to miss, what sort of medical certificate is needed, etc.

After you cleared all questions with them, tell your instructor that you have a pressing medical issue that will force you to miss up to three weeks of class. Do that in person if possible, not via email. Ask him how to handle this and show him that you are still interested in his class and willing to take it, e.g. ask him if it is possible to get the lecture notes for these weeks and hand in the homework via email. Of course this depends on how you define "bedridden", so if you will be on heavy meds and unable to do anything, or if you will be sitting in your bed, fully alert and able to work on a laptop, but not able to stand up. I don't know what condition you have and I understand that this is private, but you should think about a plan on how to make up for the missed classes and present this plan in the discussion with the professor. This will show him that you are motivated and willing to take the class and is far easier to accept than you being gone for a few weeks and some legal office forcing him to still let you pass.
Also try to point out that you have some flexibility on when to schedule the operation and ask him for his opinion. Make clear that you can't say an exact date, but ask him if he prefers this month or that month, for example. All in all, talk to him, be frank and show motivation to make up for the missed time and you should be ok.

The above advice might also help with him not being pleased with your anxiety. It is hard for a non-professional to distinguish between anxiety and stress/fear of exams. Furthermore, some students simply say "I have anxiety", even if they are just a little stressed at the moment. Show the professor that you are still motivated for his class, that you are not trying to use your anxiety as an excuse for anything, that you are doing your best even though you have several medical conditions and he will most likely not worry about it anymore.


Is it realistic to deal with a huge undocumented code base for master's project?

I would be very wary of taking on this thesis topic.  There's a huge amount of programming effort here, but you're not trying to get an MS in software engineering, so this will necessarily be a project in which you spend most of your time doing work that is actually outside of your discipline.  Furthermore, there's a risk that either you'll never be able to understand various aspects of the code or that you'll misunderstand things and then make changes that break the code.


Use a zero. A dash or blank space could be misinterpreted as 'not applicable' or 'missing data'.


On the originality of a master's thesis topic

Short answers: it's a requirement of sorts, it's probably acceptable (with caveats), mostly, assuming you have covered major databases and/or Google Scholar.

Long answers: One of the requirements for academic research, particularly in the context of dissertations, is to contribute to existing research. This can mean coming up with a new approach to solve a particular problem, or a new theory or idea. But it can also mean looking at a topic from a slightly different angle, or focussing on a different aspect.

Not all research (#notallstudies) has to be new and exciting. Trying to replicate and thereby confirm existing research is entirely valid and acceptable. However, the current publication process favours developing new studies and approaches over replication studies. A perceived lack of originality may therefore hamper your publication chances, which is problematic in itself. Whether this is an issue for you depends on your future career plans and choices.

Whether your slightly adjusted topic will be accepted also depends on how plausible it is that a different region / industry / sample composition would bring different results than the original study. For example, if you're looking at topics that are likely to be influenced by cultural differences / class / education background / or similar, you can reasonably expect that looking at a different country or a different sector may yield new information. However, there will be other factors where it would seem implausible that region or industry would have any bearing on them, e.g. left-/right-handedness, general IQ, neuroticism scores etc.

In checking for existing research you should make sure to cover relevant journals and databases in the fields. You're not expected to research the library of any university, but to cover relevant publications.

Lastly, a few caveats:

Check your university's requirements. Whatever I and other people tell you will be based on our experiences in particular contexts and institutions. Your institution's guidelines may differ.
Answers to your questions may also differ between subjects. My answer is based on experiences in psychology / social science research, particularly work and employment.


Resubmission of arxiv paper after rejection

I am not particularly "new to the game", and I still often submit preprints prior to acceptance. To me, this is the entire point of an arxiv or PeerJ preprint - after acceptance, I can usually just self-archive the camera-ready version and don't even need a preprint server to ensure priority.

  will the preprint of the current version that is already on arxiv affect the acceptance of the newer version (asssuming that the journal has no policy against arxiv preprints) ? If yes, what can I do to prevent that?

Why would it? The fact that you have an earlier version of the paper online at a source that, according to your assumption, does not count as prior publication should not matter at all. You are allowed (some would say required) to improve on your work between unsuccessful submissions.

Also, the existence of your preprint probably does not say much more than that an earlier version exists, not whether and where it has been submitted, or how often. It would take a particularly unreasonable reviewer to hold it against you that your paper may have been rejected somewhere in the past.

The only time when the existence of the preprint may be awkward is you made a significant mistake in your previous version and need to change some relevant study outcomes because of that. I would not worry about minor updates to the results, especially if you collected new data in the meantime, but if the core results and message of the paper somehow dramatically changes between versions a reviewer who is aware of this may question the validity of your science. For instance, I have once reviewed a paper that was strongly arguing that A leads to B in the preprint, but in the version I reviewed they suddenly flipped and said that A clear does not lead to B, but instead to C - without any new data. As a reviewer, this does raise a lot of red flags.


Which access-date should be used for cited websites

There is very little that could have changed between your first access and your most recent one. Access dates are used for material that is likely to have changed rapidly. In this case I would use your first access date, i.e. the oldest one, unless you are using material that you know wasn't there on the older date. If you do that, use the date you found that material.


How to frame incomplete previous studies when applying to new graduate school without being too negative about previous program?

what is a convincing non-negative way of explaining "I don't have references from my prior program?"

If you dwell on it, it will sound like you're making excuses. It's not really worth spending more than a sentence describing unfavorable circumstances that made you leave this place or that place. It might even be better to not mention at all. Just make sure you have favorable references from somewhere to go with your application.

  is there any way to get connections made between "gifted" and "promising student"?

Through achievements. If you say "I am good at X," no one cares, or really believes you. If you say "I did A, B, and C," it's good if you can say "I received award Y," by pointing to things that demonstrate that you are good at X, then you will look good. Talents only count to other people if you use them to achieve results.


PhD from university where I did my bachelor's degree or master's degree?

Well if the topic or material is “local” to that university then it seems logical.

If you are going to study, for example, the effects of tourism on the breeding habits of koala bears then enrolling in the University of Wisconsin or Oxford or Cambridge may not be too helpful.

You should enrol at a Uni that has the course that you want, with the facilities you need and the environment you like - both for work and relaxation. It does not help, if you are happy in the stcks to be in a high-rise neither does moving to the sticks suit a city-dweller...

I am in an establishment where 1 metre of snow is common in winter and some new colleagues find winter just too much and leave...


Is an acknowledgement worth putting in a CV?

No. We don’t hire people to be our friends or to offer us emotional support, and I don’t even understand what “standing firm in support of the department’s goals” means. We hire them to teach, do research, and do other more or less well defined tasks, none of which are evidenced in any meaningful way by being mentioned in the acknowledgements to someone’s paper.

You can be the world’s most amazing, virtuous, supportive person, and that’s great, but no one will hire you for an academic job for those qualities. For your CV, focus on quantitative, measurable achievements that hiring institutions actually care about.


First of all, OP, take a deep breath.
There are two well-used tropes on SE, one is 'get mental health support' and 'impostor syndrome'. Both have their place. And if you really feel it is a mental health issue, go for it.
However: I do not think your case is either. You have an objective (I do not say real, you will soon see why) reason to feel down. You have been just shoved to the side by an insensitive PI.
Of course your question is, were you just lucky in your PhD?
Yes, you may have been lucky that you had a good PhD topic. You may have been lucky that you just needed to scratch its surface and results would gush out. Yes. That's luck. That's researcher's luck, it's the luck of the one who can harvest it; the expert in the field. It may be luck or not, but it's still yours and deservedly so.
Others, say, equally talented to you, may have spent their whole PhD on some miserly results to be scraped together in some work paper, who knows? They were less lucky. Was it their fault? Not necessarily. They were good researchers, just picked the wrong topic.
Almost unavoidably, you will run into bad luck periods, but, on the long run, good research comes from honing your instinct on where good luck can be more regularly found to loiter around.
Let's move to the second one. Collaboration. Comes this guy spewing stuff at you and you are lost. You do not get them. Note: "them", not the "math". They confuse these two. They think you don't get the math, but that's not what happened - they simply didn't explain it properly.
Sometimes, you find people, where conversation flows naturally, as if you always had worked together. There is a natural intersection of ideas, even where you do not understand them, you fill it with insights and interpolations from your own experience, quite naturally. It is exhilarating to work in such conditions, and rare. But it happens. And it's the most fun science can be.
You got the opposite. You got some - perhaps famous - guy as mentor that you simply couldn't tango with. It's not your fault.
Or perhaps it is? Your PhD supervisor does not listen to you - well, perhaps your choice of mentors is what needs to be improved?
So, your mentor found a counterexample to your conjecture and left the room. What does he want to prove? That's simple to see one? That if you have not such superior vision into the field, you are not worth to discuss with? How did you get to this guy? Ask yourself this question.
Whether the counterexample may have been obvious, it may be not, I cannot judge. A famous chess master made once a complete beginner's blunder in the opening moves of a game. It happens. It's not nice, but it's not an excuse for a put-down.
If he is that dismissive of your work, cut your losses, and get a different mentor. Find colleagues, mentors etc. who you have a common language of mathematics, where you understand what they say when they say it (I do not say that you need to understand their math fully, only you understand what they communicate). Find a place where you intertwine into the scientific discussion. You do not have to be a Gauss, Galois or Grothendieck to be a good mathematician. Having luck is fair game if you put in your part of the effort (note: I say effort not talent - if you can do a PhD in math, that's a given).
TL;DR

You feel down for an objective reason, not for some mental health problem. You have been treated badly.

You are entitled to luck in the choice of your research topics. You were lucky in your PhD thesis. Expect also some bad luck in your career, but develop the scent for the good places.

Collaboration requires effort from both sides, not dropping packages and expecting someone to pick them up, which is what your mentor did. Perhaps that's the way to test you, but it's not a way to treat people. Get a different mentor.

As with luck, the right collaboration partner can make results come out easy. It will feel effortless and not because the partner does everything. Like luck, find where these people loiter around.

So, perhaps the one thing where you are really not yet good at is finding the right people to work with. Your supervisor, as well as your mentor are both not exactly the most ideal of colleagues. Maybe, however, you are just in a difficult location. Clearly that's something you should work on changing.

It's not your fault. You are entitled to researcher's luck. You are entitled to a proper explanation of fresh concepts, or else direction where to read them up before "wasting" the precious mentor's time. First and Foremost, you are entitled to be treated as a human.
Get out of there and either a mentor or position or even just visit to a group who are interested in your stuff and who you can communicate with.
Good luck. If it comes, it's yours.


What tense to use in thesis when describing complex simulation models?

I would say the present tense is appropriate if you are giving a description of how the model works in general.  The model itself is timeless; it will keep working the same way now and forever.

The past tense puts the emphasis on what you did in your specific project; it reads like a report.  You did it this way; someone else in the future might do something else.


Don't do it.

It sounds like you don't know why you want to do a PhD. You focus on things that aren't reasons, and where you do mention reasons they are very vague, e.g. in a comment you've said that:

  But I will have also opportunities to intern at national labs during my PhD, would that be helpful for my post-graduate career? And their math program is top 50 in QS ranking, sounds so attractive. And I do love research, the main issue is I'm too old and have no money.

First sentence ends with a question mark indicating you aren't sure it's true. You clearly can't make decisions if you don't know if it's true, so you should find out first before even thinking about the question. Second sentence indicates you want to study at that university simply because it's in the top 50 in the QS ranking, which is fine (I suppose we all have different priorities), but are you sure it's worth it? There's a high cost to studying: you earn less (if you earn anything at all), you spend time, you have to relocate, and so on. The same goes for the third sentence. If you're too old and have no money, why are you considering a PhD?

My read of your question is that you're studying because you have no idea what to do next and / or want to avoid the job market, which is not a good place to be. You'll have to get a job eventually - even if you do a PhD, you'll eventually finish the PhD and have to find something else. Until you've figured out what a PhD allows you to do that you can't do now, you should not do it.


I replied,"Thanks for the update! I could start at the beginning of xxx."

You're almost certainly okay. You haven't gotten the actual official offer, and though you've shown clear interest you haven't accepted anything. Of course, the PI involved could be disappointed, and if they're a jerk they could even retaliate by speaking badly about you. Unfortunately, though, just about anyone can choose to be a jerk whenever they want and it doesn't necessarily have to be a consequence of something you've actually done wrong.

I have since clarified to the PI during a call that I was considering other options and he did not seem too bothered

Now you are definitely okay. Some people would suggest this level of honesty is somehow not strategic; personally I think in most cases it's better to be clear. People who are hiring for a position should always assume the people they recruit are pursuing other offers, just as people applying for one should always assume there are other candidates.


Etiquette of applying to current institution

In general, you can apply if you feel you're qualified.  If they don't want to hire you, they'll reject you, but it's not inappropriate to apply.

Tenure-track jobs get huge numbers of applicants, so statistically, it's extremely likely that you will be rejected.  If that's going to seriously disturb you and affect your ability to succeed in your current job, then you may want to think twice.

Some departments might prefer "fresh blood", which would put a strike against candidates from inside.  On the other hand, if you've been particularly successful and it's clear that you really want to stay and would take the job if offered, that can be a plus, since it reduces uncertainty for the hiring committee.

If you have a trusted contact or mentor within the department, you could talk to them about whether they think you might be a good fit for the job, or vice versa.

If you do apply, then you should make yourself scarce while other candidates are being interviewed.  (Unless of course you have already been rejected by then.)  Don't go to their talks and don't try to meet them.


Why is it so hard to convince professors to write recommendation letters for me?

In general, when you ask someone to write a letter of recommendation for you and they are unwilling to do so then it is likely that the reason they are unwilling to write a letter of recommendation is because they don't feel that they can write a positive and helpful recommendation letter for you and they don't want to write a negative recommendation letter.

There are many reasons why a letter writer might not be able to write a positive recommendation letter for you, including that they don't think you're well prepared for the program, they don't feel that they're qualified to recommend you for a program outside of their area, they don't feel that your record is sufficient to gain admission to the program in question, or perhaps that they have doubts about your intellectual ability or character.

In any case, it is almost certainly not in your interest to continue to press for a letter of recommendation from them, since you can be pretty sure that the resulting letter of recommendation will not be positive and won't help you in gaining admission to the program that you're applying to.

In particular, you should be aware that your professor could be much more candid (and negative) in a telephone conversation than they might be in a written letter of recommendation.


Is it okay to discuss multiple interests when writing statement of purpose for attending a conference?

Keep it short and succinct, I would say a paragraph is good, unless otherwise stated in the application. If this means that you only have enough space to talk about one of those areas, then pick one.

If the conference is more geared towards pure mathematics, I would suggest expanding on your interest in cryptography. Otherwise, if it is an applied mathematics conference, then talk about your studies in biological math. Chances are schools which specialize in pure mathematics will attend a pure mathematics conference, and likewise for applied math. If you want to find out the universities who are attending, just ask an event coordinator. I'm sure there isn't any secrecy surrounding who is attending.


Make changes to (my own) already published IEEE paper?

You can have the journal publish an erratum, if the changes are limited and bear on statements of fact. For example, if you inverted the array indices in proof 3, or a typo in lemma 2 changes its meaning, or you quoted from another paper and forgot the citation. The journal's web site will show a link to the update.

Otherwise, the published version is the version of record, and wholesale changes wouldn't normally be acceptable for two reasons. First, the journal would have to ask the reviewers (in this case, ad hoc reviewers for a conference with which the journal is not associated) to re-evaluate the manuscript. Second, other scientists may have already based work on the published version in good faith.

(An analogy, if you are a user of the git version control system, is forcing a push to a public repository. Don't be that person.)

If you can substantially improve the original by these changes, then it is worthwhile to make an updated version available through ArXiv or on an institutional archive. At least it will be indexed and will show up in searches. It is common to see this kind of update in CVs and publication lists.

If the changes are only cosmetic, or bear on things like citing existing work or improving figures, then my suggestion is to stick with the old version. Everybody has papers that they would have liked to improve, but couldn't. Save your energy for the next paper!


Easier to obtain permanent position in Europe after being faculty in US?

Are you actually deciding between particular positions in Europe and in the US?  It's not clear to me what you are actually suggesting doing in option 2. There's no question that you should be making personal connections in Europe, particularly whatever country you're hoping to move to, but unless you have a job offer there, you should just try to find a position where you can be successful and reasonably happy, whichever continent it's on.

I think it is true that it's dangerous to take a position, thinking you'll move later.  A lot of people find it harder than they think; in a lot of cases this is more because they get settled and lose their motivation, rather than it actually being out of reach.

As for how serious a possibility it will be to move later if you're starting a position in the US, I think this is the wrong forum to ask.  You should find a senior person you can somewhat trust in your target country and ask them (if you don't have such a person, try to cultivate them).  It's going to vary a lot depending on the country, the field, and unfortunately with time (just because it seems hard now, the situation might change later), so I don't think general facts will help you much.